HeadLlama

...and it got posted! ...er, I mean published! Fabulous! I was pleasantly surprised that they printed it, even more so that they didn't cut anything. I know of two others that never got published, did anyone else submit?

Go ahead Commissar, I did.

Here is the letter I just submitted to the Beaufort Gazette. I was offered the chance to write an oped/commentary piece, rather than a much shorter Letter to the Editor. Thanks go out for those bits drawn from this forum. Let's see how much of it gets edited out before publication, IF it gets published at all. I've heard that some other people's letters have been completely ignored. ------------------------------------------------- There are some who would have you believe that there is a lawless group of individuals who hold clandestine meetings and communicate covertly over the Internet with the intent of invading our lands with reckless abandon, leaving destruction and desecration in their wake. Just who are these people and what are their true motives? They’re not thrill seekers, vandals or scofflaws, there are no rituals, illicit meetings or secret agendas. They’re just nature lovers, history buffs, hikers, bikers and tourists. They’re your family, friends, neighbors and co-workers. They come from all age groups and all professions and they all share a desire to get out and explore the world around them, to see new sights, get some exercise, learn some history and help preserve our heritage. These people are GEOCACHERS! We’re an international community with State and local clubs and associations. We host meetings and events that are open to the public, where we discuss geocaching policies, give classes, swap stories, and make new friends. Each year we organize an international CITO (Cache In / Trash Out) clean up day and sponsor smaller scale CITO events in communities all over the world on a regular basis. Its just one of the ways that we give back to the communities we live in. To see some amazing photos of this year’s effort, follow this link online: http://tinyurl.com/cp6ot There is an archive available online at http://www.geocaching.com/press/ that consists of several hundred informative articles promoting geocaching. The articles are collected from local and national newspapers and magazines around the world, such as the National Geographic, whose business has always been to expose the wonders of the world in which we live, in an effort to perpetuate and preserve those peoples, places and things. Geocaching’s central tenets promote these very same ideals. A recent editorial stated, "Southerners still hold sacred important spaces dedicated to historic events or the people who have inhabited this earth before them." This is exactly why geocaches have been placed in these locations. Our goal is to encourage others to come visit these special places, to help keep them alive, not abandoned and forgotten. Geocachers visiting these scenic and/or historical sites and cemeteries have written about how much they enjoyed the educational, thought provoking and sometimes moving experiences they provided. Detractors say geocachers are irreverent and potentially destructive to sites that the public has spent vast sums of money improving and protecting. In reality, no vandalism, defacement, or excessive wear due to geocachers in the locations in question has ever been reported or substantiated and while some geocachers may seem irreverent, their actions are no less respectful than the multitude of other visitors to these same locations, just more scrutinized. Another complaint was, "They have no right to climb on property and they have no right to trespass on private property. Many cemeteries are private." This is very true, and as a community, we actively enforce this regulation. If a geocache is placed without permission from a private landowner, it is forcibly removed by the community and archived from view on Geocaching.com. Unfortunately, such mistakes are sometimes made, as was the case with a local cemetery in Beaufort, which was neither gated nor posted as private. As soon as the error was discovered, the geocache was immediately removed. Can we citizens stand by and allow the legislature to enact a law based on the ill-advised opinions of a few misinformed individuals? A law that will give South Carolina the dubious distinction of being the only place on Earth to criminalize an activity that, in just a handful of years, has earned the endorsement and praise of the media and has been embraced by countless thousands of individuals, families and organizations in 214 countries around the globe? The world is watching.

I followed MountainMudbugs lead and made some coins out of clay. It was a lot of work but I had fun making them. Can't wait to start putting them in caches..I've even set up a tracking system for them. Coin tracking page

After reading everyone's replies and talking it over with my geopartner, I think we've decided to go about this in a more traditional way. In other words, partial coordinates will be placed in each small egg. Collect them all and it leads you to a grand egg. I've already drawn up preliminary plans and actually this may work better for the geocacher(s). I think one of the best ideas we have is to make this a "there and back again" journey. We're going to have caches (grand eggs) at each end of the trails instead of both grands at the far end. The small eggs will be distributed along the trial between them. The flow of this design on a given segment will be to head down the trail searching for blue eggs. Each egg will give you parts of the coordinates of the grand egg at the far end of the trail. Once you find the grand and sign the log, you come back along the same trail but this time you're looking for red eggs. The red and blue eggs will be located a good distance apart of course. The coordinates for all the red and blue eggs will be given on their respective cache pages, so you could find them all on the way out, but why? Anyway, once you collect all the red eggs on your way back, you will have the needed info to find the grand egg at the near end of the trail. The main difference between the easy and hard legs will be the number of eggs to find (3 vs. 6).

