Geo Quest

quote:Originally posted by Acceptable Risk:Twice now someone's mentioned "OMG, you came down *that* in sneakers? So I'm convinced that I need to get some shoes... Not boots, shoes... Do they really make a difference? You shouldn't get new shoes based on the opinion of a couple of astounded people. If you "came down that" in sneakers then obviously sneakers are fine. Stick with what works for you. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I'm worried enough about liability that I pulled all of the caches I placed. What did it for me was a thread in these forums regarding just how responsible cache placers were for ensuring the safety of cache seekers. Too many people think that if they get lost/injured/killed while seeking a cache that was placed in a dangerous or challenging location that the hider is somehow to blame. Although this way of thinking is wrong it is all too common. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I found mine while surfing the web. Can't remember the exact site but it accurately represents my interests. I might customize it later. Or maybe not. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

What would keep someone from simply taking the whole container? If you're planning on using the same tree (as it sounds) it wouldn't be long before the locals knew there was somthing up there. I know when I was a kid a lock only meant somthing cool was inside. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

As an avionic comm/nav technician. 1st SOS, 353rd SOMS 1989-1991 Clark AB, Republic of the Philippines. Worked MH-53J Pave-Low, MC-130E Combat Talon special ops aircraft. 89th AGS 1991-1994 Andrews AFB, Maryland. Worked C-137, C-9, C-20 special air missions aircraft. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I know there are idiots in every sport but I just want to let you guys know that not all hunters are complete boneheads. I would never pull the trigger on a movement or a noise. Always properly identify your target and know what's beyond it. That's basic hunting safety and common sense. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I don't want to give Oregone a big head or anything but his logs are pretty funny. It's not so much that his writing is any better than anyone else's it's just that he takes the time and energy to craft an entertaining log. Here's one I found pretty funny: "February 9 by oregone (505 found) How frustrating it is to be within 200 feet of the cache and have a busy freeway in your path. Luckily for me, i've lived in three different places in Salem so i remembered the park this cache is located in after looking across Hwy 22 for about thirty seconds. I don't remember being able to park so close to that part of the park, so i ended up parking way on the other side of the railroad tracks next to the Marion County Correctional Facility chain-gang. Too bad i'm not a sexy voluptous blonde girl, otherwise I would have had an impromptu car-washing. after i found the cache and made the trade i had a few hours to kill, so i decided to go visit one of the many colleges i've gone to, Chemeketa Community. Now that was depressing. A whole parking lot full of cars and nobody in the halls but maintenance personell and remodelling contractors. Where is Elaine Konovolov? Shannon Stanley? Where was Jocelyn, that cute girl from Saipan? And that hot teachers aide from the statistics class that I got kicked out of? I missed these girls sorely as I wandered aimlessly through Building 3 like a ghost haunting an old haunt. There was this one girl in my Chemistry class that was 27-years-old. She was an old lady to me back then." "...like a ghost haunting an old haunt." Oh, man that's funny. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I don't want to give Oregone a big head or anything but his logs are pretty funny. It's not so much that his writing is any better than anyone else's it's just that he takes the time and energy to craft an entertaining log. Here's one I found pretty funny: "February 9 by oregone (505 found) How frustrating it is to be within 200 feet of the cache and have a busy freeway in your path. Luckily for me, i've lived in three different places in Salem so i remembered the park this cache is located in after looking across Hwy 22 for about thirty seconds. I don't remember being able to park so close to that part of the park, so i ended up parking way on the other side of the railroad tracks next to the Marion County Correctional Facility chain-gang. Too bad i'm not a sexy voluptous blonde girl, otherwise I would have had an impromptu car-washing. after i found the cache and made the trade i had a few hours to kill, so i decided to go visit one of the many colleges i've gone to, Chemeketa Community. Now that was depressing. A whole parking lot full of cars and nobody in the halls but maintenance personell and remodelling contractors. Where is Elaine Konovolov? Shannon Stanley? Where was Jocelyn, that cute girl from Saipan? And that hot teachers aide from the statistics class that I got kicked out of? I missed these girls sorely as I wandered aimlessly through Building 3 like a ghost haunting an old haunt. There was this one girl in my Chemistry class that was 27-years-old. She was an old lady to me back then." "...like a ghost haunting an old haunt." Oh, man that's funny. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

Byron's Famous Stump Pin. I wear it proudly on my backpack. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I love this topic......each and every time it comes up. Problem: Caches getting blown up. Solution: It's already been stated. Hide them better. If there is no way possible for an outsider to ever catch a glimpse of the cache then the police will never be called. You could glue a fuse to the outside and hide a ticking alarm clock inside your genuine surplus MK-84 bomb casing geocache and be perfectly safe. Ahh, but the solution has a problem of it's own. Now we have to put some real thought into our cache locations. Behind a bush at the local park will no longer do. We will have to live with quality over quantity. Can we do it? You don't want to hear my answer. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

