Wet Pancake Touring Club

Yeah, I saw that in the release notes. I think it is a great idea. Skye.

All this talk about 'quality' proves one thing. Quality is in the eyes of the beholder. To me, getting back to the OP, and their idea that an overhaul is required, I disagree that an overhaul is required. I think we already have most of the tools in place with geocaching.com, we now need to finish what is needed to make use of them. For me, any cache that is part of a geotour is one I want to find. When travelling, I look for earthcaches, virtuals and webcams. Anything that helps fill out my Jasmer and D/T challenges is something I am interested in. I am not interested in Park n' Grabs. I don't have scuba equipment, so those that require it are out. In winter, I want to avoid caches that can't be found under lots of snow. Late at night, I want to make sure the cache is available 24/7. If I have to pay a fee, I'd like to know up front. All of these things would help winnow out caches I'm not really interested in. All of these searches are possible using attributes. However, attributes currently suffer because of inconsistent application, and the fact that they weren't added until later, so a lot of the early caches don't have them. How can we overcome this? First, we have to get the reviewers to require attributes. They really can't challenge what the CO says, but a cache is either available 24/7 or it is not. It is available during winter, or it is not. There are a handful of attributes that should always be set. Make the CO set those. Parking available, restrooms available, those are examples of attributes that the reviewer can't mandate. Maybe we change the cache submission process so that the CO has to go through a series of questions and can't skip them. Anyhow, encourage the CO to make the attributes accurate. The second thing is we need a mechanism to allow attributes to be added (or changed), on existing caches. This is a lot harder, what with CO's that won't take the time, or CO's that are not longer around. We may need a process that allows the users a method to suggest attributes. One way could be to allow attributes to be submitted with logs. If enough users set the same attribute, the system will update the attributes on the cache. Or maybe we duplicate the attributes. CO submitted attributes, and user attributes (with a count of the number of users that set the attribute). Anyhow, my $0.02 worth (and I probably am overcharging). Thanks, Skye.

In today instant gratification world, there are going to be people that don't take the time to read all of the cache page. Hey, look, its in the shape of a star. Let's try this. Got the coordinates, lets go, don't bother reading about it, its just boring history stuff. My suggestion is aimed at trying to get the attention of those few. Looking at your profile, I see you have found over 29,000 caches. So, I think its safe to say you have a little more experience in these things than most. :-) Thanks, Skye.

I think one of the problems with this particular kind of geoart is that you have to use mystery caches to accomplish it. Mystery caches may, or may not, be at the listed coordinates. In my area, for mystery caches that are not at the posted coordinates, most CO's will emphasize, right at the beginning of the description, that the cache is not located at the posted coordinates. Looking at the cache description, it is not obvious in this case. My point... For new cachers, they may not realize that that they have to solve something, and/or they don't know how to enter new coordinates into their GPSr. They just go traipsing off over the fields, damaging crops, or upsetting cattle, looking in the wrong place. A couple of instances like this, and I can see why the locals would get angry. I have no statistics or research on whether or not this is happening, its just a hunch. I know of one time where I did just that. Another time, I thought I had corrected the coordinates, but I didn't. (I've since changed my procedures because, frankly, I hate when I do that.) Another thought, something that Groundspeak should be able to add fairly easily, is a notice at the top of all Mystery Caches, that the cache might not be at the posted coordinates, and you should carefully read the description. Thanks, Skye.

For me, I do carry around a portion of my collection everywhere I go. I purchased micro geo-coins for each type of cache I have found. I also have a FTF and 1000 cache achievement coin. All of these are affixed to my hat, and the tracking numbers are not visible. If anyone notices them and asks, I have a business card size list of the tracking numbers. Nothing automated, just typed them in and printed them out. Skye.

