NYPaddleCacher

You have a new visitor from New York. I've also been using a Flag Counter on my profile for years. There's a thread in the All Nations Forum here that people use to let others know when they're visiting profiles from other countries. Just post in the thread that you've got a flag counter and others that follow the thread will visit your profile when they're traveling. I've got visits from 51 distinct countries on mine.

I'm, uh, 50+ too. I saw Jethro Tull live once. It was one of the best concerts I ever attended.

One of my favorite caches had lat/long coordinates that would take you to a strip mall parking lot. There were quite a DNF logs which said that they search in the obvious spot (a light pole skirt...I know that you don't have them in the U.K.). Although the listing didn't include elevation, there were clues in the listing which suggested that it was not in the parking log, but under the parking lot. About 200' from the published coordinates was an entrance to a tunnel under the parking lot and a mostly dry creek bed. The surface of the earth was actually under the parking lot. There was also a heavily favorited cache in German that required one to get into an elevator (which also had room for a car) which took you down to a tunnel that went under a river. If one looked at an satellite map with the lat/long coordinates it would appear that the cache was in the middle of the river, instead of in the tunnel about half way through. Since elevation is not included in geocache metadata, the terrain rating can be used to give seekers a clue to where the container is hidden. For that cache in Germany, the fact that it didn't have a T5 rating indicated that it was not *in* the river and would require special equipment.

Careful with these coordinates. Without the N/S/E/W hemispheres specified, the degree value should be positive or negative to indicate the hemisphere. In this case the "42" indicates it in the northern hemisphere (-42 would be south of the equator). The 78 value (a positive number) would mean that the Eastern hemisphere is used, which is not what you want. A negative value for the longitude degree would be in the western hemisphere (e.g west of the greenwich mean line) 42 59.909 78 41.933 is the same as N 42 59.909 E 78 41.933, which is a location in Kazakhstan. 42 59.909 -78 41.933 is the same as N 42 59.909 W 78 41.933, which is a location in Manhattan, about a block away from a hotel I've stayed in a couple of times.

I disagree. Lat/Long coordinates are two dimensional. The real world has three dimensions. The seeker can land at a set of lat/long coordinates but is never going to find the cache unless they're at the right elevation as well. GZ is where the cache is located, because that's where you need to be if you geocaching involves actually finding the cache.

I had that happen, and an even greater distance, but the cache was under a large metal bridge. I was originally search about 100' away from the bridge for a "magnetic" container (according to the hint) on some guy wires for a telephone pole. My GPS was bouncing around a little but said I was within 20' near the telephone pole. When I saw that the next nearest metal object was the bridge I walked about 100' to it and my GPS said I was within 20'.

I agree. The terrain rating is supposed to represent the effort it takes to ground zero and the difficulty rating representing the effort it would take to locate the container. Ground zero, to me, is where the container is hidden, not necessarily just the lat/long coordinates. The cache might be easily visible from the base of a tree, and thus a low difficulty rating.

There's the source of your confusion. The terrain rating is not something you earn when you find the cache. The terrain rating is a tool for the cache owner to communicate the general nature of the "Physical effort needed to arrive at coordinates" to potential seekers. While that is true, speaking from personal experience, floating down a river in a southern U.S. state on an inner tube takes a lot less physical effort and skill than launching a sea kayak in breaking surf and paddling a mile offshore to an island with a sea cave. Both get a T5 rating, but the general nature of the experience is going be significantly different.

It was an analogy. Hunger and malnutrition isn't a problem for someone that has enough money to adequately feed their family. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to help those that are hungry and malnutrition get the food they need. She we just tell them to just deal with their problem? So you don't have a problem with Challenge caches. Some do.

I'm not sure we know that the goal is. However, there are accessibility compliance laws, and non-compliance can result in lawsuits. I'm actually dealing with this right now in a somewhat similar scenario. I developed a site for a US government agency that serves as an archive and dissemination site for a huge collection of publications and datasets from several branches in that agency. Some of those publications are released periodically and, for documents prior to 1995 they're pdf files created from scanned images. Those document are not compliant with the accessibility laws. The site itself is compliant, but some of the content is not. The university that I work for is mandated to have all sites in the university domains accessibility compliant. I have a meeting next week to discuss the issue but one of the "solutions" may be to change the domain of the web site. Removing and/or mitigating the content would take a very long time. I wonder if Groundspeak is under the same pressure. Although their website may be compliant (I don't know that it is), the content that we are providing would not be without alt tags on images.