What TeamGPSaxophone says is partly true. Each "leg" is a separate cache, each with it's own cache page. You can choose to do 1, 2 or all 4. If you do all 4, you would be logging 4 separate cache finds. We intend to cross-link the 2 easy and the 2 hard legs together just so people know they are in the same area and can be completed at the same time.

In the original cache plan, we would provide exact coordinates to all the small eggs and to the 4 grand eggs. We didn't want to get into the "you must find this before you find that" or "you must find all these and add them up in order to find the next thing". We wanted to keep it simple and easy. What could be easier than an egg hunt where someone has given you the locations of the eggs in advance? Later we tacked on the idea of hiding one huge "mother egg" deeper in the forest and placing the coordinates to it inside the 4 grand eggs. I think we have abandoned that idea. If we do a mother egg, it will be a stand alone traditional cache. The incentive to go find it would be that you are already .3 mile into the woods, might as well go another few hundred feet.

Thanks for the input. Is there no way to translate a traditional easter egg hunt into a geocaching format? In an egg hunt, you go to a location and find all the hidden eggs to include a grand egg. The eggs have no link to one another, they're just randomly hidden. However, the finder of the grand egg usually gets a prize. We wanted to recreate this scenario. We were going to hide a bunch of eggs for them to find and make the grand egg a cache w/goodies and a log. To prove they found the other eggs too, they would have to identify the egg's color and contents. This seems really simple to setup and maintain. If a casher couldn't find an egg or two, no big deal, at least they tried. They would be allowed to log the cache anyway. If we follow the standard rules for multi-caches, we'll have to either put coordinates (or partial coordinates) for the grand egg in each small egg or have each egg lead to the next. That's a lot of work to setup up front. Cacher's will have to find them all in order to locate the grand egg. If they can't find one they're screwed and they'll have to abort the mission and email us for the missing info. Everytime somebody can't find an egg, we'll be obligated to hike out and verify that it's still there. I've had this problem with micro caches before and was trying to avoid that by making the small eggs required to LOG the cache but not required to FIND the cache. This is not intended to be a temporary event cache. It will kick off on Easter but remain in place indefinitely. We will go the route of placing coordinates in each egg if no one can give us the OK on our original plan.

A friend and I have been gathering cache items, scouting trails, plotting points and drawing maps for weeks now. We were just about ready to go build the cache when we decided to go check the geocache FAQs just to make sure our ideas were kosher. We couldn't find a definite answer so I'm asking the community to judge whether we should go ahead or drop back and regroup. The basic idea is to have a huge segmented easter egg hunt. A diagram and more info is located here: Map Coordinates will be given for all the eggs, big and small. Like any easter egg hunt, the object is to find all the eggs in each segment/leg of the hunt. A cacher can choose to complete one leg or do all five. To prove that they have found the small eggs, each egg contains an object. To claim a find on any given cache segment, they will have to find the grand egg and sign the log and correctly identify each of the small eggs by color and contents via email. The questionable part about all this is two fold. The small eggs contain no coordinates or hints to the grand egg. The goal of each leg of the hunt is simply to "fill your basket" so to speak. Find them all - log the find and move on to the next segment. Each segment is a separate unique entity, each with a tradition cache at the end filled with goodies and a log book. Each segment will be built separate. I will hide all the eggs for the G1 cache, my friend will do G2. I will do G3 and he G4. The mother egg cache will be a joint venture. The numbering of the eggs on the map are there to show that the segments overlap in such a way that hunters will have something to do on the way in and on the way out. For example, you head down the main trail finding the blue eggs associated with G1. When you get to the end, you locate G1 then G2 and sign the logs. On the way back, you find all the Red eggs associated with G2. You could, of course, find all the eggs on the way in but then you have nothing to do on the way out. The second questionable part of this is the mother egg idea. To find it, you have to find eggs G1 thru G4. Those 4 grand eggs will contain parts of the coordinates for the mother egg. This is essentially a multi-cache but the 4 grand eggs are also part of 4 other caches. Ideally, we want people to find all the eggs in all four caches then go on to find the mother egg. However, a hunter could come out and find the 4 grand eggs only, get the coordinates, find the mother and go home. By ignoring all the small eggs, he could not log finds on the G1- G4 caches. Thereby making the mother egg cache a separate multi-cache unto itself. To us, the biggest question mark here is the mother egg idea. That's easy to fix by simply making it a traditional cache with no connection to the other 4 caches. As for the other 4 caches, do they qualify as a variation on the multi-cache model or not? All the small eggs will be placed several hundred feet apart and all the Grand Eggs will be more than .10 miles apart, just so there is no confusion. Not to mention that in each leg/segment, the eggs will all be of the same color scheme. [This message was edited by HeadLlama on April 01, 2003 at 01:00 PM.]