57. At events, I'm in the 'older' category. Lots of families with teen and pre-teen (11-15) in my area. Being near two college towns (8 miles apart) will probably skew the average age a little lower. I do agree with others that basing the average age of geocachers based on events will be misleading. At one biking event with 15 or so, I was middle of the pack. At a pizza/birthday party/get well event, I was the third oldest, out of 30 or so. In addition to myself, one of my sons (Bowling4Cache @ 30) geocaches with his family. My daughter (StormKing @ 27) is an occasional geocacher. And, I have several grand-kids that geocache with grampa, and/or their families. Skye.

Quality is, and always will be, subjective. My caching has changed over the years, film pots at the base of a sign are not terribly thrilling anymore. On the other hand, there is one local cacher I know that has a special needs child. He never tires of finding these kinds of caches. In my opinion, one thing that would help is a more consistent application of attributes. There are way too many caches getting published with no attributes selected. Ask the reviewers to challenge the cache owner to add attributes for any new caches. No attributes, it is not published. For me, ignoring caches with the Park & Grab attribute would make my searching for 'quality' caches a whole lot easier. With the increased number of geocaches in the world, we need better tools to help us find our definition of 'quality'. However, without a more consistent application of attributes, that basically means looking at each cache by hand. Thanks, Skye.

Thanks for the update. On another note, one of the problems is that you can only pick a single location for the trail/tour. Some of these can get cover a lot of territory. I was thinking about adding a radius or area column, but I'm not sure that that would help much. And I doubt that Google Fusion would be able draw circles, or any other shapes. That would also get to be a maintenance nightmare. Anyhow, the basic idea is to give people an idea of just how how much travel is involved, and how long they may expect it to take to get all of the caches. So, I would like to see the following added to several of the trails/tours in the Notes column. For the BLM Idaho Land Adventure trail, add 'Caches located throughout the state. Will take more than a day to complete all caches.' The Washington State Parks should have a similar note; 'Caches located throughout the state. Will take a week or more to complete all caches.' The Lamprey trail is 'Between Chehalis and Aberdeen, WA. Single day.' Bigfoot is North Bonneville, WA area, single day. HQ, local to Fremont, WA, couple of hours walking. Lane County. Each tour follows a route. Will take up to a week to complete all four tours. Is there anyway to open up the notes column for editing, rather than asking you to make all of these changes? Thanks, Skye.

I agree. The spreadsheet does have the creation date listed, however it would be nice if it was also in the pop-up on the map. Thanks, Skye.

You should search for 'Top Five Android Geocaching Apps'. I found it on notaboutthenumbers.com, at this link. The article is from 2012, but I think the apps still exist. I use a GPSr, and not a smartphone. My two main units will show me the direction and distance to the nearest cache, when setup with the Geocaching Profile on the units. Skye.

You may want to do a little searching on-line. Garmin offers a repair service, and there are places where you can purchase replacement parts. Skye.

To answer your question, not me. I could care less what my current 'streak' is. However, I did decide to complete the 365/6 grid, as a New Years resolution. As the grid was quite empty when I made that decision, I had to do lots of 'one cache a day' trips, because caches around my area can be a little sparse. And I did, one cache a day, because my conscience wouldn't let me cheat. Coming up this August, I'm going to start that up again, because that is how far I made it before I had to break my resolution. I also just completed a 2,500 work/geocaching trip. If it was just for work, I would have driven under 1,200 miles. The remaining 1,300 miles was geocaching. And I only went after about 30 caches. 1,300 miles for 30 geocaches. That's roughly one geocache per 45 miles. They were caches that I wanted to get for a variety of reasons. Jasmer, GeoTour, Favorite, Oldie, D/T, etc. So, am I environmentally friendly? Not when it comes to Geocaching, unless, of course, it is a CITO event. And, removing the 'Current Streak' from the statistics isn't going to change that for me. :-) Skye.