This is somthing I've given serious thought to. Let's review shall we: You can sue a restaurant if you spill hot coffee on yourself, you can sue the manufacturer of the cigarettes you smoked if you get sick, you can sue the manufacturer of the gun that killed your relative, the manufacturer of the car you wrecked, the manufacturer of the ladder you fell off, and the homeowner whose front porch you tripped on. I could go on with countless examples of liability laws abused to the extreme. All the lawyers have to do is find out who has the deepest pockets. I do not want to have placed the cache that will be used as the first test case. Regrettably, I pulled all three (good ones too!) of my caches a long time ago due to this very reason. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

LOG: Found it! Took cool Fisher Space Pen, left official Russian space program #2 pencil. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

LOG: Found it! Took cool Fisher Space Pen, left official Russian space program #2 pencil. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I don't see how you can draw a correlation bewtween the number of finds a person has to the validity of their opinions regarding issues related to geocaching. Given that find numbers can be easily faked through subversive means they are essentially a moot indicator of geocaching experience. Stupid opinions abound but so do enlightened ones. Try listening once in a while, no matter the source, you just might learn somthing. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

The hint I am going to talk about is from one of the best cache hunts I've ever been on and I don't mean to insult the cache hider but this hint really led me astray. Here it is: "... [the following hint is for when you get real close] You will have to climb up high to find this cache!!" Once I got close I was near an awesome waterfall in a huge amphitheatre-like canyon. Once there I decided that the only thing he could be talking about "climbing up high" on was the waterfall itself. I found a way to get to the top of the falls and searched and searched in a highly dangerous area in vain. It turns out he was not talking about climbing the falls but the wall of the canyon. Or how about these two : 1. "Under the moss covered branch in the first clump. " 2. "The cache is hidden behind a moss covered log. " I live in western Oregon. Everything is covered in moss. Trees, logs, rocks, houses, even slow moving cars will eventually be covered in the stuff. I know it's behind, under, or beside a moss-covered somthing. That's a given. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

I see a lot of the same stuff make the rounds in the local caches. It seems like people take something from the cache and put somthing in from the last cache they found. This kind of item swapping stagnates the cache goodies and makes people wonder why they should trade items at all. I bring items to trade but I will only trade if I find somthing that holds interest. By that I mean somthing I couldn't buy in a store. Sometimes trading just seems stupid. Lets say you start your caching day with a brand new Duncan yo-yo and a 2 pack of AA lithiums as your trade items. In cache number one you find : 2 free AOL cd's Someone's expired fishing license A hotel keycard An out of state subway card A torn and dirty map of Montreal A Bernard Gilkey baseball card $738 in Monopoly money An expired coupon for free admission to a local zoo Expired Dairy Queen coupons Hmmm. What to trade, what to trade? It all seems so tempting. In your moral confusion you TNLN and continue on. Opening cache number two reveals: A balloon A superball with a chunk of super missing. A Cracker Jack box fake tatoo A used shoestring A Chuck E. Cheese pencil with broken eraser One pink furry slipper (you think I'm making this up?) Yet another quandry. Do you decide to bless this cache with a true prize all the while knowing that the next person will snatch it up only to replace it with a clothespin? Hmmm. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

People who complain about environmental damage caused by off trail geocaching. The litter and garbage that I spotted on my last couple of cache hunts were ten times worse than any footprints or squished weeds left by me. I saw: three grocery carts in a pond, a pile of bras!?, a tire, a sock, as well as the "normal" stuff (cups, cans, and bags) Now I can "trash out" some stuff but I'm not gonna haul a muddy grocery cart out of a stagnant pond. And this brings me to my second gripe. People who hide caches in these locations! One of the caches I found was (no kidding) hid in a pile of rubble. Honest to goodness rubble. We're talking broken bricks, busted concrete chunks and dirt clods. There was broken glass in the area and lots of debris. What's the big idea? Was that place picked on purpose? There was absolutely nothing aesthetically pleasing about the location. Just a box hidden in a pile of crap surrounded by filth and decay. Now for my final gripe. Difficulty ratings that don't match the actual difficulty. How can a cache that is effectively buried be called a "1" in the difficulty? I used Clayjar's rating tool to rate the cache in question and it rated it a "3". I know it's just a matter of opinion but I think the majority of geocachers would agree that a "1" should be partially visible to an observant cacher when at "ground zero". WHEW! End rant. Thanks for listenin' "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

People who complain about environmental damage caused by off trail geocaching. The litter and garbage that I spotted on my last couple of cache hunts were ten times worse than any footprints or squished weeds left by me. I saw: three grocery carts in a pond, a pile of bras!?, a tire, a sock, as well as the "normal" stuff (cups, cans, and bags) Now I can "trash out" some stuff but I'm not gonna haul a muddy grocery cart out of a stagnant pond. And this brings me to my second gripe. People who hide caches in these locations! One of the caches I found was (no kidding) hid in a pile of rubble. Honest to goodness rubble. We're talking broken bricks, busted concrete chunks and dirt clods. There was broken glass in the area and lots of debris. What's the big idea? Was that place picked on purpose? There was absolutely nothing aesthetically pleasing about the location. Just a box hidden in a pile of crap surrounded by filth and decay. Now for my final gripe. Difficulty ratings that don't match the actual difficulty. How can a cache that is effectively buried be called a "1" in the difficulty? I used Clayjar's rating tool to rate the cache in question and it rated it a "3". I know it's just a matter of opinion but I think the majority of geocachers would agree that a "1" should be partially visible to an observant cacher when at "ground zero". WHEW! End rant. Thanks for listenin' "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

