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C,mon,,fess up..

team lagonda

By team lagonda
in General geocaching topics

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Confucius' Cat

+Confucius' Cat

Posted
Posted

I'll bite.

 

It happens to me a lot (using a very loose definition of 'lost')

 

In the act of looking for a cache in the woods, I often turn many circles and cross my own path many times. Then after the find, I try to find the trail resulting in finding another portion of the trail, another trail, or just realising that I had bushwhacked a hundred yards and the trail is six feet from the cache.

 

I have found that following the bread-crumb trail out is nearly impossible after a good wandering search.

 

The extent of "lost" has been not knowing for sure which direction to go on the trail.

 

The most serious consequence of my being "lost" is to look like a fool to the Wifemate who instinctively knows which way to turn... and I'M holding the GPS. :D

 

IMO, survival wise, if you are on a trail, you are not "lost." You simply stay on the trail until you come to "civilisation." You might not find you car, but you will survive.

 

Likewise following a water course downstream will always eventually lead out of the woods.

 

And if you are truly lost, any road is the right road.

 

And now I ALWAYS mark the car before I go into the woods, even if it is just a state park trail. Whilst I am not concerned about survival, not being able to find your car or having to thumb a ride back to it really sucks.

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Rattlebars

+Rattlebars

Posted
Posted

WPT0001 gets me back to civilization unless I forget to mark it when I head out from the truck!

 

Being a NightCrawler, using my long range remote start button has saved me in some instances since it turns on the headlights whilst the truck is running.

 

Those two methods failed only once, but it only took me 15 minutes to find my way out....

 

RATTLEBARS

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nonaeroterraqueous

nonaeroterraqueous

Posted
Posted

ya leprecuns,,i knows all kinda em big words like ''whilst''..i figer its from me havin a giant brain n all..lol

 

That must be it.

 

 

 

 

GPSr or no GPSr, I always like to have some idea of my boudaries, like a road, stream, mountainside that I know I'll run into eventually. Mostly it's useful in the cities, knowing major streets and highways that run for a long way, so that I'm bound to run into one or another, and the moment I do I have a pretty good idea of where I'm at. Batteries do die, and sometimes I forget to bring a spare set, so I always try to have an awareness of my location.

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geospyder

+geospyder

Posted
Posted

Back in the days that I had a Magellan I thought that I'd tweak the software a wee bit. Unfortunately I didn't notice that my tweaking messed up the data bases until I was over in Europe and had to rely on the mapping. The map drawing was OK - it was the data bases that got messed up. When I was in the Netherlands, the street names showed Italian names. That was bad enough, but at one point I forgot to waypoint the car in a village where we were doing a 21 point multi. We lost the car. That is where I discovered backtracking although trying to back track when the street names don't match the physical streets made for some interesting moments. When we finally found the car, the skies opened up with a huge downpour. The timing was perfect.

 

Now I have a different GPSr with great maps. I also waypoint the car first thing before leaving it.

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Ambrosia

+Ambrosia

Posted
Posted

I'm amazed that you know a word like "whilst," and even spelt it rite. That's a city slicker word.

 

And no, I've never been lost in the past six years. The GPS has gotten me out of some tight spots, though.

Well, maybe never technically "lost". You always know exactly where you are, although it may not be the place that you intended or was the best way to get there. :D

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jtbrady01

+jtbrady01

Posted
Posted

I've always known to mark my starting location. Be it my truck, a trail head or some point I need to get back to. Maybe it is my military background. With this I've never been lost. However, I was out in the woods when my battery was getting low and wasn't paying that close attention to my heading. I thought I was going NE when I was heading NW. When the battery went dead I pulled out my compass and kept on going. I walked out of the woods about 3 miles from where I needed to be. Was I lost? Not really I knew I just wasn't where I needed to be at right at that point in time. BTW - I have an extra battery charged now.

 

Maybe I should charge it back up again just to be sure :D

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moongecko

+moongecko

Posted
Posted

Recently I went out looking for 3 caches that were clustered near one another at a centuries old quarry. Actually. the quarry (which is now overgrown with trees) was once used for the stones that were used in the National Capitol Building. This old place sits behind a number of residential neighborhoods, completely forgotten by time.

