Bamboogirl

The first cache hide is great! And kudos to you for giving it some though and not tossing a coffee can wrapped in camo tape out there! So that gives away the "What's cool for me" thing. I really appreciate finding a cache that is well camo'ed in some way. Something that the finder has to work for and may even hold in their hands wondering if that's the cache or not. Hidden in plain sight types are wonderful. Anything that makes me stop and really look at a location and wonder what's different or out of place. I've got two out now that I'm happy with. One is camo'ed in the same mulch that is in the surrounding area, next to a pond. Logs have mentioned almost stepping on it before finding it. The other is covered in shredded fabric, like a ghilly suit. Logs have mentioned it looks like something dead. Good times. One that I hope to put out soon is a micro. Fly tying is a hobby and I'm trying to work a micro tube into a dragonfly body that is tied with the correct colors and scale of the natives in the area. The possibilities are pretty much endless. With the wildlife management area you mention, you have an unlimited number of choices. The obsession of hiding a great cache is almost worse than finding the first few.

Completely cool idea. And from the feedback, you can see that there are a lot of good variations and ideas already in use. My favorite was a micro that was placed in what looked like a hummingbird house. The "hole" was actually a black mag capsule that held the log. (fwiw, hummingbirds don't nest in houses) From the bird watcher's perspective: please be sure that you don't place it in an area where there are several other bird houses placed as part of a habitat enhancement. You'd be amazed at the number of ah, well.....idiots, that see a bird house and run up to see if there is a nest in it and if they can see the baby birds.

I tie flies for fishing, so have all sorts of bits of feathers and such. I'm messing with a micro that would have the log in the "thorax" of a life-sized dragonfly. Not quite all done yet but I want to have it ready to go for spring.

Is there any miniature version of a LoJak for cars that could be glued into an ammo can? Be interesting to track the stolen cache to the Maggot's dump and show up looking for it. That kind of stuff just hacks me off.

Um, not really destroying forest land - they're talking about a prescribed burn of the underbrush. Right, this is a secluded burn that just happen to be where this guy had his camp. They are not singling out Geocachers at all, as this thread makes it sound. Dunno, this just seems odd and when I saw that in was Vinny posting I thought it was the start of some wild troll (sorry Vinny) But is seems like rather than torch the forest there would be sniffer dogs that could find the stuff. Not that clearing out the understory is a bad thing, it just seems a tad extreme.

We've had two in the last year or so up on Mission Peak. Both your basic Western Rattlesnakes, both very very funny. The first was an early spring when they were just getting out of hibernation. We were headed up a very wide well-used trail and saw a small one, maybe 3' long stretched out in the warm dirt catching some sun. We walked up to him and he took a look and then headed off to one side of the trail. I watched him to be sure he was leaving when this couple came trooping down the trail headed right for the snake. Totally cluless, blathering away and about to stomp on this poor snake. We yelled at them to stop and they look at us like we were nuts. I pointed to the snake and the woman saw it and pitched a fit. She started yelling at the poor guy she was with in farsi or something, climbed up on him and refused to come down. He ended up carrying her past the snake and when he put her down, she continued to yell at him. I think it scared the poor snake half to death. We were laughing our heads off along the rest of the trail. Some people just should not be in the hills. The second was a different day a little farther along in the summer. We were on the same trail system in sort of a narrow cut heading down through a creek. Hubby saw the head of the snake of the trail. It was a big one and none to happy to have to move. He set up a huge rattling fuss and backed off into the grass. The problem was we couldn't tell where he was and Waylon was stuck there while we sorted out where he had gone before we continued on. We ended up using the hiking poles to shake the grass around on the opposite side of the trail and went on around that way. With the snake carrying on like that, sticking around to try to get a picture did not seem like the cleverest of ideas. Good times, indeed!

Things learned while geocaching: A good handful of Tylenol in the trail mix helps a lot on on long hike. Rattlesnakes are not very polite. When nearly stepped on, a turkey is very loud and flappy. We will cheerfully scoot backwards up the face of a nettle-covered slope to find a $5 chunk of tupperware. As soon as we find the $5 tupperware, we will find a nice, wide trail that could have saved us the backwards scooting. It's always on the other side of the fence. I need a new knee.

We have been stupidly lucky so far. Sore muscles, poison oak and some nasty scratches rummaging along a fenceline. Nothing a few asprin and some ice won't fix. Does extreme rattlesnake-avoidance count? Clearly we are not doing anough terrible hikes or there would be a lot more biffage.

Put some little packets of sunblock in the cache. Sunburn hurts.

There's a lot of ways for a cache to be a micro and very entertaining. The thread on Cool Cache Containers show several examples of spiffy hides in a pinecone. A pinecone in an elm or oak tree will bring a smile to whomever finds it. I found a green wax apple in a oleander bush once and that was quite entertaining as well. (Edit for bad spelling)

Sorry, there are enough other things on my "list" to be offended by other than MOC. I like the idea of launching a cache as MOC and then opening it up later. It does show support for the game, at least with the annual dues. Bits, bytes, servers, power. None of that stuff is even close to free. Web geeks gotta eat too ya know. Heck, for the amount of entertainment one gets from the actual playing with caches and all the fun on the forums, the annual membership seems pretty cheap. (Don't tell Jeremy I said that......)

