rock_rat

I'm an overweight backpacker and have had the same problems with clothing. Every one tells you to lose weight. To walk more. To get out there and do it. You get excited about idea and then you find out that the same people don't want to sell you the right gear in your size. Go figure! I finally found a site that carries a few items from Columbia in a lot of sizes. The I'll suggest a pair of the Titanium Omni Dry Zip Off Convertible Pants. There extremely comfortable and dry quick. Quick drying materiel is important. A lot of hikers have suffered from Hypothermia because of wet cotton clothing. They also have a shirt in the Omni Dry. Good boots will be extremely important. You want something with good ankle support to help with that extra weight, I like Merrells but just find some that fit well and work for you. Also take my advise and get a pair of good wool hiking socks and polypropylene sock liners. Increased weight means increased friction in your boots which means increased blisters. The liners will keep your feet dry and help eliminate most of that friction. One other thing that is a little, um, personal. Get some boxer briefs that still have support but have longer tight fitting legs. This will help reduce friction in your thighs and prevent rashes and blisters. This site also carries some good rain gear, gore-tex jackets, winter jackets and the like. http://www.bigmen.com/

As stated above, hammock campers can be considerably lower impact than our ground dwelling brothers with little effort. I always use 1 1/2 inch straps you should never use less than 1 inch. You can pitch camp in new areas without a major impact allowing previously established camp sites a chance to recover. You should always use the trees with the hardest bark available. At home I had my hammock strung between two 6" maples for about a week for testing and didn't leave so much as an indentation. Mind you I'm quite heavy for a backpacker so if any one was going to cause damage it would be me. You can complain that "idiots" can damage trees but those same idiots in a tent are not any more likely to be following leave no trace guidelines. Idiots are simply idiots regardless of what gear they carry.

First if you took my comment as a smack-down let me apologize, it was a simple observation about the way our society is treating personal liberty these day's and meant as nothing more. The problem is far broader than the CCW debate and extends to all parts of our lives. Any photographer can tell you the way they are treated for doing something that is well within there rights and geocachers see it as well. Instead of asking why that person shouldn't be able to take a picture of there city street they instantly assume the worse and ask why should they. Now to get back on topic, aside from a pocket knife all the time and a fixed blade when I'm backpacking I don't carry a weapon (and I don't consider a pocket knife a weapon). I've considered getting a hand gun recently out of a simple desire to have a handgun. If I were to carry the weapon it wouldn't be do to feeling "unsafe" instead it would be out of a sense of preparedness. Individually our safety is our own concern. It's impossible for any law enforcement agency to always be there when you need them so one must use what ever reasonable measures they feel are appropriate to a situation. I carry water, food, a blanket, and some medical supplies in my vehicle at all times. This is not because I feel unsafe driving down the road, it's because if I wreck in bad weather I want to have what I need to survive. I would rather have those things my whole life and never need them than to need them and not have them.

This is the wrong question completely and is part of our current problems in this country. We are a free nation and should never ask why some one should be allowed to do something instead we should always ask why they shouldn't. It is enough in a free nation that you desire to do something. As long as there is no valid, legal, and constitutional justification for not doing it then you should never need to justify doing it. There is no valid constitutional reason why your gun rights should end at the park borders. We spend way to much time worrying about what other people are doing in this country.

We have a wonderful local club. There are a few dozen members and between group hunts, chatting on the forum, and of course our monthly Beer and Wings night I wouldn't miss it for the world. For the most part Geocachers are decent people and there backgrounds tend to be so varied that you get amazing ideas come up when they get together. We recently did a group hide where we created an event and everyone at the event got to vote on the details of the cache. From the container and swag to the hiding spot it was all a group decision. If you have an opportunity to check out a local club, do so. I don't think you will be disappointed. If you don't have a local club it's not that hard to start one. Set up a forum (I suggest PhpBB) on one of the free (or cheap if your willing to pay) hosting sites. Come up with a good name and then let the other local cachers know what your doing. Plan something like a monthly group hunt, dinner, or both. Don't forget to post something to the Ground Speak forums as well. I think there is a thread somewhere to list groups.