 

Anyways, there are a number of trails going into the area and they all cross several times and of course all look the same. I had my Trail Head marked, but I didn't turn on my breadcrumbs for tracking. I walked in okay... but walking out took me 3 times longer and I popped out of the woods two miles from where I parked. Doh!

 

Lesson learned... bread crumbs are a very very good thing. I use them religiously when going pajama caching. Great feature... but only when it's turned on. :D

 

MoonGecko

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Kit Fox

+Kit Fox

Posted
Posted

When I was hunting a Thunderchief (F-105) wrecksite, I marked the "roads end" while using Nat Geo Topo. What I failed to notice is that the road actually stopped about 400 feet before the waypoint that I had marked as parking. I never marked my truck, so I had the wrong coords to refind the truck. The area is heavily forested and there weren't many references.

 

After having a fruitful day visiting the wreck site, hanging out with my dad, we headed to my truck. When we got to ground zero I realized my mistake. For about three minutes I had no idea where my truck was. I failed to notice that the truck was up on a knoll and we descended immediately when we started. Thankfully after much searching, we spotted the roof of the truck. :D

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AustinSweetnSour

+AustinSweetnSour

Posted
Posted

When I was hunting a Thunderchief (F-105) wrecksite, I marked the "roads end" while using Nat Geo Topo. What I failed to notice is that the road actually stopped about 400 feet before the waypoint that I had marked as parking. I never marked my truck, so I had the wrong coords to refind the truck. The area is heavily forested and there weren't many references.

 

After having a fruitful day visiting the wreck site, hanging out with my dad, we headed to my truck. When we got to ground zero I realized my mistake. For about three minutes I had no idea where my truck was. I failed to notice that the truck was up on a knoll and we descended immediately when we started. Thankfully after much searching, we spotted the roof of the truck. :D

 

My first day of solo caching, I led my kids into the woods to find a cache...let's just say that by the time we found our way out, hours later, not one of them was speaking to me, and McDonald's was bought for dinner out of fatigue and guilt! :anitongue:

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rallymud

rallymud

Posted
Posted (edited)

I have NEVER been lost.......well, not exactly.

 

I was without computer on our first cache this summer. Went to the local CAP site (computer access), logged on to geocaching.com and found some interesting ones and had to write them down. We went to one that would suit the entire family (child friendly cache). We were on our way and checked it out.

"Who would put a cache in a freaking corn field! This makes no sense!" I said. I looked at the routing and it actually lined up with an access point to the field for a tractor adjacent to the road. It was 500m in from the road but there was an adjacent stream. I realised we had nothing with us to add to the cache so we went to town got some stuff.

 

An hour later we arrived at the same point, got out of the car and went for the cache.

 

2 hours later we're walking back to the car with no cache, 3 muddy and tired kids and one tired wife.

 

I say "Wouldn't it be funny if I typed a wrong number into the GPS!" My wife looked at the piece of paper with the coords (which I left in the car) and compared them to the waypoint in the GPS and looks at me.........

 

We went to the local pub and re-evaluated the situation. After some serious abuse (from the kids) we continued with the correct waypoint and my wife found the cache in about 5 minutes.

 

I now can't go past a corn field without this trip being mentioned.........

Edited by rallymud
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bogleman

bogleman

Posted
Posted

Well there was this one time I was in Savannah GA, impulse visit. Very hard place to find parking <_< . I find a sweet spot and hit mark and edit the waypoint to show PARK, I get out of the car and saw that I was not in a legal spot. I drove around and some more until I found another usable spot. I thought I updated the parking spot before I left. Keep in mind, alone, no maps, no other waypoints, new city and lots of distractions.

 

A couple of hours go by and darkness starts to creep in and I decide to head out. I hit goto and start walking and walking then I realize that I am nowhere near where I parked. Well to make a long story short I ended up wandering all around downtown pressing the stupid panic button on the key fob for about an hour until I found the car. PS the panic button only works from about 50 yards, you should be able to see the car by then :P

 

Lesson learned - double check and do not rely 100% on the GPS. Track back was of no use, the screen looked like a plate of spaghetti from driving around in circles looking for a place to park.

