sdarken

Swag often adds to my enjoyment of geocaching. I enjoy looking through the contents of caches but I don't trade much. I'll trade for sig items and I'll take TBs and GCs. There are a couple of times over the years where myself or my kids may not have traded evenly as I've been caught without anything (and no dollar bills). On the flip-side most of my caches are regulars or smalls. I always try and fill them with interesting things. If I do a maintenance trip I'll refill and clean out trash. I dont worry too much about what happens to the swag in my caches. I expect the quality to degrade. Many of my caches require a fair hike so the degredation is slow on those.

Take a hand mirror with you. Hold it facing the camera so that you can see a reflection of the camera/gpsr in the mirror while taking a photo of yourself. For inspiration, here's a photo of a guy taking a photo of himself, taking a photo of the tattoos on his wrists. He is the only person in the room.

As others have said, geocaching can give you destinations to explore and will almost certainly introduce you to places that you wouldn't have found on your own. All kinds of people geocache. Many geocachers wont leave paved areas to cache and will just follow the arrow to the cache. For serious exploring, the use of maps of some kind is essential :- following the arrow up and over a mountain instead of following a trail around the mountain teaches you that lesson pretty quickly. Most people that I know who really get to known their surroundings use topo maps (either paper maps or maps on their GPSr or both). I dont own or use a regular compass though on the forums it's often recommended that people carry a compass. One of Mulvaney's posts above gives a pretty good list of other reasons for geocaching. It's certainly not just about getting from point A to point B.

In an urban or suburban location, a rubbermaid container with at least one side (or top or bottom) left uncovered should work fine. That way it can be examined without opening if anyone is concerned about it's contents.

I'm OK with lots of caches having zero votes. Once the favorites system has existed for a while, if I see a cache with zero votes it's going to suggest to me that there's nothing particularly special about the cache. I'm going to guess that a fairly large percentage of caches are probably not going to get any votes. I've given votes to all my top favorites and am gradually adding votes to lots of other caches that I also think are worthy of a vote but I still have 239 unused votes. I don't see any reason why I should feel inclined to use all those votes.

I looked at a single cache in the series and saw this in the log of one of the finders: "This is where the CHiP's officer stopped and asked if we were ok. Did you know stopping on the side of the highway, without an emergency is illegal?" Aren't all these caches on a highway?

Thanks for all the input. A couple more ideas: - I wonder whether at some point it might be possible to do a comparison of log length and GC vote ratings to see if the favorites point allocations are highlighting the same kinds of caches that those two techniques/systems would highlight. (My guess is that there would be a fairly high correlation.) - I wonder whether it might be possible to combine either terrain rating or difficulty to produce another kind of rating. eg: 1 favorite vote on a cache with a terrain rating of 5 might be worth 5 points, 1 favorite vote for a terrain rating of 4 might be worth 4 points. Something similar could be done with difficulty. My thinking is that the difficulty of some caches means that they are never going to get as many visits or favorite points as easy caches. The kind of points system I'm proposing might cause less-visited caches to bubble up to the top of the list. Not sure if this idea has any merit or not.

In an idle moment I was thinking what else we might be able to do with favorite points. A couple of things are obvious: - Most importantly, I'd like to see a selection criteria to select caches with at least a certain number of favorite points - Favorite points obviously needed to be added to GPX files so that we can use them in tools like GSAK. How about some less obvious ways - Suggestions for caches based on favorites votes (eg: 5 people that voted this cache a favorite, also voted xxxx as a favorite) - Some kind of Karma rating based on the number of favorite points for owned caches. - Perhaps some kind of stat that totals up the number favorite points for found caches. What other ideas do people have for ways they could be used?

No. the Ipod touch will only give you your current position when you're connected to a wifi network so that's not going to work. A no-cost way to start would be to use the maps on the cache pages. In the U.S, for most areas, Google maps and satellite images can show the location pretty well if you zoom in all the way. Lots of people geocache without a GPSr at all to start. It will be frustrating in some situations but it would give you an idea whether you want to continue playing the game.

While more of a goal than a resolution, I'd like to spend the year working down the list of (non-puzzle) caches in my area with the most favorite votes. That sounds like a fun way to cache.

I just finished a week of vacation in a new state and use the favorites to locate an interesting cache as a destination for each day that I was able to get some caching time. It worked out very well. My only regret was not having enough time to visit all of the caches that sounded like fun. The favorites feature was one of the best Christmas presents I received this year.