I don't think you'll regret getting a hammock. I went with the ENO Double Nest and a Jacks R' Better Hudson River underquilt my self. One advantage to the ENO is that you save enough that you can get a decent underquilt to go with your hammock. I've used it a few times in the field now and I've got to say I slept better than in my own bed. I'm actually considering going hammock full time at home. The post above pointing to hammockforums.net is right great guys, great info.

I think the ideal solution is to implement a system similar to netflix. They use your own ratings to evaluate how likely you are to want a particular movie. For instance geocaching.com may see that you like caches a, b, and d however you hated cache e and had no opinion on cache c. They would look at other cachers who rated the same caches in similar ways and give a higher rating to caches those people liked. It eliminates the fear that certain caches would be rated down because of bias. If you rated mostly micros as good then the ratings for micros would go up for you, if you rated them poorly they would go down.

I recently purchased a pair of low cut Merrills for day hiking and I must say they are some of the best fitting shoes I've ever owned. I have wide feet and have always had trouble finding decent shoes but these are great.

Post your request to http://www.magpi.us and I'm sure you will find some cachers willing to help set things up once you have the proper permission from Groundspeak (If indeed you intended to advertise the festival on the cache pages). Most of them are fairly involved in the local caching scene and enjoy participating in such things but I'm not sure they all read these forums.

The short answer Kate & Leo. Being a huge geek I used to watch a show called The Screen Savers and the hosts Kate & Leo did a segment on this new thing happening out west called "Geo Caching". It took me a few months to save up for a GPS but that was where it started. Now Kate is gone, The Screen savers are gone, Tech TV is gone, and only my obsession remains.

Just to show my geekiness. Alton Brown used a box fan, some furnance filters, and bungee-cords as a dehydrator. Here is a page I found that duplicated it. http://annarbor.albertelli.com:85/weblog/?p=86

Last winter I was hunting a cache in one of those orange plastic match cases. We found it between the roots of a tree with about 2 inches of iced up leaf clutter on top of it. It took me a half hour of chipping ice with my knife to free that dang thing. I also had a cache of mine freeze last weekend. It's in a hollow log in the split of a tree and was frozen in there pretty good.

Does anyone have any experience with how well they hold up to the cold? For instance sitting in a flashlight and radio in ready pack in your car over the winter.

We have a group named MAGPI, the Mountaineer Area Geocaching Persons of Interest. Most of our membership ranges from north central West Virginia through the northern panhandle and even southern PA. We have an unofficial get together on the last Thursday of every month. http://www.magpi.us

I received a Gerber Suspension as a gift last year and really love it. It's always with me when I'm outdoors. If I'm backpacking I'll take an old 6" fixed blade buck knife as well. I've been contemplating buying a Case pocket knife like my Grandfather always carries for an everyday pocket knife. I'm thinking about one of the medium stockmans with the CV blade. Does any one know if Case are still good knives.

Your more than welcome. If you really can't find tree's to use the tarp I have can be used as a tent. There is a give and take with hammocks. On the one hand you can set up your hammock on a slope, on rocky ground, heck even hanging over a stream(think of the cool breeze in the summer) but you do need trees to hang it from. With a tent you can set it up in an open field but you do need relatively flat ground with a minimum of rocks and roots. That combined with the footprint a tent can leave means you are essentially bound to established camp sites. With a hammock you can camp anywhere with decent trees and as long as you don't build a fire(I use a stove for cooking) you can still follow leave no trace. By the way speaking of rocks and roots, how is it that the only rock in miles always ends up right in the middle of my back when I'm camping. Here's a pic of the tarp for you:

