poohstickz

Seeing as knowledge is a good thing, i.e. a benefit, I have increased my personal awareness of: A couple of meniscus tears, several broken toes and fractured fingers, compartment-syndrome, cellulitus, lyme-disease, poison ivy, fractured collar bone, multiple concussions, mucho tendonitis, lots of sutures, and much, much, more - and that's only the minor stuff; frankly, some cachers really don't seem to be trying hard enough.

You have to shoot them, knife them, kneecap them, or somehow disable them so as to avoid being left with the consideration of saying hello and getting to know them.

I go with, "I see you are trying really hard to look inconspicuous" or "don't you feel silly carrying that clipboard around?" and follow up with "Are you Geocaching?". Works every time.

Yes, but why is it so irritating that someone was there "first"? How is "your" experience (whomsoever is into the FTF thing) diminished by someone else having been there? Seriously, I don't get it. Is it bragging rights, is that what it is? If so, without quantification who is proving what to whom? Aren't these numbers best increased by concentrating on the easy / trivial finds? Again, not picking on anyone, but I'm totally failing to see the allure of bragging in the pub about being the first to drive to 100 more lamppost skirts than someone else. Is it that the only way to make the hide-a-key hidden under a park bench, or the magnetic nano on a road sign appealing, is to be there "first"? What if the cache was previously listed and found via some other site? Now someone else was there "first". Is that also irritating? If not, why not? Granted, when I make a multi-hour trek out into the middle of nowhere and find I'm the first to log a cache, sometimes months after it's been published, I think "Gosh, this hasn't been logged yet", but my experience isn't going to be diminished if I wasn't the first visitor. In fact, I regularly revisit areas that people have drawn my attention to via a Geocache and my enjoyment is enhanced by learning or seeing something new. Hence, I'm struggling with the concept of deliberately looking for a Geocache that was placed somewhere so implicitly unappealing that the only reason to go there is in writing FTF on some web site. Please explain what it is that I'm missing.

From reading these posts, I am beginning to realise how intrinsically unfair the current system of FTF really is. Up and until now, I had totally overlooked the fact that some Geocachers were being denied the opportunity to "claim" a FTF due to the bothersome and trivial details of other Geocachers having visited the cache before them. Clearly, in this enlightened age of entitlement, the current system of first-past-the-post represents a scandalous and unacceptable practice. I have a proposal. For those owners who wish to more fairly distribute the FTF honours, we should implement a randomised award system. The owner could, for example, specify the bounds that are to be considered as being "first" with that number being stored in a database for later use. For example, the owner could specify first to be between 5 and 15. Remember, it's a secret that not even the owner knows. Up until the designated "first" log is received, the cache page would show "A First To Find is still available on this cache". Once the designated log entry is made (12, for example), a nice shiny star gets added to the log, trumpets will sound, a choir of angels will descend from the heavens, and a post congratulating the finders will be made in their regional forum. Naturally, the cache page will be amended to show "No first to find is available on this cache" so as to not waste the time for future visitors. The advantage to this system is that it will more fairly distribute FTF honours amongst the community, whilst not discriminating against anyone that plays the game for the strange and odd practice of visiting geocaches. Discuss.

They can claim what they like, doesn't make it any more or less true than it would be though. I'm thinking that a simple email explaining that their visit was appreciated but it wasn't a new hide, would probably have been enough to explain their confusion. I've seen people ask if the FTF "is still available" because the previous finder hadn't "claimed" it. That's somewhat silly too but it seems that some geocachers may use a definition of the word "first" of which many of us are unfamiliar.

I'd like a game whereby people post on a web site the coordinates to a container that's hidden, but not buried, somewhere on earth. Then we'd use those coordinates to get outdoors and find those containers. We could then write about them, sort of like a blog. There could even be sub-games where people could obsess about who was the first person to visit a lamp-post or who had been to the most Walmart parking lots. Perhaps you're more interested in something like Wherigo?

It's playing in the great big outdoors, so the consequences are pretty much the same as if there wasn't a geocache there. I've had several hospital trips and bits of surgery as a result of caching adventures but the person who is responsible for my actions is me. No rescues though. Methinks I'm going to have to try harder!

Well, others are entitled to feel guilty if they wish, but I'd rather someone left me a nice log about their day out finding a cache then they "gave back" by placing some inane "for-the-numbers" cache at some nondescript freeway exit. If there's no "new" caches nearby, there's no penalty for going back to visit a cache a second or third time. Additionally, if so many caches are unappealing for a repeat visit, then maybe there's a flaw in this oft-mentioned "must give back" scenario.

http://www.nps.gov/jotr/ There's no fee for backcountry camping, you just need to register at one of the backcountry boards and off you go. The Boy Scout trail is a popular and reasonably short option, but it all depends on what you are looking for. The JT website has a wealth of information, maps, and so on; FWIW, the backcountry rules and regulations are here. Water sources are limited in the park.

Wow. So, folks are going to watch a TV program on the Discovery Channel, then run out and buy a GPS, go back to a web page to get some coordinates, then rush out to trash a random Rubbermaid container? Did I also miss the memo regarding Geocaching being some super-duper-secret-agent thing? Somehow I'm not feeling the need to put on my tin-foil hat.

