Dj Storm

What I would do: I would try to persuade the finders of the imposter cache to change their log to a note or DNF. For this, I would send them an email telling them they didn't found the actual cache (which wasn't missing), and they are invited to change their log and/or to return to find the real cache. If they comply, great; if they don't comply, I would let their log stand. To the person who left the imposter cache (if he can be identified without any doubt), I would send an email telling him that I didn't approve throw-down caches, and in the future not to do that again, at least on my caches. I would offer to mail him his container if he wants it. I will invite him to change his online log into a note and to return and find the real thing. If he doesn't comply, I would delete his find log in about a month.

There are three devices you can use to alert family and authorities: PLBs, SENDs and sat phones. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. PLB - Personal Locator Beacon - is used only to signal emergencies, and it's the best device to have in these cases. A 406MHz unit has a price around $600, and doesn't need yearly payments for use. It alerts the SAR teams directly, and location can be obtained even if only one satellite has line-of-sight. SEND - Satellite Emergency Notification Device (the standard is still being developed) - SPOTs are part of this group (the only one so far, according to my knowledge). They are the best for signaling "I'm OK" to family and friends, and can be used to send "help needed" and "emergency" alerts. With a price tag of $150 (+$150/year), they are the cheapest ones. Satellite phones - I would choose an Iridium phone because they have satellites in polar low earth orbit, and a coverage of 100% of the Earth's surface. They are the best to have when you need help, but the situation is not life-threatening: you can call whoever you want/who can offer the best or fastest help. You can also call 911 in case of an emergency, or call home telling you're OK. With a price tag starting at $1000 for the unit (plus extra for the plan), it is the most expensive of the three. Let's say you are in the middle of nowhere and have all three devices. With a SPOT, you can let know those at home where you are, and that you're OK. Let's say something happens and you need help (non-emergency), for example your car breaks down. You can use the SPOT to signal "help needed" - and a family member will have to drive to your location to see what kind of help you need, then drive back to a place with cell signal and call a tow truck. If you have a satellite phone, you can call the tow truck yourself. In case of an emergency, you will probably use all three. Let's say you fell from a cliff and broke your leg, or you were bitten by a rattlesnake and need immediate help. The PLB will probably be the fastest alerting the SAR teams. The SPOT will alert the "middle men" who will send the rescue teams, but if you don't have adequate satellite reception, it won't send out your location. With a satellite phone (if you get satellite line-of-sight for long enough to make the call) you can communicate your situation to the rescuers. If the situation you find yourself in is so bad that you are unable to request help, the SPOT might help you: your family will became worried that you are late (or made no progress), and will alert the authorities, telling them your last known position.

And many folks after entering the note for the bug drop will delete the note on the cache page. The bugs/coins will still show on the cache inventory and it will not affect the bug/coin mileage but will decrease the clutter on the cache page. It also removes a useless log from the last five as a courtesy for the paperless cachers. I don't delete such notes. Instead of logging with a short "coin drop", I submit at least a paragraph - same as if it was a find - the only difference being that it's a note not a "found it".

While the quarter is "currency" for you, in Europe it is seen as "foreign coin". Since you cannot buy foreign coins from banks (they only exchange large-ish bills), it's also kind of a rare item, and it would be fine to be found in a cache. They also fit in micros! However, it's a good idea to have a geobag of assorted items, in order not to "spam" the caches in an area with quarters. Pins, keychains or "fridge magnets" representing California/US are better than the coins. You could also visit some dollar stores and buy some nice items (that can be left in local caches, too). I raided the local stores and bought spring-propelled toy cars (the kind you pull back several inches, and they go forward a few feet), put them in zipbags and left them in caches (it became kind of a signature item) - and finders love them. Postcards are a nice item to leave, but they only fit in regular caches (and some regulars are actually small) - if you will hunt mostly urban caches it will be difficult to drop them.

While I agree that "special equipment required" caches are 5 stars, I don't agree with rating every ATV accessible cache 5*. You can walk anywhere an ATV can go (actually, you can walk in places where ATV's cannot go) - so in these cases the vehicle is not required, only recommended. Mark the terrain according to the hike for an average person. I wouldn't mark it 5* unless the hike takes more than 36 hours roundtrip on flat terrain, or more than 24 hours on a trail with significant gradient. If a cache is on an island in a lake 15-20 feet from the shore, it isn't automatically a 5* terrain - swimming in this case is a valid option for the average person. If the island is 1 mile off shore, swimming is no longer a valid option, so that's 5* for terrain; even if someone fit will swim to it, it's still 5*. If public transportation exists to the "trailhead", I will take that into account. If there's a ferry to the island, mark the cache according to the terrain encountered while walking from the port. You can hike up the mountain to a 4* cache, but if there's a cable car and from there the terrain is 1.5, I will rate the cache as 1.5, maybe 2*. If I want to place a 4* terrain cache, I will find a different peak with no cable car or road nearby - or find a deserted island for a 5* terrain cache.