I've been working on a hammock set up for a few months now. There are a couple things to keep in mind, first that if there are no trees you must be able to "go to ground" so to speak. Second if you are camping in cool weather (lets say less than 65-70 degrees) you will need insulation under your hammock. The reason being your sleeping bag is compressed when you lay on it and does not provide insulation from the cool air beneath you. Most hammockers(?SP?) use a top quilt and an under quilt, it's kind of like you cut your sleeping bag in half and hang the bottom underneath the hammock so that your weight is on the hammock and not the insulation, while the top is used as a blanket. You can also use the blue CCF pads as insulation since they don't really compress under you. A partly inflated thermarest seems to be popular as well. As for the "go to ground" options I am using a tarp that I could easily set up as a tent using my hiking poles or any sticks that are long enough. If I need to go to ground I will set up the tarp tent and then use a space blanket as a ground cloth. I'm currently waiting for my underquilt so I can do some cold weather testing. As always YMMV My hammock kit includes: ENO Doublenest Speer Winter Tarp/Tent Blue Walmart CCF pad (if needed) Kick a** Quilt Good sources of information include: Hammock Forums Just Jeff's Just Jeff's keeping warm page

I can think of three times I've met other cachers. My favorite was an FTF on a cache in a local park. Here I am 12:30 at night tromping through the woods when I here "Hey there". Once my hart stopped pounding I realized it was someone I knew.

I'm trying to put together an email parser that will pass some data from the published notification emails to my cell phone via SMS. I would like to be able to pass along a link to view the cache page via the WAP interface for the site but I can't figure out how to pass a target to the "View Cache" form from a link or how to pull up a cache directly via the WAP interface. I was hoping some one would have an idea about how to do this. If your interested here's the format I'm shooting for: P - GCXXXXXX (The P is for published you could have a code for disabled, archived etc...) Distance: 37.7 mi NE Link to cache via wap Any help is appreciated and of course I will share the PERL code when I'm done.

Power bars for breakfast, GORP and/or Jerky for snacks, peanut butter or nutela with peta bread for lunch, Freeze Dried for dinner. Some times I skip an actual lunch and just snack on the GORP and Jerky all day. The hardest thing for me is finding breads that hold up well in the pack. Mini beagles hold up ok but I just don't like beagles unless there toasted. Rock_Rat's Famous GORP++: dried Cranberries cashews sunflower seeds sesame sticks (I love sesame sticks, gotta have lots of those) m&ms (maybe if it's not to hot)

The bears are more aggressive this year. Because of our near drought conditions there has been a lack of soft and now that fall has arrived hard mast. Bears are having to scavenge more to get the calories they need for winter. I was there in July with a couple friends and we ran into a couple guys who where camped just upstream from us. They said that a bear had rummaged through there camp the day before while they where hiking. We didn't actually see a bear while we where there but we did see plenty of sign. Now as to lion's head I first have to explain I'm a bit more, um, round than most backpackers. I've spent most of my time in the Blackbird knob, Upper Red creek area's and seeing that I'm not the fastest hiker on the trail my time estimates might be a little off for you. 89SC has said he was at the lion's head cache in 2 hours and he just followed the directions on the trail page. The one thing I would suggest to any one going to the Sod's is take a decent map and a compass. If you stop by the Scenica Rocks visitors center you can get a free trail map and they sell topo maps of the region for a couple bucks.

Being the outdoorsy type I'd argue we have a lot more than most eastern states. By the way the glades are cool but I'm in love with Dolly Sod's. There's nothing quite like resting your tired feet in the ice cold forks of red creek.

You might want to start with this list of shelters. It includes coordinates for each one, and there's a link on the page to the ATC's waypoint files for more detailed information. GPSBabel lists National Geographic .tpo as one of the file format's it can convert. I've never tried it but it should do fine.

I've had a Kelty Whitney 1900ci pack for a few years now and I love it. It has a hydration pocket that holds a 2 liter comfortably and I think you could squeeze a three liter in there. The only thing I didn't like was the bladder. It was one of those blue ones similar to what they sale at Walmart now and it always made the water taste like plastic. A 2L platypus fixed that issue though. The Whitney is able to hold just enough for over night trips and be comfortable. It's also the perfect size for extended day trips when I'm caching. My large pack wasn't designed for hydration bladders but the two water bottle pockets on the side hold 2l bladders just fine.

That's a cool idea. I bet if I made it collapsible I could fit the pieces in the small compartment in the back of my kayak. Thanks for another weekend project to add to my list.