JimmyEv

I have to keep reminding myself this is how it has to be done, regardless of anyone's personal opinion as to whether NPS may be exceeding its authority or not. Geocaching is a very sensitive sport. It only takes one person that doesn't like a cache to remove a cache. If you don't have buy-in from the land managers, and, sometimes, other concerned parties, they can just remove all the caches they don't like, justified or not.

The abandoned property thing is just a rule, one of many, DOI is strectching to cover geocaching. This way the department avoids the time-consuming and contentious path of rule-making. Whether or not their solicitors would actually argue this before a federal magistrate or not is a different story. It's never been done, so no one actually knows if their interpretation is correct.

Actually, the law is on the side of the one with 51% of the evidence. If one side can present a scientific study to prove their point, and all the other side has is ancedoctal evidence, the law is on the side of the first. You currently have a hypothesis -- that geocaching harms native plants and allows invasive species to flourish. Your hypothesis holds no value until you test it.

Wow. I've never seen a Reviewer threaten to archive a cache based upon this: "Geocaching is supposed to be a light, fun activity, not one to attract geocachers to locations known to cause discomfort." I'm assuming this new application of the guidelines applies to homeless encampments, trash dumps, the barrio, and micros in very public places. These are all locations know to cause discomfort to a number of cachers.

This is still an AOL problem. The 'report as spam' line and the 'delete' line are easily confused, and they do the same thing -- they delete the e-mail. I know I've accidently hit 'report as spam' things I've meant to 'delete.' This has the potential to cause a lot of problems for people that rely on paperless billing. Lots of late fees from bills that you never got because someone's been reporting them as spam.

Yep. It only takes 30 minutes to pedal 8 miles. The other hour and a half is spent searching and searching and searching...

If you think the hunt is too easy, you can always make it harder. That's what bicycles are for. But saturation is still pretty amazing. On a 2-hour, 8-mile ride you can grab 11 or so caches. You might not remember each cache you hunted, but you're gonna remember the ride.

Micros seem to be the most popular form of caches for both hiders and finders, except in the forums. So I doubt it would really bother someone if their micro was on an ignore list somewhere.

Thanks Markwell, I'll see if I can figure out how to automatically forward. I'd cancel too, but then I wouldn't have dial-up when traveling to those stupid motels that still don't have high-speed.

I cannot believe that AOL is still causing all these problems. I have e-mails trickling in from more than 10 days ago, some pqs being sent twice, some e-mails sent through gc.com not coming at all, and the dates are all mixed up. I just ran a pq. It was generated, nothing came. Re-sent it to my yahoo account and there it was. Still not in the AOL account. This bites. Is there a way we can have everything sent to two e-mail accounts? Then I wouldn't have to regenerate pqs to send to yahoo.

From reading the articles and posts, it could have been cachers, but it's unlikely that cachers did the damage. Going from seeing cachers near a tree in a park to the conclusion that they must've uprooted flowers in a near-by flower bed is quite a leap. It's just as big a leap as seeing a bar next door and assuming it's the bar patrons. Both conclusions are equal. But, based on personal experience, the reason I think it'd be unlikely to be geocachers is that I've only seen damage on 0.18% of all caches I've done (three times). It happens, but it's rare. I haven't done any observations to see the percent of bar patrons that do damage, but I have a feeling it might be a little higher. All this (highly circumspect) evidence weighs towards the bar patrons.

I'm still not getting anything on my aol account. I've had to send the pqs to my work account (comes right away ) and forward them to my aol account. I guess aol still hasn't fixed this problem.

What irks me about nps land being off limits is that it is based on an assumption of ecological damage from geocaching. If anyone actually did a study on the ecological damage, I'm pretty sure that their results would show that caches do cause ecological damage within a set radius from a vehicular access point. Caches placed beyond that radius most likely cause no damage. This was in evidence (as pointed out above) at Geowoodstock. Caches within 0.25 miles of the road had social trails develop. Those further down the trails did not. One cache that was an 8 mile roundtrip hike (or bike) only had a handful of visitors the entire weekend (I think there were only 3). This might indicate a need for nps to control placement but it doesn't seem like there should be an outright ban.

I've noticed some people beginning to increase the terrain rating of caches due to 'the long drive' to the cache or the fact that it's way out in the boonies down a maze of dirt roads. The caches are usually hidden within 100 feet of parking. Should these really be a three terrain? I was always under the impression that caches three or higher in terrain involved some sort of hiking. Am I wrong?

I have UTM Coordinates like this: UTM R East 0390472 North 3318448. How do I enter these into a Magellan? My Sportrak and explorist want them in this format: UTM ## East ####### North #######.

MAP 330 --- Firmware got corrupted after a year Sportrak (first one) --- Screen went blank after about a year Meridian Gold --- Didn't like the way it felt in my hand and took it back to wally Sportrak (second one) --- This is the one I use Explorist 600 (first one) --- stopped working and took it back to Fry's Explorist 600 (second one) --- sits underneath my dashboard waiting to be used

I've gotten to the point of hating drive-up caches, so I bought a road bike. It's much more enjoyable now. You do discover a lot of things from a bike. And it does for micros what hiking does for ammo cans, makes each one an adventure to get to.

I figure that (eventually) all numbers will only be a function of time, i.e. how long you've geocached. If someone starts caching ten years from now, how could there be any competition with people that started in 2001?

I agree. It sounds like an ad for the Chippewa Valley. Let people discover what a great place it is for themselves and they might put it in their logs.

There's a cache or two right at Double Lake. Sam Houston National Forest has quite a few caches. Do a search using the zip codes for Coldspring and New Waverly. Most are easy, close to the trailhead or road, but a few are really great hikes. Four Notch Loop is a classic in SE Texas and about an 8-9 mile hike.

Someone finally noticed that the article seems...badly written. I also doubt that the cacher 'refused' to inform the police of the locations because it would ruin the thrill of the game; Then any pq would ruin the thrill of the game. The alleged comment from the parks director that the cache was supposed to be buried also seems a little suspect. One can only guess what else in the article is being mis-reported.

I got a 600 for Christmas. I figured out, with a lot of trouble, how to manage the files, turn off the backlight, and load waypoints. It would take twice as long for the explorist to find satellites side-by-side with the SporTrak. The battery lasts about 7 hours or so. Now when turned on the unit cycles through a screen and automatically turns off. I like my SporTrak better.

I got a spiked warning meter years ago that appeared under my name on one of my posts. I never knew what it was, what it meant, or what it was for, so I stopped posting for awhile. I've always wondered about that. At least I know what the 'warning meter' is now. PM is a bad idea. I didn't know what PM was until a few months ago.

Arghh! I forgot why I don't use attributes to screen my pqs. I was working in New Orleans in December. With the short days and long work hours, I could only do night caches. So I ran a pq for the 'night cache' attribute. It returned something like 15 caches. Tried to do some, and not even one was actually a night cache. They weren't even accessible at night. Now I'm starting to imagine all the caches on private property marked with the public property attribute. "Well, the public does park in the Walmart parking lot, so of course it's public property..."

I agree totally with this line of reasoning. AND - I continue to fear that the lack of such an icon could lead some to believe that it was placed illicitly. I'm not following the logic here. If there is a lack of an icon stating that a cache is on public property, this could lead some to believe that it was placed illicitly?