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Running Out of Caches


Silent P's

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After caching in the area for a while I've started to run out of places to cache that are near by. There are still caches around but either they are spread apart or too far away. To go for a day trip of caching I have to drive for over an hour to get to any place that has more than a couple of caches. How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

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After caching in the area for a while I've started to run out of places to cache that are near by. There are still caches around but either they are spread apart or too far away. To go for a day trip of caching I have to drive for over an hour to get to any place that has more than a couple of caches. How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

 

I have by no means run out of caches in my local area, but I would rather drive to places I liked going before I started geocaching - back when I used to just take daytrips.

I'll drive 3 to 4 hours to my favorite spots and cache. Granted, I'll start at 5 in the AM to get there and still have time to cache. I might not get a lot of numbers this way, but I sure get to see a lot of great places.. :laughing:)

From my home to Rome, GA is around 3 hours and Chattanooga, TN is around 3.5, OR, to Blue Ridge, GA is about 3.5 hours and I'll also drive the same distance south of my home location also.

Saving my local caches works out pretty good when gas prices go up. :laughing:

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Hello,

 

I think we all long for the days when you could practically walk out the back door and find caches. Now I have to drive 30+ miles to find some cache density. I started using queries, mapping tools, etc to try and plan good caching trips. Also, if you can split the gas with someone then the cost won't get our of hand. Good luck however you decide to tackle this one. Peoria Bill :>)

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After caching in the area for a while I've started to run out of places to cache that are near by. There are still caches around but either they are spread apart or too far away. To go for a day trip of caching I have to drive for over an hour to get to any place that has more than a couple of caches. How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

 

Follow my theory of economy caching. Gas prices are still generally less than $2 / gal. Go as far from your home coordinates as you can afford and get as many of those caches as you can. As gas prices go back up, you will have all of those new ones nearby to get when you can no longer afford to drive distances for caches.

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I'm not all that concerned about clusters of caches. I'd rather seek out one or two that will take up a good part of the day.

Same here. I just lurve me some geocaching but I hate stopping every 500 feet to look for a cache. 1 cache every 2 or 3 miles is perfect!

Edited by DarkZen and Beautiful
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After caching in the area for a while I've started to run out of places to cache that are near by. There are still caches around but either they are spread apart or too far away. To go for a day trip of caching I have to drive for over an hour to get to any place that has more than a couple of caches. How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

 

Right now there are a limited number of really local caches here... and I've done 4 of them... a few more to go to clean out the valley at this end... (lots of potential hides, of course, but then I can't find them...)

 

This became clear to me the moment I did my first search for caches around my location... Lots close by, but

unaccessable without long drives to the other side of the mountain/ next valley... Those are still fair game for hunting of course, but not really local even though closer than the ones IN the valley. I decided that one approach was to limit the number of caches I hunted in the area, as well as along the routes I normally travel frequently to the 'big city'... Once I get there it is a different story. Although I havent' found that many yet, I will always save some for the drives... I like one cache about every 30 minutes of driving to give my back a rest... that gets me away and back without cleaning out the route... Eventually, I'll have to go farther and get further out into the boonies... but I go there anyway and anywhere but here there are lots of caches about... I don't care about finding them all... just having something to do and to see new places... Of course I don't worry about running out, since there are some really prolific cache hiders around me... and like I said, I have yet to get hiding myself... There is also the fact that some of these hides can take a while to locate... my longest was 4 tries til found, and I really enjoyed booting my own butt for that one ONCE I located it... Bigger thrill was watching the number of higher count cachers that HAVE YET to find the thing... at least the ones who admit to DNFs...

 

Doug

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After caching in the area for a while I've started to run out of places to cache that are near by. There are still caches around but either they are spread apart or too far away. To go for a day trip of caching I have to drive for over an hour to get to any place that has more than a couple of caches. How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

 

Follow my theory of economy caching. Gas prices are still generally less than $2 / gal. Go as far from your home coordinates as you can afford and get as many of those caches as you can. As gas prices go back up, you will have all of those new ones nearby to get when you can no longer afford to drive distances for caches.

I love that plan. You could just say that no matter how much gas is that you will always drive X dollars away. As the price fluctuates, you end up with different caching destinations; far away when gas is inexpensive, just down the street when gas prices soar.

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I'm the opposite of some here I guess. I have more than 500 caches within 7 miles of the house (southwest Denver metro), but most aren't really my cup of tea. I've sorted through and picked a few that sound interesting, but the usual urban cache doesn't really grab me. I'm more interested in finding some that are in the foothills and mountains west of Denver, or out on the plains east or north. I like to hunt without the constant threat of muggles, and I enjoy bushwhacking, so I'm more selective in my choices.

Edited by rapriebe
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I'm the opposite of some here I guess. I have more than 500 caches within 7 miles of the house (southwest Denver metro), but most aren't really my cup of tea. I've sorted through and picked a few that sound interesting, but the usual urban cache doesn't really grab me. I'm more interested in finding some that are in the foothills and mountains west of Denver, or out on the plains east or north. I like to hunt without the constant threat of muggles, and I enjoy bushwhacking, so I'm more selective in my choices.