The GPS is a magic and wonderful toy to help me find little bits of plastic. The technology is also quite cool that makes it work. I'm a techno-geek by profession and spend most of my days messing with hard drives - and really enjoy it. But I want to get away from all the techno-blather, and geocaching helps me do that. So by choice, that GPS is a toy. If I started taking it apart, and really dialing on on how it works, what the sample rate and frequency is, the granularity of the sample, blah, blah, blah, then sooner or later it would become work. So it's a spiffy toy.

The article said the container was covered in 'gibberish'. I wonder what that meant or if they were just holding it upside-down.

Aren't moving caches no longer allowed? I thought they were supposed to be stationary?

I rather like AC/DC "Highway to Hell", especially if I'm on some miserable hike through a pile of scrub and rocks. "Flirtin' With Disaster" by Molly Hatchet also comes to mind occasionally.

Edited for double post. I'd still like to offer up the replacement, LOL

Thanks for the heads-up. I published that cache based on the CO's promise that he visited several times a year and had friends who lived nearby who would also help. I e-mailed him this morning asking him to follow through on his promise, but as he has not logged onto the site in over a year, nor responded to requests for maintenance going back at least two years, I don't hold out much hope. Perhaps a future visitor will take the initiative to trash out what has obviously become trash and post a "should be archived" note to open up a great area to local cache placement. As a cache reviewer I can't ask that be done, as the cache is still considered to be the property of the cache placer. Old timers may remember that many geocaches placed by visitors on the south shore of Maui were archived at the request of someone in local government many years ago for this same reason - lack of maintenance. At the time that included virtual caches leading people down closed roads on NPS administered land. Hopefully we can police our sport so it won't be done for us. ~erik~ So I love the spot where the trashed cache is located. It's an amazing point of land and seems to me to be full of some sort of island spirit (I can't better describe it). If you can hook me up with a local cacher, I'll send them a decent replacement cache to put out there. I'm not back there till April, but can get something in the mail pretty easily. Since there are no "Adopted Vacation Caches", I'd like to offer up the replacement.

The orange fellow looks like Quiggle's ah........cousin.

Hopefully at least one of these steps will help you out: 1) Start with disconnecting the iPhone and restart iTunes. Re-open iTunes and connect the iPhone and try to sync again. 2) Double click on the Geocaching app icon in iTunes. Does an Apple account login dialog appear (iTunes Store account)? Enter your login and password and try syncing again. 3) Remove the app from iTunes. Re-download from App Store and try syncing again. Thanks greatly! I'll take another run at it shortly.

This must be the silliest question ever and probably more related to itunes than the app: I downloaded the app to my laptop. Went to sync the phone to install the app and got an error message: "Some of the applications in your iTunes library, including "Geocaching", were not installed on the iPhone because you are not authorized for them on this computer." ????? Everything else syncs up fine from my laptop, so how could this app not go over? I must be missing something really silly here. Ideas?

LOL! But can you maintain them???

Having read large chunks of this thread and then going back through my own finds, I vote a large "NO" to vacation caches. Here's why: Maui Cache This is an amazing spot on the edge of Maui. Gets tons of visits. Placed by a person from Washington. It's been having problems since February of 07. Contents soaked, logs too wet to write on, container reduced to a couple zip locks and a garbage bag. And because the spot is so cool people still hunt for it. When we logged it, it was not much more than trash in a bag. I felt bad for not noticing the problem and packing some new tupperware to replace the bags. It's not adopted, there's no mention of a local cache buddy to maintain it. It's had maintenance notes posted for ages. The owner has not been on geocaching.com in over a year. They found 5 caches and placed one. this one. The only hope for this one is that someone who has a trip planned will bring a new container and then replace it. But that's a temporary fix at best. The thing should be archived and a local cacher take over the spot. Sorry, I must be fussy today, but this one is a great example of how NOT to place a cache.

Cache. Short, doesn't sound like another command. Doesn't sound silly if yelled out loud out the back door (like Fluffy or other overly cutsey names). Nice solid sound. Also would stretch out to two syllables if needed. And if asked by a muggle what you are looking for, your response of "My Cache" would be pretty honest.

Welcome to the wonderful world of frustrating things! You will find all sorts of creative ways folks have chosen to hide caches. Bison tubes, hollowed out bolts, 'fallen' logs, you name it. Best advice: Read the cache page carefully. Read all the logs from previous finders. There will be hints that will help you on your hunt. It's already clear you have a good sense of humor about things. It will help you greatly as you search. Fun stuff!

A quick search on at the istore show 11 apps on a "geocach" search. None seem to be the one we are all "geolusting" after. I wonder if there's a way to set a pocket query to tell us when it goes live?