So you actually *do* believe "if it's not a problem for me, it's not a problem that should be addressed". Suppose instead of geocaching we were talking about food, and specifically how the very poor go hungry and under nourished. Perhaps, that isn't something that you have ever experienced first hand, but would be it right for a rich person to suggest that nothing should be done about hungry and under nourished because they've always had enough money for food?

There was a trail with 20 or so caches along the Susquehanna river that all had stamps in them. A couple of them were close to the river, which frequently floods. I found one of the caches a week or so after water level had dropped back down and the contents of the cache was a black, inky mess.

I never noticed that rule. For the past several years there has been a series of caches published in central new york parks, called the CNY Park Geocache Challenge. There are a few park offices where one acquires a passport book. For 2020, each of the 70 caches in the series has a stamp in it. After finding a cache, one stamps their passport and after acquiring 45 stamps, it can be turned in for a nice geocoin. As far as I know, all of the caches were published as traditionals.

I believe that one is in Sweden. There are/were a few Vinny&Sue caches that have some pretty dire warnings for those that might choose to find them. There are at least a couple of regulars here that geocache naked. The only thing that I've got was an aborted attempt to find a cache on a bridge over the Mara river in Kenya. I was stopped from attempting it by an armed guard that said that I couldn't go out onto the bridge without an armed escort. The Mara river is known for the annual wildebeast migration as shown below. What you don't see is that the river is full of very large crocodile (thus, why I was prevented from looking for the cache on the bridge) that feast on the wildebeast trying to cross the river.

Okay. But how do you get the padlock code? Was that in the puzzle?

Is that worse than, "it doesn't cause trouble for some, therefore it doesn't matter if it causes trouble for anyone else"?

Or simply that the cache isn't in a tree. I've seen some seriously damaged trees while searching for a cache that was hidden on the ground.

I've also done an Intercache (listed as a puzzle) cache that had about 7 virtual stages and a final physical cache that resulted in one found it log. Each of the virtual stages was a question that had to be answered in the Intercache web app. An Intercache could be essentially identical to an Adventure labs cache (plus a bonus), but because it a AL app instead of a web application, one can get 5 found it logs instead of one.

It's an interesting idea for a multi-cache. Navigate to s specific of coordinates, then require a projection to a specific location inside a building. It doesn't *sound* like something that HQ would allow it.

Ratings should be based on the average geocacher, and consider height, age, physical strength, etc. but I don't think that because females are shorter than males on average that ratings should be based upon female averages.

How did you obtain the coordinates? Typically a GPS does not work inside a building? The issue that you're running into is that while the cache may have a set of coordinates in a room, one can not use a GPS to navigate to those coordinates, and the use of a GPS enabled device is a basic requirement for playing this game. From your description, it sounds like once one know which library it's in, the cache can be found using the hint. That doesn't meet the GPS usage requirement. The other issue which seems to be causing confusion is the existence of another cache similar to what you are trying to do. As someone else said, sometimes a cache is published when it should not be. There is a statement in the guidelines which basically means that an existing cache can not be used to justify the publishing of another. By mentioning is other cache, you may put that cache in jeopardy of being archived if it was mistakingly published and currently violates placement guidelines.

One of the library caches that I found (and I would do one if I placed on in the library where I worked) used an outside location, which require the use of a GPS to find, with a container which had a library "call number". Then, using that call number, one went into the library to "the stacks" and the location of that call number indicated, where a cache container was found. In the case of the one I did, it was a hollowed out book with a fake cover. What I liked about it was that even though library call numbers aren't the same as geographical coordinates, they're a different form of the language of location.

And writing out "thank you for the cache" instead of TFTC adds four words to your word log count.

Hey Alexa, show me the coordinates...

Hamburg, Germany isn't especially exotic either but it's not often that you get to find a cache *under* a river. The fall in New England has been especially spectacular this year.