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Looking For A Good Hike


gmattie

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Is there an easy way to distinguish the tyoe of cache being listed on the site. I am just beginning with geocaching, and I wanted an excuse to take my family on several day-hike on the weekends now that fall weather is coming. Is there a way to sort this within the listings?

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The caches have a rating for difficulty as well as for terrain. A long hike would probably have a terrain rating of '3' or '4'. A terrain rating of '5' means you need special equipment such as scuba gear, or climbing ropes, or a boat, or a ladder.

 

If you become a Premium Member, you can run Pocket Queries and base your search on caches with specific ratings.

 

GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) is a very, very useful program that can be used to sort your database/databases by difficulty and terrain.

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There's other *free* software programs which, working with GPX files, will also sort or label caches according to difficulty and terrain. I use Watcher and Spinner.

 

There's also a "cache attribute" for "Significant Hike." When you open a cache page, look for the hiker icon at the top right where the attributes are displayed. And, in the future, attributes will be searchable and/or you can order a pocket query for caches that have a particular attribute.

 

The low-tech, non-premium member solution is to look at the map. If it's an urban map with lots of geocaches in the area, you're not likely to have a serious hike. If the map is green and has no roads on it, you may have found yourself a winning hike.

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Go to this webpage and select Austin, Tx.

Under the column, D/T, are numbers in paranthesis. The first # is the dificulty level - the higher the number the more dificulty to find. The second # is the terrain rating -the higher the number, the more challenging of a hike. You will need to go into the webpage to find out more particulars.

 

Good luck.

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If you are curious about specific caches and if they are short or long, I'd email the owner. I have done that on a couple occasions asking whether it was suitible for kids, or whether it was super long. They didn't seem to have any problems answering my curosity, and I really appreciated it especially since I would have been driving quite a ways to their cache and wanted to be prepared.

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Terrain is a good indicator, but not a perfect one. I've seen some people rate caches 4 stars that have no business being rated 4 stars.

 

Another way to find out is to check the maps on the cache page. One look at the topo map could tell you if a long hike is involved.

 

Finally, if you don't find one cache that is a long hike, you might be able to make a long hike by stringing together a few caches in an area.

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Thanks everyone - this really helps. Looks like I want to be a premium member. Once I get into it a little more maybe I'll look into getting the softwa5re.

 

Thanks again!

Try Google Earth for free!

Just plug in the coords of a likely looking cache and you will see exactly where it is. You can see if it's in the woods and if there are trails to it. You can see how far it is from anything. That's just the beginning, but that's plenty to start with!

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