Bamboogirl

I've not been able to put out more than a couple of my own caches. (too picky about spots, making different camo, etc) So when out caching I like to have some more interesting stuff to leave as swag - interesting shells, mineral samples, foreign coins, just different stuff. I do clean out torn, shredded, moldy, expired stuff but leave the rest. It's just one way to 'give something back' to the game I guess.

There are several very good story/puzzle multi caches in the Bay Area set up by GeoWomyn. GeoWomyn Story Caches I've done a few of them and they are always most entertaining and well-thought out. (A bad knee is keeping me from a lot of hiking now, so the rest I'll get back to in the spring) If you read the logs and comments, it's pretty clear that she has a great flair for the creative.

How does one determine that a gopher no longer uses the hole? Dude-you've never seen Caddyshack?? Drop a nice healthy gopher snake down the hole and I guarantee there will be no gophers. Tidy, 100% organic and they stick around until the gophers are gone in a good-sized area. Plus they don't bite if handled kindly. I've done this a few times over the years at home (they are native to the area) and never have a problem with gophers digging up my yard.

Only the Wicked Witch will melt in the rain. Get your gear on and go! And here I sit working looking out at gorgeous early fall here and cannot go anywhere caching. Work sure messes up some good days.

That cake is great! Is that a merangue toadstool? Too fun!

A friend was messing with Geocaching and told us about it. Being techno-junkies, it was a good excuse to buy a GPS. We're both willing to crawl up large piles of rocks for no other reason than to find tupperware. We enjoy finding new places and learning about new things. Geocaching feeds both those needs.

There's 6563 caches within 40 miles of my home in the Bay Area. Jeeez, I gotta get busy!

Well there's the problem right there. A lawyer is involved. Of course. This looks like a great cache to go find! I hope if you do decide to let it go, one of the local finders can adopt it.

I am loving Kit's idea about adding bugs and waiting to place the cache! There are some serious FTF hounds in the area. The chances of most regular 'working folk' FTFing anything are pretty slim. I believe as the hider of a cache (I only have a couple but they're not too bad) it's up to me to even the FTF playing field a little. If either of mine had been poached, I would have been significantly peeved that I didn't think of how to prevent it. Using GM and working dropped bugs is very clever. Learning how to turn it against them is better.

We ran across a cleverly hidden rattlesnake last summer on a trail. Very large, very unhappy with us. Backed carefully away on tippy toes. Found another way down the trail waving hiking sticks in the grass. Have seen black bears and scat. The only time we were a little concerned was with a mom and 2 babies. But we were in a drift boat, so she would have had to work to get to us. Had a good sized cougar run across the road in front of us a few weeks ago. Happily it was headed uphill and didn't stick around. Great looking cat but I'm glad we were in a car. It looked a whole lot like the one in the video, just a bit lighter gold. Most of what we see are a whole lot of birds. A pair of bald eagles look really large just over head but I don't think we're part of their normal menu. We cache together and do carry poles and a cell phone. Running into another rattler concerns me more than the cougar. There's a whole lot more of them up by our house and the chances of running across one this time of year are quite good.

Jeeez. Ya gotta love an angst-filled Monday. Herewith is my one and only ever ever attempt to defend micros: Sometimes they actually do take one to interesting places that are easy to get to. This all goes back to the quality of the hide - same as any tupperware container or ammo can. Good spot/good camo = interesting hide. Doesn't matter what the size of the cache is if it's an interesting hide. While I do prefer larger caches, I'm currently limited to the amount of climbing/hiking I can do and if I need a caching fix, an interesting flatland micro beats the heck out of nothing.

Caching is way up on my "fun stuff to do" list for a lot of reasons. In no real order.... I'm curious about almost anything. Caching makes me look at maps, play with a cool techno doodad and find new places - intersting places. My husband likes to take pictures of wildlife - birds and such. Caching gets us out to places that nearly always have birds and we've gotten some great shots - and flat missed a few too. (Like the mountain lion that ran across the road in front of us Friday night...) If I think I'm too old, too tired and too sore to crawl another half a mile up a rock-filled trail, knowing a cache is "up there somewhere" is enough to get me up that hill. The "quality time" idea is huge. We get out somewhere in a trail, get a few miles behind us and whatever problem from work just gets left behind. It's just Waylon and I out there and we act like little kids. Bliss.

Great Topic! Agree, agree agree with all of it. Time for everyone to quit sniveling and go find something. I wonder if a knitted tea-cozy would work for cache camo?

8472 Miles from home. GC6097 My work sends me to some interesting places. Sadly most of them are sitting on the equator. I keep hoping I have to go back to London. But nooooooo.....

Nothing quite says "ewwwww" like a nice hamster-filled cache in the middle of summer.

We don't do numbers runs or try to set 'records' for the most caches in a day. If we're going to hit some caches, I do some reading ahead of time I look for caches that have: A lot of interesting logs - comments like "great camo", "how'd you think of THAT?" or "this is the third time we've come looking" really interest me. A few DNFs thrown in add to the challenge. I avoid the ones that are simply TNLNSL Anything in a park I've never been by or heard of that's harder than a 1 x 1 Descriptions of interesting things in the area or at the hide location Descriptions that have a lot of humor, an intersting story or just really quirky (I figure if who is writing up the cache can write an interesting tale, finding it should be intersting also) Takes time, but I have better luck than if I'm working on the fly and looking for caches from on the road. It may mean not rolling up much in the way of numbers but I'm generally happier with the ones that I find.

Glad I am not the only one that hates finding spiders. Giant spider cache Made for an intersting log, but YUCK!

It's not possible to control the 'quality' of a recorded log. But it is possible to be sure that the caches hidden are interesting, either good camo, good location or both. I keep telling myself that while I plan the next couple of hides. Keeps me from getting fussy about cut 'n' paste logs.

I don't usually take anything except TBs if I'm headed somewhere they might like to go. (I have enough random bits of stuff around the house already) I prefer to leave interesting doo-dads that I don't normally see. It's nice to toss in a handfull of fun stuff to spiffy up the contents of a cache that has nothing but broken crayons and chewed-on golfballs.

Just saw everything and cannot wait to mess with it this weekend! So much for painting the bathroom and getting the garage cleaned out. lol Edited for bad spelling.....got an Ap for that?

Clearly I need to take a walk or something. I looked at 5 states strictly for quantity of caches. The divided by the sqare miles of same states. Rhode Island actually has a greater cache density than California. Useless information? I think so. Alabama: 0.089 Alaska: 0.003 California: 0.300 Idaho: 0.067 Rhode Island: 0.493

A more interesting query may be cache density per square mile. As Wacka said, California would probably be way up on the list. But would that be because of the big number of square miles as compared to other states?

This one: Best 60 made us just crazy. What's worse is that the finds about equal the DNFs so I know it's there. If the snow is gone over Memorial Day, we're going back after it. I see little point in taking on a 4 or 5 level cache without expecting to be dirty, annoyed, vexed and sometimes a little crazy. There's so many 1 and 2 level hides out there that are all about the numbers. The few really tough ones make a 'name' for themselves with those of us who DNF them. The folks who make these great hides deserve a big "Thanks! " for their efforts. (Right after we get done swearing at them for their cleverness and ability to torment us.)

We have friends who dabble in the game who told us about it. I looked up my home coordinates and found at least a dozen within a couple miles. It drove me nuts knowing they were there. Add to that an excuse to go buy a new tech doo-dad and get out of the house with my honey and we were hooked.

Hubby is getting a new 7 pc. xxxxxxxxxxx for backpacking. He's going to have to work to find it.