Old coins (out of circulation), foreign coins, rare coins and banknotes (like the $2 bill) are great to be placed and found as swag. Some cachers place a $10+ bill as a prize for the FTF. I'm not too fond of money placed in caches, I prefer finding a $0.50 McToy instead of a $1 bill, or a $6 unactivated geocoin instead of the $10 prize.

31 inches is about half mili-minutes, so there's no imperative to recheck and fix coordinates. At worst, you will have to add/subtract .001 from the original coordinates.

I'm one of those guys who don't log my finds/dnfs/notes right away. Usually I log within a week, but once I logged online 2.5 months after finding the caches. When the caches I visit receive on average 5 visits/year, logging late shouldn't bother anyone. If I'm FTF, or I retrieve/drop a trackable, or when the next finder logs online before me, I hurry submitting my logs.

What I do in cases like this: - if the owner is missing, and the cache needs maintenance, and I consider the cache worth preserving, and I volunteer doing periodic cache maintenance, then I perform maintenance. - if the owner is missing, and the cache needs maintenance, and I consider the cache worth preserving, but I don't volunteer doing periodic cache maintenance, I write in my log that the cache needs maintenance and suggest/ask if someone would want to maintain it. - if the owner is missing, and the cache needs maintenance, and I don't consider the cache worth preserving, then I submit a "needs maintenance" log, and let the archiving process take its course. - if the owner is missing, and the cache is confirmed missing, then I submit a "needs archived" log (after trying to contact the owner). - if the owner is active and uninterested (not doing maintenance and not communicating), and the cache needs maintenance, I submit a "needs maintenance" log, and let the archiving process take its course. Even if the cache is worth preserving, if the owner doesn't care, I don't care. Maintaining his cache in this case only encourages him not to maintain his own caches. - if the owner is active and uninterested, and the cache is confirmed missing, then I submit a "needs maintenance" log, try to contact the owner several times, then submit a "needs archived" log and tell the reviewer that my attempts contacting the owner failed. - if the owner is active and interested (communicates, but real life keeps him from doing maintenance), and the cache needs maintenance, then I perform maintenance on behalf of the owner. - if the owner is active and interested, and the cache is confirmed missing, I log a note with my findings. Only if I know the owner/had found the cache previously, and agree with the owner beforehand, I will replace the cache. By "maintenance" I mean serious maintenance, like replacing a broken container or replacing a logbook. Simple maintenance, like drying out a wet container, adding some ziplocs or a pen, or putting back a container that fell out of its hiding place - these are things I do regularly.

My fastest FTF was ~40 hours after publishing - beat the next finder by about 3 hours. It was a cache 200 km from my home! My slowest FTF is 2 years, give or take a couple of months. My last FTF was 8 months after publishing.

I was in almost the same situation: went to do maintenance on a cache (2 DNF's), found the container in its hiding spot. A cacher had found it the day earlier, and mentioned in the logbook that a snake was sharing the place with the container. Looked around, saw no snake, did nothing else.

When I revisit a cache, I use the word "Revisit" (or "maintenance visit"), both on the physical log and online. Sometimes that's the first word of my log, but not always. Your log contains the words "This time" at the beginning of the fourth phrase, making it clear (for me) that from that point onward I'm reading about the second visit. Probably those cachers who replied can't grasp the concept of someone revisiting a cache, or expect to see "Found it" logs even for revisits. They saw your note and thought you were rambling, even before reading your log.

Please look at this cache: GC1PMXZ Here is a screenshot from Google Maps: The cache, according to GPSr readings, is placed where the container indicates. If you use the satellite view, the container is at the tip of the "1" green arrow, 64 meters (210 feet) off. If you use the map view, the placement is where the "2" arrow indicates, 143 meters (468 feet) off from the GPSr coordinates. This might be an extreme case, from a place where accurate imagery is not available, but it shows that it can happen.

I'm happy to see an old cache live another day (or decade). In 2007 I found and decided to adopt a cache only 45 days younger than yours (missing owner, broken container, everything else almost identical). At that time forced adoptions were possible, but dumb me, I thought I'll ask for adoption after I prove to the reviewer that I'm responsible, by doing more than one maintenance visit. By the time I returned for the second maintenance visit, forced adoptions were no longer possible. I kindly asked the local reviewer to clear the "maintenance needed" attribute for me, explaining that I'm maintaining the cache (and had two logs to prove that). The reviewer cleared the attribute, and the cache continues to live. You can find who the local reviewer is by looking at other nearby caches that were published recently. The guy who posted the "Published" log is the local reviewer (there are three of them in your area).

My take on this situation: If I want to place a cache in the exact spot where I already have a cache, I prefer to keep the old cache going. If I want to start the racers in a new cache, I find a good spot to place the new cache without archiving the old one. If I recycle the container from an archived listing, I put in a new logbook.