I haven't run into the problem yet... It seems that some people want a way to prevent phantom logging. I will assume that there are also a lot of TO's that don't care who logs their trackables. What we need is a way that the TO can exercise some control, but not cause extra work for TO's that don't care. Some kind of authorization scheme seems like a lot of work. What if the TO could enter (and update) a 'logging allowed radius' on a trackable? Initially, the default would be world-wide. Logging of a trackable would not be allowed if the trackable is farther than the radius away from its current location. Just a flat denied, no pending approval state, or anything like that. For trackables released into the wild, I would leave the radius as world-wide. For trackables in my collection (such as the car decal mentioned by the OP), I could set them to a 1000 miles (and because they are in my collection, they would use my home location as their current location). Is this perfect? No, it is not. I'm going for the 80/20 rule, and trying to solve 80% of the problem, and to minimize the impact caused by the other 20%. Here are a couple of scenarios of the impact. If I travel to an event that is close to the radius, there is a chance that legitimate people would be denied. Or, a foreign visitor to a local event would have a problem. And of course, there is the case of the travel bug decal and I travel outside of the radius. At the risk of making the solution more complex to implement, we could expand the definition of 'current location' to be my home location, and the location of the last event that I attended. This would catch a few of these issues. One other thing to consider is the phrasing of the 'not allowed to log this trackable' message. It should contain someway for the logger to contact the TO so they can make arrangements to log the trackable (by temporarily changing the radius). What I am suggesting should be (moderately) simple to implement, not affect TO's that don't care, not create much, if any, extra work for 'legitimate' tracakble logs, and not create a lot of work for the TO's that do care. Skye.

I like the spreadsheet and map of the GeoTours and GeoTrails. I would suggest a couple of changes to the map. 1. Make the placemarks a similar size. I like the size of the GeoTrails circles, the GeoTour placemarks are just huge in comparison. 2. Make them different colors. However... 3. Keep them different shapes. That way color blind people can still differentiate between the symbols. 4. If possible, add a legend. Thanks, Skye.

It is working correctly for me. I only tried a handful, so I can't confirm they all work. I did a quick look on the list, the URL looks correct. Skye.

I second the motion. For large GeoTours, you could also consider different awards for different levels. The Lane County GeoTours (36 caches each), require 24 for the coin, and for all 36, they entered you into a drawing for a trip (to Lane County, of course!). The Washington State Park GeoTour has over 100 caches. There is a challenge cache available to those that find 50+. Also, they have a silver coin for completing 50, and a gold coin for getting 100. Skye.

Look into Pocket Queries. You can create a pocket query (lots of selection options). Once the pocket query runs (usually on a few minutes), you can download the resulting GPX file, and copy it to /Garmin/GPX directory on your GPSr. Skye.

I also have a Montana. I believe that it will hold 4000 caches. There are some regions in California where the cache count can easily exceed this limit. So, you may need to be selective in the caches you load. I would create a Pocket Query (PQ) of caches along a route to locate caches that are along highways (pretty much every rest area has at least one), and combine them with PQ's around the areas where you will be doing more exploring. If the number of caches you get in this manner gets close to 4000, consider trying GSAK (Free, with a nag screen). I find GSAK makes it easy to sort out caches that don't interest you (like a lamp post cache in a Walmart), and focus on other caches (like the ones in a redwood forest near Crescent City). Skye.

When long times and distances are involved, I research caches that I specifically want to find, or may be 'special'. I am working on several GeoTours, a Jasmer challenge, a D/T matrix challenge, and a favorites challenge. So, these are the caches that I plan around. I do use third party software to organize everything, by adding tags to the cache name. These tags are unique, and easy to filter on the GPSr. I load ALL (planned and unplanned) of the caches in the area onto the GPSr. So, I can easily focus on the caches I really want to find by filtering, yet also look for opportunity caches by removing the filter. My tags are: Dhv - D/T matrix Jhv - Jasmer Fhv - Favorites challenge Thv - GeoTour I can filter on the specific tag, or on 'hv' to get all tagged caches. Skye.