Perhaps you can take pride in the fact that you are probably the first person who was big enough to admit that they didn't find that cache. That's being honest, it's not being humiliated.

Option C, hide a new cache. Before you modified your initial post you mentioned that the cache would always be hidden somewhere in a 500x100 foot strip in a city park. So, if the intent if to let people up their numbers, then why not also take them somewhere new? Is this minuscule strip of land really the only quality place in which you can hide a decent cache?

I think that you just answered your own question. You can slice and dice it how you like but you can't change the fact that someone found the cache before you. If someone found the cache before you, then you can't have been first. They were first, you were not. At the end of the day, what difference does it make how many people found the cache before you? Say a log was posted to the website whilst you were out looking for the cache. Would the posting that you didn't see somehow have affected the experience you had already received that same day? FTF isn't an "official" Geocaching thing. If you get to be the first to find the cache, well that's great. If someone else found it before you, then that's life.

This last year I've had my share of injuries so at times I've been caching on crutches or have been severely limited in my mobility. I've also had the chance for several 500-1000 mile road trips where I passed literally hundreds and hundreds of 1/1 P&G micros. I tried going for the 1/1 gimmes but most of those left me so unbelievably bored I found myself wondering what it was that I was doing and why I was doing it. The location was often without merit and many of the caches were in disrepair. Many all you needed was a street map or a knowledge of where to locate such-and-such shop or whatever. So I went for what I could get to on crutches and as I wasn't proficient enough with those to get up mountains I simply didn't go for the higher terrain caches. It was OK that I couldn't go geocaching too. I didn't expect to be able to compete in sporting events either. With the road trips I stopped at a few P&Gs along the way but the same "why am I here?" feeling pervaded the experience. Perhaps if the numbers mattered to me I'd feel differently but, equally, I'm struggling with the concept of achieving a milestone of finding 100 rest areas. So, I passed on hundreds and hundreds of caches not just along the way but, also, in the areas I was visiting. That was a shame. For example, in Utah, I happened to stop at a place with an amazing view where you can see forever and noticed that there was a cache right there and it was place that you'd have been happy to drive out of your way to visit. Sadly, I probably missed dozens of great caches just like that but the banality of the ones I did investigate turned me off as I really wasn't in the mood for sorting the wheat from chaff. So now I'm ignoring a whole aspect of geocaching simply because so many are placed without a thought other than "there is no cache here". Personally, I don't think that's a good advertisment for Geocaching.

I'm not offended by such people either and I'd probably laugh along with you particularly as modern evolutionary theory doesn't offer at all that man is descended from monkeys, similarly nor does the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe even pretend to explain the entirety of the complex world that we have now. You'd certainly not have been doing these folks a disservice if you correctly explained those theories to them and you'd probably have had a more rational argument with them at the same time. I also doubt that these elitists that you mention would be able to produce any tracts as tracts are generally religious in nature. Perhaps a closer analogy would be asking them for their peer-reviewed, published, testable, scientific literature. Who were these people, by the way? Back to religious material in caches. It's a thin line, isn't it, but I think flask has a good direction on it. When I find tracts and the like I swap them for something of equal or greater value but I do wish I could go geocaching without someone feeling the need to save me.

I think you probably are referring to Galileo

It's the same cache as you yourself said, and you've already logged a find on that cache. There's no reason not to go find it again if you wanted to but as for logging multiple finds on the same cache... that's up to you but to most folks that's somewhat cheesy.

Yeah I bet quite a few of those have "Peak Registers" Seems kinda hypocritical to me..... The word that came to mind when I was told that a peaks series that I was planning on setting up in this area could not be listed was "ironic", but the rationale was the same. Still, I'm glad our local reviewer told me that before I lugged them ammo cans all the way to the top!

There is no reason for them to be the same. One says you found it, one says it needs maintenance. Perhaps if you look upon the Needs Maintenance as an attribute then it becomes clearer?

If the cache wasn't available to be found, then you are quite unlikely to have found it. If you found the correct location but not the cache, then you still didn't find it. It doesn't matter if the cache was there the day before, or if the cache was replaced an hour later, the fact of the matter is that you didn't find it. Hence it's a DNF. If it helps, there's no penalty for logging DNFs nor does logging a DNF imply that you are a bad cacher or, indeed, that the cache owner is a bad hider, it's simply a matter of what happened that time around.

Finding the cache on the second, or third visit doesn't change the fact that you didn't find the cache the first time out. Your original DNF is still true and your subsequent found log will show what happened when you finally found the cache. There are caches where I've logged four or more DNFs. It's neither a bad thing nor a good thing, it's just the accurate history of what happened. As this is an exceedingly common question, if you use the search facility you'll find many, many, discussions on exactly this topic.

I reported this problem to Garmin as far back as August 2006. So, yes.

To some people, yes it's important. For myself, I work on the premise that if a cache is worth visiting, then it's worth visiting no matter if one is first, or if a hundred people have been there before. Conversely, if I thought I'd only enjoy visiting a particular cache if no-one else had been there before, then I wouldn't waste my time going to find it.

Normally, I'd roll my eyes at a thread like this and move on. However, what really struck me from the previous threads was that Keystone is more than a match for a bunch of cry-baby whiners with an over-developed sense of entitlement. So, yes, to TPTB. Thanks for all the grief you folks go through for keeping politics out of Geocaching.