chris-mouse

I think the notion that it's unsafe to be hiking at night is highly overrated. Given an adequate light source, one is no more likely to walk off a cliff at night than one is to walk off a cliff in the daylight. Since we are talking about the KoBFL team here, 'adequate light source' is probably somewhat of an understatement

Hey, I'm in. A nice long night hike is always fun. Just be warned, since the Hilton Falls loop is some 25K of hiking, it's going to be an ALL night hike.

Well, if you're looking for an easy cache, Old Mill Pond should do quite nicely. It's in a nice park that's hidden away in the centre of town. There are a number of other caches along the Bruce hiking trail just to the west of Milton. Be careful to read the descriptions though, many of them will involve a fair amount of hiking. The views from Niagara Escarpment - Mount Nemo Earthcache are well worth a visit. There's also a set of caches in the Kelso area. I haven't done those caches yet, but the area is spectacular. Just be prepared for some hill climbing.

dogsbreathcanada, if you keep pulling his leg like that, it's gonna come off! Seriously, I've done most of the caches in the Toronto area. There are a number of good ones within walking distance of the subway system. A Monumental Quest has already been mentioned. It's a good way to spend a couple of hours, although it will be difficult to do when there's snow on the ground. A search centred on that cache will find many more caches in the Toronto area. My personal favorites are the ones on the Toronto Islands. The Islands are a great place to spend the day, but hard to get to in the off season. You mentioned that you were going to be near the city. If you can indicate where, I'm sure there will be many people willing to pop in and suggest the best caches for that area. As for the police, I've yet to be stopped by any of the Toronto police. In an urban area, giving away the location of a cache to muggles is a much greater danger. Just act like you have every right to be doing what you're doing, and you'll pretty much be ignored. If you do get asked, just tell them you're geocaching, and be prepared to spend a few minutes explaining what geocaching is. I usually carry a few copies of this brochure to hand out to people. It makes the explainations much easier. At any rate, welcome to the city. Remember, the primary goal for geocaching is to have fun. I hope you have lots of it while you're here.

I have a Palm T2 that I take geocaching. I use GSAK and Plucker to dump cache pages into it for reference in the field. this gives me clues, photos, logs, and things that I might want to refer to in the field. It also gets used as a calculator for those pesky offset calculations The Bluetooth doesn't get a whole lot of use since I don't have a bluetooth capable phone. If I did, I could probably use it to log my finds right from the cache site! WiFi would be more useful, but the T2 doesn't have that. The one problem I have with the T2 is that the screen is almost unreadable in daylight. On a sunny day, I have to move it into the shade to see anything at all. At night, it's just fine, and can even do double duty as an emergency flashlight After having dropped it a couple of times, and having it fall off my belt a few more times, I picked up a zippered case for it. The case is intended for an MP3 player, but it fits the PDA just fine. It zippers securly shut, and more importantly, there's a belt loop on it, so it can't fall off my belt in the middle of the forest.

I received a copy of the same email from Parks Canada. From reading it, I assume that all 44 individuals who sent in a comment to Parks Canada also got a copy. It was encouraging to see that the common topics were, for the most part, positive, and indicating a genuine willingness to cooperate in reaching a policy that both Parks Canada and Geocachers can be happy with. The email also indicated that it's only a summary of the comments made between May and August.2005. the public comment period hasn't ended yet, so if you want to make some comments of your own, you've got until the December 31st to do so. I'll be looking forward to the final summary of all the public comments, and more importantly, to seeing the resulting policy. I hope that will be in time for geocaching in the springtime, but given the usual speed at which governments work, I suspect having a policy in place by 2007 is more realistic.

Local ham repeaters: Bracebridge: 146.865 - VE3MRT Edgar (Barrie) : 145.190 - VE3TTB Orillia: 147.210+ VE3ORR (tone 156.7)

I'm in! I've been looking for an excuse to get out the snowshoes :-)

How does the liability issue work for other activities in a provincial park? I'm especially concerned about parks like Mono Cliffs where there is no gatehouse, and no staff on duty, just a parking lot and a trailhead leading off to some potentially very dangerous places. Obviously Ontario Parks is satisfied with the liability issues regarding hikers, picnikers and teenagers looking for a place to have a beer party. This makes it pretty obious to me that liability is simply a smokescreen to hide the real reason why Ontario Parks doesn't want geocaching. Until we can discover that real reason, and deal with it, geocachers will get nowhere in negotiations with the parks.

