x_Marks_the_spot

Looking at the Google Earth image, I have to say that it doesn't quite square with the description. The description talks about an established path, but the coordinates provided point to a parking lot of some sort. I would say it bears at least emailing the cache owner to make sure the coords are right.

I agree that it would be a nice feature, but I just count my lucky stars that they even show up different. Before the nifty Google Maps feature, I used Google Earth with the Geocaching KML, and you had no way of knowing until you clicked on the cache and looked at the listing.

I hasten to add that both Magellan and Lowrance now have "crossover" GPS units, which have the auto-routing and street-level maps of an automotive GPS, with the rugged case and straight-line navigation features of a handheld outdoor GPS.

There isn't a single "best" unit for geocaching. Sorry. I know that makes it tough to choose. If you want a budget unit that will point you to a set of coordinates, maybe with mapping capabilities, you can go with the "Yellow" eTrex or the eTrex Legend from Garmin, or the Magellan eXplorist 100 or 200. Any of these for well less than $200. Or you can go for an older unit, which will do about the same things as any of these. I have a Magellan MAP 330, which you can find all day long on eBay for under $50. Garmin III and V units are also still out there being used. If you want a mid-range GPS with a few bells and whistles, maybe with a color screen, auto-routing, yadda yadda, you can get a Garmin Vista or a Magellan eXplorist 500 or 600 for the $200 - $400 price range. Of you can go higher end, for units with color screen, barometric altimeter, electronic compass, etc. and so forth. Lowrance iFinder Expedition, Garmin GPS 60, Garmin Colorado, Magellan Triton, etc.; $300 - $500 or so for these. You can go still higher, and get GIS and surveying units, particularly from Trimble. They aren't built specifically for geocaching, but they can certainly be used in that way, and they'll give you God-a'mighty accurate readings (subfoot accuracy). You'll also spend several thousand dollars on them. But no, the automotive GPS units (TomTom, RoadMate, nuvi, etc.) won't do for geocaching. They're meant to stay on the road and in the car, and not on the trail.

Your country planning commission may even have an online map that has all such information. Where we live in Greenville County, South Carolina, the Planning Commission such a thing here. You can find who owns a piece of property, who previously owned it, how much they paid for it, what the zoning is on it, etc. So you might at least look there.

I believe, from my days of using a Magellan MAP, you will need to hold down the MARK button if you want to manually enter coordinates. It will come up with your current location, then you just have to change the numbers to mark the coordinates you are looking for. Then you will be able to get a directional pointer guiding you in a straight line to the cache. Be aware: mindlessly following the straight line on a GPSr is a really good way to fall in a ravine, wind up in a river, or get run over in traffic. The arrow tells you where the cache is, you have to figure out how to get there. Not that I've done anything like that before ...

For what it's worth, I know plenty of people who still use old Garmin V and III units. Up until about a year ago, I used a Magellan MAP 330, which worked beautifully under heavy tree cover, and I only stopped because I got a Lowrance for Christmas. I've also used a Magellan GPS companion for the Handspring Visor, which worked just fine. The bells and whistles are nice, to be sure, but if it will point you to a set of coordinates out to three decimals of minutes, it will work for caching. But absolutely get the eTrex H. We have an older eTrex, and it is pretty dismal in terms of performance under tree cover. Good luck!

PLEASE use the date you actually physically visited the cache. Maybe I'm more neurotic about this than the average cache owner, but it bugs me to no end to get a log on a Tuesday, dated that Tuesday, that says "Found on Saturday afternoon."

The quality of the coordinates is really a function of whether or not the cache owner took the time to get good coordinates. Some people just walk in, drop off the cache, mark their position, and go on. When you start hiding caches (and God help you then ) you'll want to take an average of many, many readings, check the coordinates by coming out another day, etc. But it is important to remember that your GPS isn't a homing device. It isn't giving you "hot" or "cold" indicators for the cache itself. The GPS is really guessing about how close you are to a position that someone else's GPS guessed at. We always start at "ground zero," then work our way out. Congrats on your first caches! Good luck to you!

First I break out my sextant and astrological charts, then I sight an azimuth angle to the North Star, and ... Actually, we usually let the GPSr settle down to a good EPE, let it average 100 points, and that's usually it. My Lowrance iFinder shows a scatter plot of where all the points it has averaged are (don't know if other units do this, but I think it's just as neat as can be), and if it's really diffuse we'll plug those coordinates into another GPSr (we have four by now) and check it that way. Rechecking with the same unit at the same time (as opposed to coming back another day) doesn't make much sense to me. Kinda like playing Battleship; if E7 is a miss, you wouldn't call E7 again until the next game. You already know where that GPSr says it is, given the satellite data it has, so the smart money says it's going to say the same thing when you walk away and come right back.

I have an iFinder Expedition C, which I love. So far, I have been using just the basemap, which has been plenty detailed enough that I can get my rough bearings. I haven't tried MapCreate a) because it's expensive and because I've heard tell that the maps generated by MapCreate aren't the best in the world, and since the unit doesn't auto-route, it just hasn't seemed worth the money. But in reading around, I keep seeing vague mention of satellite images as background on GPSrs, which I think would be just as cool as could be. How would I go about getting satellite images as "maps" on this unit, if it's even possible?

There are at least two premium member features that allow you to know about new caches right away, (Pocket Queries and Notifications) but to be honest, at least half of our FTFs were just luck. One or the other of us happened to be browsing the area with the Geocache plugin for Google Earth--which you can now also do with Google Maps from the geocaching website, and which I think is just as cool as can be--and noticed a cache where none used to be. So don't think you have to have a Premium subscription to be FTF. It makes it easier, but it's still doable without.