 

I've never been lost in the weeds around home, walk long enough and you will hit a road.

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team lagonda

+team lagonda

Posted
  • Author
Posted

must confess once when bow hunting for deer when i was 19 i parked my car on a wooded ridge and went way down over into the holler and down the creek....it was almost dark when i started back up the hill figgerin that the car was right on top..well when i got back on top the hill there was nothin but trees and the other side o the hill n more trees..i caught myself runnin down the hill in an effort to find some way out befor dark and my mouth was gettin dry..i kept going on anyways and i came out on the little country road bout 200 yrds below my car..wheeeew..

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Zop

+Zop

Posted
Posted

Lost? Not even close.. But I do live in a fairly populated area. But!!

 

One day a buddy and I were hunting the ever so elusive 'Urban' cache in it's own environment.. In San Francisco. We ended up walking over 22 miles thru the city and not once got lost.. But... Yup. We lost the car! Only for an additional mile though. We eventually found it but we could have sworn that the spot we returned to was where I parked. So.. Moral of the story here? Mark a waypoint when you park!

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Moore9KSUcats

+Moore9KSUcats

Posted
Posted

Lost? Well, not really... confused, maybe.

 

We knew where we were..... but couldn't find the right trail to lead us back to the car! The car was waypointed, but where the side trail met the main trail was not. We kept trying to find the trail, but couldn't. Bushwhacking in cedar forests is not fun.....

 

The trail we were on finally led us into the back of a gated apartment complex. We were tired, dirty, and very thirsty! Fortunately, we got some water from the front office, and found out we were several miles away from our car. We started trekking back along the frontage road, to the next turn, (a very busy by-way), and hubby left us on the side of the road under the trees and we waited until he came back with the car.

 

We've not been back to that part of the greenbelt since! (That was back in 2002, when we first started, I think.)

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3Coltsfans

+3Coltsfans

Posted
Posted

The 3Coltsfans team has never been lost, however our truck was very badly lost once. Very early in our caching career, I forgot to mark the truck as a waypoint, and thought we would never find it. We could not backtrack because we had come down off of a steep incline and didn't think it too safe to try to go back up, so we followed the marked trail. After about 3 miles of rugged hiking we came out on the road. Oh wait...did I say THE road...I should have said A Road. Anyway after a couple more hours of walking we finaly found the truck. LESSON LEARNED!

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Team GeoBlast

+Team GeoBlast

Posted
Posted

how many you city slickers got lost with a gps in yer hands....

 

What I am struggling with lately is being too reliant on the device. Many hours on the trail pre-GPS taught me a lot of skills that this nice digital display is threatening to replace. I'm finding that leaving it home is actually a refreshing change now and then.

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GPS-Hermit

GPS-Hermit

Posted
Posted (edited)

Hopefully any experience that leaves you unaware of you position in the woods will make you better. I studied the maps and had them with me - but they don't show plants so thick you can't go that way. I didn't have a flash light, warm enough clothes, extra batteries and I didn't know where I was, and none knows where I am. Darkness fell just as the GPS brought me back to my car.

 

I do everything different now since that happened. I use the GPS to teach me better distance in the woods. I practice guessing how far I have gone then look at my track and see if I am right - them double check it all on the map when I get back. I practice being aware of north.

 

I am pretty tired after 4 miles of hiking in rough terrian and need to have my act together.

Edited by GPS-Hermit
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TeamGuisinger

+TeamGuisinger

Posted
Posted

We weren't lost but the car was! We were sort of almost lost in the dark in a fairly large state park which had a really wonderful trail system that we did in fact wander off of. Can't call it lost if you know which direction the highway is...right? We managed to bush whack (for hours) to a highway. This was great news as it was spring and we were not dressed for nighttime temps and we were out of water. Unfortunately, the wonderful park was loaded with caches that we had visited 5 times. Like good little cachers we had also marked our parking spot 5 times. We had a highway, but no idea where our car was after 8 hours of caching and 2 hours of being somewhat lost. I won't tell you how we found the car, it's just too embarassing.

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