I side with Clan Riffster in this case. The cache has been placed in 2001, the owner went missing in 2002, the cache needs maintenance in 2010. It survived for 9 years with no maintenance, it will most likely survive another 9 once the container has been replaced. The logbook can be dried and put in a ziploc (or scanned and reprinted if it's in a really bad shape), and the history will be preserved. The location is worth visiting, and having a GC+3 cache at the end of the hike makes the hunt more exciting, and the trip more memorable! (Full disclosure: Since 2007 I'm also the unofficial maintainer of a cache placed in 2001, whose owner went missing.)

First question: do you plan to perform regular maintenance on that cache? - If the answer is 'No', then submit a "needs maintenance" and move on. You can even check back in a few months, and submit a "needs archived" if the cache wasn't fixed. - If the answer is 'Yes', then: Second question: Why do you want to maintain a cache that's not yours? - If the answer is "because it's close to home", or "is in a nice location", or simply "because it's nice to help others", then submit a "needs maintenance", followed after some time by a "needs archived" if it wasn't fixed. Once archived you could place your own cache, if you want. - If the answer is "because the cache has a history worth preserving", then try contacting the owner and arrange to adopt the cache. If the owner doesn't respond in a timely fashion (or cannot be contacted), then reevaluate your feelings towards this cache, and if you still want to maintain it, go out and perform the maintenance.

I also write in my online log the terrain/difficulty I would rate the cache for my particular approach, if the cache is misrated and I didn't do something stupid to increase the T/D. Example: I found a cache on the top of a mountain, after a 2km ascent; the elevation change was only about 350m from where I left the road, but the last 100m were on a 40 degree rocky slope. The cache was hidden in a rock face, about 4-6 meters high, full of crevices and possible hiding spots. I climbed up and down the rock face until I found the cache. It was rated 2 for terrain. I added in my log (like others before me) that the terrain is closer to 4, for the path I took. Technically it could be rated as 2 if someone was to drive a 4x4 on a forest road for 9km to the summit, then going directly for the cache (without searching up and down). Another cache was rated 5 for terrain. I found it quite easily, and noted (like others before me) that the terrain is 3 tops. It involves taking the cable car (or 4x4) to the summit, then a 3km hike on the plateau. Technically it could be rated T5 since the cache is located at the upper end of a very difficult trail used by mountaineers (not on any tourist map), where many lost their lives. The same goes for difficulty: if the cache is rated D4 or D5, and it's hidden in the cavity of a tree, chest height, then I write in the log that it's overrated. Of course, if the difference between the owner's D/T rating and my rating is 0.5 or 1 star, I say nothing.

I find worth noting the "guideline" written in caps on the cover of the peak register: "It is particularly requested that no names be registered except of those actually making the ascent." I think about adding a similar phrase in my logbooks.

I wouldn't adopt a cache that I did not found. Either I go out and find it before adopting it, or go there with the hider during the adoption process. Last year a cache went up for adoption (a cache I DNF'ed once). I was thinking about adopting it, but first I went back and DNF'ed it a second time. The cache was adopted by another cacher soon after that. Assume I had adopted the cache before searching for it, now I would have a cache I couldn't find.

Regarding the OP's question, this is what I would do: - leave the cache in place, wait for a month, see if the other cacher publishes the cache; - (optional) during this time, start working on the next cache placement; - if the other cache gets published, retrieve the cache and reuse the container/swag for another placement; - if the cache doesn't get published, after a month ask the reviewer for a follow-up. Odds are the reviewer will archive the other cache and publish this one. I see three reasons for holding a location (the case of the other cache): - the cache was ready to be published, but had some issues, and the reviewer asked for some clarification; - the cacher asked that his cache be published on a specific day in the future; - the cache is a custom one and/or a work in progress.

I think the "Published" log is important. Around here caches are published at least 1 day after they were placed. If the cache was placed for an event, and published after that, you'll see several found-it logs before the "published" log. Cache owners can change the placed date; someone could place a cache, delete the "published" log, then backdate the placement by a couple of years, in order to trick the seekers.

How: I take photos of each page in the logbook; How often: usually at every maintenance visit; What I look for: I compare and match the online logs with the physical logs; mark logs with a missing "companion"; (Note: I did this only once for one cache, but I keep the photos, and can do this step anytime) How to resolve discrepancies: on a case-by-case basis; until now did nothing.

I thought there will be a mega event at the location of the original cache placement, on the 10th anniversary, published many months in advance. So far, no event...

The first TB that I found was tag only. I attached a toy I had with me, then emailed the owner, offering to put it back in circulation with the toy I attached, or to send him the tag so he could restore the TB. I received the answer that the TB tag travels without a hitchhiker. So I removed the toy I attached, and put the tag back in circulation (I added a ziploc and a piece of paper, noting the mission of the TB and the fact that it travels tag only). If the owner is inactive, and there isn't any indication on the TB's page about its hitchhiker, probably your best option is to put it back in circulation like you found it. If you find some pictures or description of the hitchhiker, you can attach something similar. Don't attach a large toy to the bug, large TB's can fit in a limited number of caches.