Yes, it will be extra work. However, there is kind of a sub-category of challenge caches where people are taking the time and energy to do just that. Check out the List of GeoTours and geotrails with rewards in the GeoTours & Reward Geotrails forum. Some of the these are 'Official GeoTours', while others are just a local organization (or cacher) that is challenging people to log a certain set of caches for a reward of some kind. For the most part, the only challenge caches I like are these physical reward type caches. In my area, quite a number of challenge caches are simply film pots, with an ALR. So far, all of the GeoTours I have done have taken me to interesting places. The caches are well maintained. Of course, GeoTours have a vested interest in keeping them well maintained, most are run by tourism groups. I have not done a reward geotrail yet, but I would assume that they would have similar goals, and put out interesting caches, and maintaining them. Skye.

I don't believe that there is a way to do it the way you described. It appears that with a Garmin, it will load all of the GPX files when you turn it one. I do the same thing. I have a list of what I call 'high value' caches. These are the caches I really want to find. What I did is modify the name of the geocache for these 'high value' caches. I added a couple of really unique characters to the beginning of the cache name. Then, I could filter based on those characters. In my case, I use Fhv for favorites, Jhv for Jasmer challenge, Dhv for D/T matrix, Thv for GeoTours, etc. Then, I can filter on 'hv' for all, or limit to specific categories. Skye.

I can confirm that it is fixed. Thanks for the quick response on this. Skye.

I downloaded the Hatfield/McCoy House GeoTour from the GeoTour web page. This GPX file is version 1.0, and therefore does not have any attribute data. So, I load the GPX file into GSAK, and do a 'refresh cache data' to get the attributes. The refresh is done with the API. This seems to work, I can see attributes on the caches. However, for some reason, it is not picking up the GeoTour (id=67) attribute on all of the caches. One specific cache where it fails is GC5HY91. One cache in the same GeoTour where GSAK did get the attribute is GCJTP5. I posted this on the GSAK forum, and clyde confirmed the problem, and indicated that the attribute was not coming over via the API. Clyde was going to contact Groundspeak, and suggested that I also post our findings on this forum. As a sanity check, I also downloaded a version 1.0.1 GPX file for cache GC5HY91 directly from the cache page. The GPX file contains the GeoTour attribute, and when I load that GPX file into GSAK, the attribute is loaded properly. Thanks, Skye.

I followed the link for your "Home Page". This takes me to my Profile, when you click it, it will take you to your Profile. I will assume that this is what you mean by your "Home Page". At the top of your "Home Page", there are a number of links for trackables. For the trackables in your possession, there are two links that matter. The 'Trackables Inventory' and 'Trackables Collection'. The Trackables Inventory will show you trackables that you have in your possession that you want to move to caches. The Trackables Collection is a list of the trackables that you want to keep (such as achievement trackables, and trackables on your car, etc.), and not move to a cache. For me, my achievement caches are in my 'Trackables Collection'. This gets them out of the list of trackables I can drop when logging a cache. To move a trackable from your Trackables Inventory into your Trackables Collection, you first need to make the trackable 'collectible'. You can do this by editing the trackable on the trackable page. Once that is done, there will be a link (under the action column) on the Trackables Inventory page to move the trackable to your collection. See this trackable help page. Hope this helps, Skye.

I was able to go and find a few more caches on this tour a couple of weeks ago. Basically, I have all the caches east of Wenatchee found (except Steamboat). With a stamp based verification system, you always run the risk of the stamp going missing. What I really like about this GeoTour (this is true of the Lane County GeoTours also) is the fact that the CO's are very good at keeping the caches up and running. I had one cache where the CO wrote a note in the logs they wouldn't be able to replace the stamp for a week. They replaced it on the day they said they would, and I was able to get the stamp when I came through the area the next day. If they hadn't, I would have had to spend half a day just to get this one stamp. I also logged a DNF in one of the not yet open for the season parks. A couple of days later, the CO logged that they verified the cache was still there. This is one of the reason that I like GeoTours. Good maintained caches. THANKS TO ALL for putting together and maintaining this GeoTour. Skye.