Camel-bak does make some real good packs but they have one huge drawback - the bladder itself. It's made of pvc and it imparts a nasty rubber taste to the water. They're also hard to dry out unless you have some sort of insert to hold it open while it dries. For that reason I prefer packs that are "hydration compatible" because they allow you to purchase your own bladder and install it. And for that I recommend the Platypus line of bags and bladders. They correct all of the Camelbak bladder's shortcomings. And they're cheaper to boot! By the way, packs are cool and I like discussing them but c'mon! How often do you really need a full-blown day pack to cruise the local park and nab a cache? I think for most people and most caches a photographer-type vest would be a better way to go. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently." [This message was edited by Geo Quest on September 20, 2002 at 08:32 PM.]

Camel-bak does make some real good packs but they have one huge drawback - the bladder itself. It's made of pvc and it imparts a nasty rubber taste to the water. They're also hard to dry out unless you have some sort of insert to hold it open while it dries. For that reason I prefer packs that are "hydration compatible" because they allow you to purchase your own bladder and install it. And for that I recommend the Platypus line of bags and bladders. They correct all of the Camelbak bladder's shortcomings. And they're cheaper to boot! By the way, packs are cool and I like discussing them but c'mon! How often do you really need a full-blown day pack to cruise the local park and nab a cache? I think for most people and most caches a photographer-type vest would be a better way to go. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently." [This message was edited by Geo Quest on September 20, 2002 at 08:32 PM.]

Camel-bak does make some real good packs but they have one huge drawback - the bladder itself. It's made of pvc and it imparts a nasty rubber taste to the water. They're also hard to dry out unless you have some sort of insert to hold it open while it dries. For that reason I prefer packs that are "hydration compatible" because they allow you to purchase your own bladder and install it. And for that I recommend the Platypus line of bags and bladders. They correct all of the Camelbak bladder's shortcomings. And they're cheaper to boot! By the way, packs are cool and I like discussing them but c'mon! How often do you really need a full-blown day pack to cruise the local park and nab a cache? I think for most people and most caches a photographer-type vest would be a better way to go. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently." [This message was edited by Geo Quest on September 20, 2002 at 08:32 PM.]

If you upgrade to another E-trex model then you are not getting much more than you already have. Let me explain. The entire E-trex line uses the same antenna and receiver. Only the software, screen resolution, clik-stik etc.. are different. If you are experiencing update and pointer problems with your yellow E-trex then I think you'd have the same problems with another E-trex. Do you have the latest software version for your E-trex? Is it battery save mode? Check those things and see if they might be causing your problems. If you still want to upgrade I'd suggest a model with a better antenna. I actually prefer a yellow E-trex because it is very rugged, light, and cheap. Everything I need and nothing I don't. If I ever upgrade it will probably be to a Rino 120. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

My whole family loves to geocache! They don't like going on the hunts that involve long hikes or other hard terrain but they love it nonetheless. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."

Waypoints must be entered by the user. This can be done in one of two ways. 1. By entering data manually via pressing keys on the receiver or 2. By linking your receiver to a personal computer and uploading waypoints to it. I don't know if the Magellan 315 has a data cable so I will explain how to enter waypoints manually. This information comes from page 24 of the Magellan 315 users manual. It can be accessed online here. Creating a user waypoint: A waypoint is a recorded position that can be used in a route or a GOTO. You can save up to 500 waypoints in your receiver. You can create a waypoint with a receiver-generated name (WPT001, WPT002, WPTxxx) by pressing: MARK MARK. To create a waypoint with a name of your choice or if you wish to change any data field while entering a waypoint, use the following: MARK (up/down arrows to select data field) ENTER (4 directional arrows to make changes) ENTER MARK So, if you were going to go geocaching you would check the name of the waypoint you want to hunt and note the coordinates. Next, create a user waypoint and edit the coordinates and name to match the geocache you want to hunt. After a while it will become second nature. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently." [This message was edited by Geo Quest on September 04, 2002 at 10:30 PM.]

I found a cache here in Oregon called Tree Hugger. It was one of the funner caches I've found so far. I thought it was a cool idea. The cache container was bungee'd to the trunk and each finder had to move it higher. Very cool. As far as people thinking it's unsafe goes: Yes it is. So don't climb it if you're scared. "There's no need to be afraid of strange noises in the night. Anything that intends you harm will stalk you silently."