 

Have you thought about removing micros from your PQ and setting the Terrain to 2+. I just tried that on my finds and it removed 75% of them (1200). That will greatly expand the circle of 500 caches and should meet your needs a little better.

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I'm the opposite of some here I guess. I have more than 500 caches within 7 miles of the house (southwest Denver metro), but most aren't really my cup of tea. I've sorted through and picked a few that sound interesting, but the usual urban cache doesn't really grab me. I'm more interested in finding some that are in the foothills and mountains west of Denver, or out on the plains east or north. I like to hunt without the constant threat of muggles, and I enjoy bushwhacking, so I'm more selective in my choices.

 

Have you thought about removing micros from your PQ and setting the Terrain to 2+. I just tried that on my finds and it removed 75% of them (1200). That will greatly expand the circle of 500 caches and should meet your needs a little better.

It would let him better participate in this thread, also.

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I generally only go caching 1 or 2 times per month and due to the rural nature of the area - I tend to need to drive 1 or 2 hours just to get to an area that has caches I have not found. I perfer regular sized caches that get me out walking but will cache for any cache that gets me to an area I have not been to before. Strongly perfer rural areas to city areas.

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Quite the opposite here. I've got tons of caches nearby that I haven't bothered to find. I'd much prefer to take a nice long multi-day drive to far-away places and find caches all along the way. One of my favorite memories is of a trip last year when TeamAlamo and I spent a week driving almost 2,000 miles to find a cache in every page of the Nevada DeLorme challenge. We had each previously found caches on a few different pages, but decided it would be fun to complete the entire challenge in a week. Another great memory is of a solo trip over the last Thanksgiving holiday where I drove just a few hundred miles to the northwestern corner of California, found a couple hundred caches and hid three. The very next week the area got a ton of snow and those three caches are still unfound almost three months later. My wife and I have also taken our RV across the great USA several times and I've found caches in 49 states (except Hawaii). I've been to Europe twice since geocaching started; both times the whole point of the trip was geocaching. But caches close to home? Meh.

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I'm the opposite of some here I guess. I have more than 500 caches within 7 miles of the house (southwest Denver metro), but most aren't really my cup of tea. I've sorted through and picked a few that sound interesting, but the usual urban cache doesn't really grab me. I'm more interested in finding some that are in the foothills and mountains west of Denver, or out on the plains east or north. I like to hunt without the constant threat of muggles, and I enjoy bushwhacking, so I'm more selective in my choices.

 

Have you thought about removing micros from your PQ and setting the Terrain to 2+. I just tried that on my finds and it removed 75% of them (1200). That will greatly expand the circle of 500 caches and should meet your needs a little better.

It would let him better participate in this thread, also.

 

Huh? Just because I'm new and happen to still have a lot nearby, that disqualifies me? :laughing:

 

As far as removing the micros... That would eliminate some that still seem to be interesting hides. I've driven by a few lately that I'm going back to look for later... I've got some 400 local ones as a POI file on my Nuvi, and I see the icons as I drive. The last couple of days have been so windy I've been afraid to risk opening a cache for fear of losing the log forever.

Edited by rapriebe
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I have recently stumbled onto a solution to this dilemma.

I will continue to hunt for caches this winter but as soon as the weather breaks, I plan to spend most of my caching time placing them. I am waiting for spring because the areas I wish to place them are difficult to access in winter.

This way I save the caches in the lowlands for winter but still have geocaching activity in the warm season while increasing the number of caches in the area. Any new caches that are placed in the low lands by others, will be available for me to hunt in the snowy months.

Edited by rlridgeway
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I go on three outings looking for caches every two months. I've got lots of caches within 30 miles, so those three outings are generally within 30 miles.

 

Apart from these caching trips, whenever I go somewhere, I take my GPS and pick up a few caches, if time permits and there are any.

 

Two or three times a year, I'll go with my wife on a business trip to another state and use the opportunity to look for caches.

 

As far as within 4 or 5 miles of my house, I've got most of those caches. As new ones are published, I'm leaving them alone so that when I go on a local run, there will be enough density to make it "worthwhile."

 

While I enjoy every find, including most lamp post base micros, I really enjoy the getting out and doing, so even if I only get one or two along a nice trail, that's just fine.

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How far do others drive for a caching trip and do you mind the drive? Also, how often do you go out caching, do you plan one big trip or go out every few weekends?

 

Was different when we started, we would grab caches on the weekend while garage saleing, so, often they were just targets of opportunity we looked up right before we hit the road in the morning, that were close to where we were heading. Now, weekends are for grabbing puzzle caches and former DNFs, and the rest of the week is pretty much "binge caching" - If I get a long lunch, I'll try to grab three or four, or have an appointment, get some on the way, or if I'm "sick" (coff coff) :laughing: try to get as many as possible. It does help that Reno has a pretty good concentration of caches and new caches are popping up all the time. As a result 90% of our finds are less than 10 miles from our home.

 

That will change when spring sprungs! We are looking for a little old 4X4 for a second car and that will be our ticket to the wonderful world of Nevada offroading. And how and how often we cache is going to change in the future, again, cuz you just never know.