The other two have it right. Navigating to a point by way of a "straight-line"--that is, the unit will point directly to the target, as opposed to auto-routing by way of roads--is all you really need to start hunting caches, and that is pretty straight forward. The quick-start guide will explain that. Once you start using the unit and fiddling with the features and nick-nacks and doo-dads, you'll start getting more sophisticated with your GPS use. I would recommend that you eventually read a tutorial on how the Global Positioning System actually works, like this one here. It will help you to understand some of the anomalies and quirks you'll experience along the way. Other than that, just get out there and have fun. You may also want to come up with a a system of taking turns with the GPS. I can foresee problems with multiple kids and one GPS.

I would log your find, first and foremost. If you've already done that, you can edit your log to reflect the maintenance, or you can log a separate note if you really want to drive your point home. Don't log "Maintenance." Your log of "Maintenance" signifies that a cache needs maintenance. Only the owner can create a log of "Maintenance Performed."

It sounds somewhat similar to our Trivial Pursuit caches. We hide one micro with a multiple-choice trivia question, and each answer corresponds to a set of coordinates. The wrong answers lead to fixed placeholders of some sort -- usually fire hydrants -- and the correct answer leads to the cache container. People seem to like them. Trivial Pursuit: Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying Trivial Pursuit: Cache-22 Trivial Pursuit: While My GPSr Gently Weeps Personally, I think puzzle caches are such a red flag for most people because they grow weary of massive, impossibly difficult cyphers they have to the decrypt. Some people dig sifting through hundreds of characters trying to find a pattern, but I'm certainly not one of them. There's no accounting for taste, I suppose.

Not really sure how Google maps impairs your ability to find highway rest stops. Seems to me it would be the opposite. But maybe I'm missing something. You can also use Google Earth with the Geocaching KML for a more free-form geographical browsing, which may be better for you.

You can add pictures to your log for that TB. Look for it in your "My Account," click on it, and look for "Upload photos" in the upper right. Groundspeak picks the ones they like for the front page.

"Here today, gone tomorrow" sounds more like what will happen to your stuff if you go bury it in the woods. Making things "secure" by burying them in the woods only really works if you're in a movie. But the next time a rogue CIA agent is chasing you trying to recover some important documents while your love interest is being held hostage by the KGB, go ahead and give the bury-stuff-in-the-woods thing a try. While you're entertaining this delusion that your safe deposit box will disappear into thin air if the bank collapses, you may also want to look into who the third shooter on the grassy knoll was, where Hitter's brain is being stored, and why the alien bodies the government has recovered are being kept secret. And I wouldn't try to hide valuables with Haliburton either, since it isn't a bank.

It rather depends on what you're hiding. In any case, I don't think it would be a great idea to go into the middle of someone else's woods or in the middle of U.S. Government woods and start digging to bury things. That sounds like a good way to get arrested for trespassing or vandalism, get shot, have your stuff get lost, or some combination of the above. If you own some wooded land and you think your stuff would be safer under ground subjected to rain, heat, freezing, critters, dry rot, etc. than if would he in a nice, clean, secure safe deposit box or storage locker, then go crazy-go-nuts. Be honest, though: who did you kill? And what's a "mellon bank"?

Be careful when you manually enter coordinates, though. The first time we went caching we had manually entered the coordinates incorrectly. It seems we only corrected the longitude from our initial position, so when we went out looking for the cache nearest the house, we managed to navigate right past the cache, over a creek, past a high school, over railroad tracks, and back to the street two blocks west of the house. Except the car was a mile-and-a-half away where we parked to set out for the cache. Needless to say, we were quite embarrassed.

Be careful of the distinction between a separate container that you must find in order to find the final cache and one that you could find to help find the final. The former should be listed as a multi-cache, and the latter should be listed as a traditional cache.

The dates in green are user-specific. They are the dates on which you found those caches.

Rate the terrain for the trail that will actually get you to the cache. You should bump the difficulty on account of the misleading trail system. As for you being a jerk, I would say a qualified "no." If were talking about two relatively short, well-established and marked trails, then you certainly aren't a jerk. But I personally would be a little miffed if you sent me on a six-mile hike across treacherous terrain only to find that the cache is actually 250 feet up a nature trail on the other side, and not even accessible from the six-mile trail.. If it's a difficult or long hike, I personally would mark a trailhead as a reference point unless you are just really keen on the puzzle aspect of the misleading trail thing. Even then I'd put some sort of really vague, cryptic hint to that effect. "Choose your path carefully" or"... I took the road less traveled/and that has made all of the difference." -Robert Frost.

I says just go for it. You might use Google Earth to figure how to get to the area if you aren't familiar with it, look for landmarks, etc. You'll want to make sure the GPS is warmed up. Give it 15 minutes or so if you haven't used it in a while, or if your location has changed significantly since the last time it was turned on. Check your EPE (Estimated Position Error) or accuracy and make sure you're below 30 feet or so, depending on your model. Clouds shouldn't play a huge factor, but buildings or rock formations may cause multipath errors which will cause funky readings. Skip on the metal detector for finding caches, because caches aren't allowed to be buried. Experience will teach you where the usual geocache hiding spots are. You just have to noodle it out. And make sure to read the words in the cache descriptions, titles, and hints carefully, because a lot of people will use specific words for specific reasons, and you'll find additional hints. If you come across a particularly difficult cache and hit a DNF, you may want to read the past logs and look at the photo gallery for the cache to hunt for additional clues. But basically you just have to get out there and do it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And remember to have fun!

It seems to me that most of the caches that are established to be night caches have the word "night" in the title, so you may be able to find at least some of them by searching "night." I personally don't understand the appeal of night caching, so I've never tried. My mom always used to say "nothing good happens after midnight."