Help for a newbie

[+2 treasure seekers]

I am new to Geocaching; tried it once a few months ago and loved it. I just got a handheld GPS for Christmas and tried it out for the first time today. I did a pocket query, downloaded all the caches in my area, and headed out for the hunt. I enjoyed it very much; I have spent hours reading the website to learn the lingo and become familiar with the information provided.

 

I have two questions I am hoping someone could help me with.

 

1. How do you know where to drive to begin the search? I see driving directions on the website, but if I print them all out, that defeats the purpose of going paperless. Any suggestions would be helpful.

 

2. Is there a way to know ahead of time how far the cache is? Most caches seem to be within a few hundred feet of the parking area, but I'm sure there are some that require quite a bit of hiking. Can you tell before you arrive and see the distance to the cache on the GPS?

 

Thanks so much!

Edited December 31, 2010 by 2 treasure seekers

[+Chi-Town Cacher]

I am new to Geocaching; tried it once a few months ago and loved it. I just got a handheld GPS for Christmas and tried it out for the first time today. I did a pocket query, downloaded all the caches in my area, and headed out for the hunt. I enjoyed it very much; I have spent hours reading the website to learn the lingo and become familiar with the information provided.

 

I have two questions I am hoping someone could help me with.

 

1. How do you know where to drive to begin the search? I see driving directions on the website, but if I print them all out, that defeats the purpose of going paperless. Any suggestions would be helpful.

 

2. Is there a way to know ahead of time how far the cache is? Most caches seem to be within a few hundred feet of the parking area, but I'm sure there are some that require quite a bit of hiking. Can you tell before you arrive and see the distance to the cache on the GPS?

 

Thanks so much!

 

Greetings and welcome to the game. I'm surprised nobody else has answered yet so I'll take a stab at trying to assist you. While I don't consider myself illiterate on the general uses of a GPSr I also readily acknowledge that there are lots wiser folks around this forum than me. So to put it in plain English read what I have to say, but take others advice more to heart since they probably are more GPSr savvy than I am.

 

1. You mention paperless caching and I may be wrong, but I think most GPSrs capable of paperless caching also have an option to route you on roads as close to the cache as possible. Then you find a parking space and switch your GPSr over to hiking mode in the routing options. If you have a GPSr that is paperless caching check out your owners manual under routing options and you should be able to find the info you need.

 

If you don't have a paperless capable GPSr then what I'd suggest is just tell it which cache you want to go to next and then it will give you a straight line pointing to the cache location. Say for example if the cache is off to the Northwest I'll jump on a road that heads North and head North until the GPSr indicates the cache is pretty close to straight West of my location. Then I jump onto a Westbound road and get as close to the cache as possible. Then basically keep repeating that process until you're as close as you can get in your vehicle.

 

2. Yes, there definitely are some ways to tell how far a cache is from a parking location or other spot. Since I'm not GPSr tech savvy I'll leave that explanation to one of the more knowledgable folks here. I don't want to give you my way which may be several steps harder than necessary and confuse you.

 

If you are wanting to go on long hikes and are a premium member (a great value in my humble opinion) then you can create pocket queries that search exclusively for caches that require a substantial hike by searching for caches with the hiking required attribute. Actually I see there are 3 hiking type attributes you may see. One is a person with a backpack and a walking stick, one is for hikes less than 10 kilometers in length CLICK HERE to see an example of that (towards the top of the page and right below the map) and rounding out the hiking attributes for hiking geocaches is the one very similar to the one I mentioned above is the hike greater than 10 kilometers attribute.

 

On the other hand if you are wanting to avoid long hikes you can design your pocket querie to not include caches with those attributes.

 

If you're not a premium member seriously consider becoming one if possible so you can get the most from the geocaching.com website. If you're not a premium member then you'll have to manually check out each cache description page to see if it has the cache attribue symbol you're looking for. Also, if you're trying to avoid any hiking look in the description of the cache for wording like P & G which indicates it's very close to the parking area. Another way to avoid long hikes is to stay away from caches with a high terrain rating. The last suggestion isn't foolproof though because maybe it has a 3 rating because maybe you have to climb a tree, but it may only be 50 feet from parking.

 

Ok, I've rambled on too long so I'll put an end to this "book". Hopefully you'll find a tidbit or two that's beneficial and even if not it will bump it back up to the top where better qualified people will spot your message easier and can respond. Welcome to the game and happy caching!

[+BCandMsKitty]

You don't say when GPSr you have, so I'll assume you have one that doesn't store much of the cache information on it.

 

We have those kinds of GPSrs, and what we do is as outlined here, using an old Palm Pilot, GSAK, and CACHEMATE.

This all sounds complicated, but after a bit of study, and once you get used to it, it is really easy.

There are various other ways to go paperless, and I'm sure others will be inputting that info here soon.

As for driving directions, we let our GPSR do that for us! We just follow the arrow (or load the caches into out Garmin NUVI, which is another topic)

 

For knowing how far the cache is from wherever you end up parking ... some cache page descriptions will tell you. Most don't. We usually depend on our GPSr to tell us how far it is once we get parked. The GO TO screens usually have a "Distance To" field in them. Sometimes, if you look at the cache on your computer, you can see that it will be a hike from the map view.

If your GPSr is good at the mapping functions, you might be able to tell from the map view on it by looking at how far the cache icon is from the road.

[voiceroad]

Good luck. So far we have tried to find 30+ and haven't found a single one.

 

I am in the process of trying to hire someone to find them for us. Seems like using a professional guide is the only way to make this work.

[g_o_caching]

1. I can't really help you with the driving directions too much. I have a Garmin Nuvi 1350 (car type GPS) that I used for my first finds. I bought a hand held later. I put coords into both and use the 1350 to show me the roads and the 60CSx to find the cache. I have tried the 60 a little for driving but the 1350 shows more.

 

2. I may be wrong but when my hand held says .36 to cache I figure each .1 is roughly a city block. If its .52 it's a half mile one way to cache. I hope this helps a little.

 

3. Welcome to geocaching. It's an addiction.

[+niraD]

I generally figure out where to drive and how far the cache is from parking by checking the geocache location on an online map. Towards the end of the geocache description, there is a group of map links: Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, Mapquest, etc.

 

I use my Android phone a lot for geocaching. Just last night, I used the Android Navigate feature to give me turn-by-turn driving directions to the parking location of a cache, where I met a dozen other geocachers for a group hike. But that was for a cache outside my area of familiarity, where I didn't know the route.

 

I've also copy-pasted the text directions from Google Maps into a text message that I could read on a handheld device. This works better if it's your passenger's handheld device, so your passenger can navigate for you while you drive.

 

In addition to checking the distance between the cache and the trailhead on an online map, you can also check the terrain rating of the cache. That will give you a rough idea of the physical challenge of reaching the cache site. For example, 2-star terrain should be less than a 2 mile hike, and 4-star terrain could be more than a 10 mile hike. There are also a handful of attributes related to the length of the hike, but that depends on geocache owners using the attributes. The terrain rating and the online maps are more reliable.