 

One thing you might consider is looking for caching events at nearby (or even not so nearby) towns, and making a day of it. Have fun!

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Last weekend I drove almost two hours to find the last cache within 50 miles that I hadn`t done yet. I`m two or three hours away from Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe (though they`re all in different directions), so if I happen to get a free day without any plans I`ll make a day trip and go to one of those places. But I like those cities anyway, even without the caches.

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I'm the opposite of some here I guess. I have more than 500 caches within 7 miles of the house (southwest Denver metro), but most aren't really my cup of tea. I've sorted through and picked a few that sound interesting, but the usual urban cache doesn't really grab me. I'm more interested in finding some that are in the foothills and mountains west of Denver, or out on the plains east or north. I like to hunt without the constant threat of muggles, and I enjoy bushwhacking, so I'm more selective in my choices.
Have you thought about removing micros from your PQ and setting the Terrain to 2+. I just tried that on my finds and it removed 75% of them (1200). That will greatly expand the circle of 500 caches and should meet your needs a little better.
It would let him better participate in this thread, also.
Huh? Just because I'm new and happen to still have a lot nearby, that disqualifies me? :)
Huh? First of all, I had no idea that you were 'new'. Based on your earlier post, I believed that you had chosen not to look for many caches in your immediate area because they were not your cup of cider.

 

If you removed these caches from your PQ either by adjusting the ratings or simply using the ignore feature, you would be left with only those local caches that you would like to find. You would then have an idea of how many caches in your local area there are left for you.

Edited by sbell111
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ATTENTION PLEASE. The following is a message from the occult hand.

 

You have reached the end of geocaching.

 

The last person leaving please turn off the satellites on the way out.

 

Thank you for doing the kneadful.

The increasing frequency of appearance of such strange posts (from any of several posters) here, such as the one above from Sioneva, forces me to make the observation that it is almost as if an occult hand had reached down from above and moved the players like pawns upon some giant chessboard. (...shudder)

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The pickens are getting pretty slim around here too. I think I'm down to about 8000 caches within 100 miles of the house. :laughing:

Geez Tyler, is that all? I still have more than 17,000 unfound caches within 100 miles of me.

 

As a general rule, I don't cache close to home. Doesn't interest me. I spend too much time near home anyway. I'd rather go see someplace I don't already know painfully well.

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Thank you for doing the kneadful.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; :laughing:

 

I'd rather go see someplace I don't already know painfully well.

 

Pretty funny to see this line from my friendly feline forumpal. I just spent part of the afternoon dreaming up some loop routes from Minneapolis and Kansas City that would allow me to fill in all of the Prairie states that are missing from my maps. I have this grand plan to fly into the Twin Cities and out of Little Rock and cache in WI, ND, SD, NE, IA, MO, KS (with a detour to Mingo), and OK between those terminal cities to fill in a big hole, but cannot find a rental car for under $1200. ;) The triangular one way airfares are only about $220 on Southwest. So this afternoon I thought about splitting it into two separate trips. But by adding the second R/T airfare into the equation the total travel budget appears to be about the same. ;)

Edited by wimseyguy
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The pickens are getting pretty slim around here too. I think I'm down to about 8000 caches within 100 miles of the house. :laughing:

Geez Tyler, is that all? I still have more than 17,000 unfound caches within 100 miles of me.

 

 

That's about 5000 more caches than the entire state of New York.

 

A couple of weeks ago I did a loop trip around a lake about 20 miles from me. I drove about 120 miles and found 20 caches.

 

Last weekend I drove about 15 miles, then parked at the entrance to a gated dirt road, walked about a mile down the road, then bushwacked .64 miles to a cache.

 

On March 24th I'll be searching for a cache that is 7034 miles from home.

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I finally have a caching buddie. My neighbor who has become my best friend. We will plan a day to go caching, pick a location then make our list of caches. There are many caches closer to home but we leave those for the 'I gotta get out of the house for awhile' days when we just jump in the car & go. So far we have had no problems as there are always caches somewhere to get.

We have a day trip planned for thurs that will take us about an hour or so away but it will take us all day to get even just a fraction of the caches between here & there & back (by a different route). This trip will even take us into another state so its all good. MW

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Edit

 

We go about twice a month. The drive is part of the adventure. Work caches into small adventures not just a caching trip. Explore the state parks, take a drive along Hwy 11. Get on 378 and just head to the beach. Us the time to talk to your family member, friend, or just to think.

Edited by SgtSue
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Drive for over an hour!!! Holey s***, you must waste a ton of gas driving such long distances!

 

Get over yourself....

 

I've driven all weekend to grab fewer than a dozen caches simply because a number of them were spread miles apart with access only by grid road. Consider yourself privileged to have to drive ONLY AN HOUR!!!

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Though I'm still a newbie (200 finds in 3 months) I'm sure I could could cache my area (say 15 miles)for another 6 months just on the active caches available today. But we are getting into hides now and part of that hope is to help keep people already involved and to help generate more interest.

 

So our feeling is if you hide they will seek. If they seek then maybe they will hide. Therefore maybe you get more to seek.

And the world goes round and round.

It's all good.

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