But some of my favorite sdarken caches have only one vote. For that matter, some of my personal favorites of the caches I have placed have only one vote - if that. That's true for me too. Many of my own favorites only have a single vote so far. Until the favorites feature is being used more regularly filtering out one-vote caches might exclude some good ones. Around my home location I happen to agree with most of the votes (even the one-vote caches) but when I was traveling I saw a lot of one-vote caches that didn't sound special in any way.

I've just been traveling away from my home area and had a chance to use the favorites feature to select caches. It was a huge help in locating caches that were special in some way. From what I've seen, I wouldn't bother looking at caches that have only one favorite. There are lots of reasons why a single person might favorite a cache that won't necessarily mean the cache is special to other people. As time goes on, I'd probably raise this threshold (ie: only look at caches with two or three or more favorites). Even with the favorites feature it's still necessary to read the cache description and logs to understand whether it's going to be the kind of cache that you will enjoy. A family with small kids probably wont want to do an epic adventure through swamplands for example and especially challenging puzzle caches that garner a lot of favorites will not be of interest to many people who just want to take a walk in the woods.

1. Caches hidden in view of private houses 2. Parking-lot caches 3. Sprinkler-head caches

Perhaps the people that like this idea should vote for it

If you were doing it solo with no driver, it doesn't seem to me that moving the containers would save you any time unless you attempted to sign while driving at the same time and that sounds like a truly bad idea.

I found my first 500 caches using the older eTrex model but I upgraded to a 60csx when I realized that geocaching was going to be a long-term hobby. The 60csx gave me much better accuracy under tree cover and other situations where reception was less than ideal. The upgrade was worth every penny I spent on it.

The comments about foreign coins as swag got me interested enough to do a quick search on amazon where I stumbled across 50 uncirculated banknotes for $US16 and 50 foreign coins for $13 (shipping included in that price). E-bay had even better details. Coins and banknotes both seem better than the usual kind of plastic junk I often leave. (I put better stuff in my own caches).

Peak-A-Boo: Mt. Whitney GC75C3 is a 22 mile round trip hike with some good elevation change

This is fairly subjective. No list of "most remote" is going to be complete without the infamous Rainbow Hydrothermal Vents and the ISS cache Richard Garriott / Lord British. For less exotic, Oh So Blue probably belongs among the top 10. Oh So Blue is actually less than 20 miles from the nearest cache. The Rainbow Hydrothermal Vents cache certainly seems very remote. I can't easily figure out how far away the nearest cache is. Congo-go (GC1AGG0) - in the Congo, is apparently 600 miles from the nearest cache.

Your oldest unfound, was archived on August 24th. Thanks. Yes, it's hard to keep those kind of lists current. I update it from time to time. Here are the oldest unfound now Hidden: 23 Jun 01 4.5lb Walleye by Jamie Matear (GCDFB) Ontario, Canada Hidden: 10 Jul 01 Conch Shell Horn by Jeffrey Courrier (GC105E) Venezuela Hidden: 28 Jul 01 Nikolay-Kam by Nikolay-Kam (GC14C3) Russia Hidden: 12 Aug 01 Mount Temple by MCpl. Paul Franklin, MCpl. J. Pawsey (GC1607) Alberta, Canada

Check the trivia on my profile page for a few more of these. (I have duplicates of some of the ones mentioned by the post above): http://www.geocaching.com/profile/?guid=8b...fc-0e1904ed5e93

That's the best post right there. I'd buy you a scoop of your favorite flavor for giving me a chuckle.

In a perfect world, every cache would be my favorite kind of hide (interesting location, nice hike, large, easy-to-find cache) and everyone would leave a $50 bill for me to find in the cache. In the real world I'm just happy enough if if the cache placement doesn't encourage me to run home and put it on my ignore list. Residential caches in full view of neighbors (who may or may not know about the game) are my least favorite and often end up on my ignore list. I will hunt for caches that take me to locations that have no point (nothing to see, no history, no special reason for a cache to be placed there) but they don't fit in my vision for cachetopia. As others have described in detail, poor container choice and bad coordinates are problems that can be fixed relatively easily.

sdarken likes this response. The geocacher probably shouldn't have admitted to not signing the log but if you're not a forum regular you probably wouldn't realize how tough people can be on the principle that if you don't sign the log then it's not a find. If it was me I'd just let it go but then again I find nanos annoying too.