The size depends on which hard drive model you're taking apart to get the magnets from. Most of them are about half an inch wide by an inch or two long, shaped in an arc. Some models use two smaller magnets instead of one bigger magnet. The magnets I have all came glued to a metal backing plate. Unless you're going to glue the magnet to a solid piece of steel, like an ammo can, leave it attached to the backing. The main effect of the backing plate is to make the magnet MUCH stronger on the side opposite the plate. It also helps to protect the magnet from shattering by absorbing some of the impact when the magnet snaps against another surface. The metal backing plates also have mounting holes that were used to bolt the magnet into place inside the hard drive. Those same holes can be used to bolt the magnet to the outside of a cache container. Two of these magnets would be enough to hold an ammo can securely in place on the underside of something like a steel beam.

OK, I decided to check my own stats on this. Out of 120 pages of cache listings, the fist page that isn't entirely filled with caches I've either placed or found is page 4. There's a new cache only 11.6km from home that I haven't gotten to yet. The first page that's entirely blank is page 70. The distances are between 91.1 and 92.8km from home. The last page that has finds on it is page 106. I've got a couple of finds out around 146km from home. There are further finds, but they're too far away to appear in my default search. That's the stats as of right now. I expect to fill in the last of page 4 by the end of October, as well as most of page 5. Of course, other cachers plan to open new holes in that area at the same time. We'll have to see what happens. About the ony think I can say for sure is that I'm looking forward to finding as many of these as I can :-)

-I've almost finished the GHMCMC series. Only one more cache to go and I'm hoping I can get there next month. - I didn't get anywhere near the FLOO network series. Perhaps they'd make a nice set to do by snowshoe... - It seems that as fast as I find caches, more caches are being placed. I've pretty much cleaned out the first 15km from home, but as of right now, there's another 65 caches within the next 15km. - So far, I've logged 352 finds in 2005. I don't think there will be all that much difficulty in finding 13 caches over the next three months. - I'm at 800 finds now. Getting 200 more in three months is going to be pushing it. It'll be fun trying though. Whether I make those goals or not is almost irrelevant to me. the key point for me is that I've had a heck of a lot of fun along the way, and as long as I keep having fun, I'll be out there using multi-billion dollar military satellite systems to hunt tupperware in the woods.

To start with, every GPS unit I've ever seen will accept coordinates in a latitude/longitude format. There will be some differences as to how the numbers are entered, but the salesperson should be able to show you how to do that. It is possible to find a geocache without a GPS, but it is a LOT harder to do it that way. Out of the over 700 geocaches I've found, only two were found without the aid of the GPS, and one of those was a virtual cache that I knew of before seeing it as a geocache. Every GPS on the market today will work for geocaching, but there are some things you'll want to look for. Portability: An in-car GPS can get you there, but it's not going to be much help when the geocache is several hundred yards away from the parking lot. Ability to download waypoints from the computer: Entering waypoints by hand is possible, but it's time consuming and prone to errors. Being able to download several dozen waypoints at a time makes it much easier, and you can change plans at the last minute without having to scramble to find waypoints in the new area where you're going. mapping: Addin mapping capability really increases the cost of the GPS, but it makes it much easier to find parking, find a route from cache to cache, and generally navigate with the GPS. It also helps make sure that you follow the trail down the right side of the creek instead of ending up on the wrong side like I always seem to do.

I don't know if this counts, but I did take this picture of the GPS mounted on my bicycle handlebar. From top to bottom, the numbers on the display are speed in km/hr, current time, distance to go, in km, and turn direction. Oh, and for those who aren't familiar with SI units, that's just under 60mph, and yes, I really was travelling that fast.

What do I do at midnight? Quite frequently I'm either searching for a cache, or else picking the next cache on the list to go for. I used to avoid night caching and always stopped at sunset. That stopped after I was on a 24 hour caching marathon last year. I found that caching during the night was not much harder than during the day, and there are far fewer muggles around. In the winter months, I usually don't get home from work until after sunset, and weekends aren't always available, so I go caching after work in the dark. Over the course of the last year, I think I've spent as much time caching at night as I have during the daytime. There are a couple of rules that I always follow when night caching: First of all, NEVER go alone. In the city, the less friendly muggle population is about. In the country, if you get in trouble, it's going to be a long time before any help arrives. At night I'm always caching with at least one other person, and usually two or three. Second, make sure you have more than one source of light. There's nothing scarier than getting a couple of miles down a terrain 3 trail, only to discover that you no longer have a source of light. I use an LED headlight for hiking on the trails, and pocket flashlight as a backup and as an extra light while searching. If I'm going after a well hidden cache, or one that's in dense undergrowth, I'll often bring along a BFL on a shoulder strap as well.

It's really simple. A commercial cache would be one where the person who placed the cache stands to make a profit from people finding that cache. I don't think there are very many event caches held anywhere where the person hosting the event also shares in the profits from the venue where the event is held. I know I can't think of any I've been to where that was the case. I'm pretty sure that the intent of the rule is to keep commercial establishments from turning geocaching.com into free advertising by holding regular events in their establishments.

That's perfect kimmyroo. Thanks. Any chance I could get a large copy of the colour version too? I keep finding more things to use that avatar for. I've got a couple of spare T-Shirts and an inkjet printer around... editted due to fumble fingers.

Store bought berries are picked green, and ripened on the truck with an enzyme spray. since most of the sugar and flavour is added to the berry just as it ripens, that's missing from those that are picked green. The enzyme can't compensate for that. They have to be done that way, because there's no way ripe strawberries would survive a truck ride across the continent from California to the east coast. If you can get them, local berries are much better, because they're not picked until they're ripe. The problem is that the local farms can't supply supermarket quantities, so you rarely, if ever, see them in the local supermarket chains.

In these parts, just about every cache outside the city is surrounded by raspberries and blackberries., So is every park, bit of forest, or even just open spaces. They grow everywhere, and right now they berries are at their peak. If you know where to look, you can also find wild strawberries growing along some of the trails. the srawberries are long over, and they're a lot more work to collect, but they're worth it. One tiny strawberry, smaller than a pencil eraser, has all the flavour of one of those big huge store bought berries.

Wow, thanks to whoever bumped this thread back up. There's some incredible talent on display here. Is it too late for me to get my request in? I'm looking for a mouse in a Santa suit, similar to the photo I'm currently using as my avatar. If you could add in a Sportrak GPS, so much the better. I'm planning on using it as my avatar, but also getting a stamp made of it for logging, so a B&W copy would also be appreciated. aTdHvAaNnKcSe

A next day reply is a bit short notice for much in the forums, but I'll do what I can. I hope you see this in time. The closest cache to Port Franks appears to be this one:The butterfly Effect Clicking on the link for nearby caches, shows a number of other caches in the area. Most of them appear to be relatively easy caches, but you'll have to decide that for yourself.

I had one cache removed by a backhoe. It was placed in a nice safe location, in an area that had been re landscaped only the previous year. The cache was fine for a while, but then the landowner put up a new building nearby. That construction didn't affect the cache directly, although I kept an eye on it. Then they went and hooked up the electrical power to the building. Seems that my cache was directly in the path of the new electrical cables, and the cache was destroyed in the process of digging a trench. I replaced the cache in a new location, where I thought it would be perfectly safe. I just got a note from a local cacher saying that the cache has recently been covered over by a layer of new sod. Looks like I'll need to fix that soon so as to not run afooul of the 'no burial' rule.

You know, I'm really beginning to love this night caching. The bugs tend to leave you alone, there are no muggles to worry about, and the nighttime views from the escarpment are beautiful. Much better than looking at the smog in the daytime. The only drawback is that it's really, really hard to get good photos at night. Algonquin Bound, I'm really looking forward to the followup fro this set. I smell another night caching event coming on. Keepers of the Order of the BFL

Went bike caching with a group of cachers yesterday. We agreed to meet in the parking lot at 9am. After shifting the parking by a couple of miles at the last minute because of an event, we finally hit the trail at about 9:45am. We found our first cache of the day at 10:00. At about 10:02, the rain started. the rain finally let up at about 3pm, just as we were giving up searching forthe one cache we logged a DNF on. In between, we'd logged finds on eight other caches. After the rain ended, we went to four more caches before finally calling it a day. Bad weather? What's that? I've been out caching in every sort of weather from 100f and sunny to -20f and pitch darkness. There really isn't any weather that I won't go out caching in. The only difference the weather makes is going to be in how I prepare for the trip.

The day was a blast. Everything that was liable to be damaged by the rain was put away somewhere safe. Everything else was soaked by noon. I didn't mind too much though, it was warm enough to not be a problem. The rain kept things nice and cool, so we didn't have to worry too much about the heat. By my count, we visited 15 cache sites, and made 14 finds. We traveled about 50km, but spent 11 hours doing it, so we didn't really kill ourselves. It was just a great day of cycling. No hills, almost all of it on pavement, and the toughest traffic was the pedestrian traffic on the islands. I'm already looking forward to the next bicycle caching trip!