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Clueless Geocachers


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I've read many stories about totally clueless geocachers; the ones who leave caches in the open, use flagging tape to mark the route to the cache, spraypaint arrows on rocks and worse. Sometimes they even boast of their cluelessness in logs, being totally clueless of the fact that they are clueless.

 

Post some of your stories here. Please do not use names, or links to real logs or caches . The point of this is to collect amusing stories, not to assign blame.

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OK, I'll start. I know of a micro cache in a mine that gets frequent visitors. The cache is a Bison cylinder concealed in an ancient drill hole. The Bison cylinder was necessary because of the traffic and the fact that a previous cache there was stolen. It's billed on the page as a log only micro, and "bring your own pen" is in bold letters. I was there today and my flashlight hit a big, white pen sticking out of the rock wall of the mine. I pulled it out and it was clipped to the Bison cylinder. :blink::D:D:D

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

Don't be silly - NO ONE would do that would they? **BLUSH!**

:blink: I know someone who managed to hike up to the top of a hill and then all the way back down again, a good mile or two of very hilly terrain with switchbacks on the trail. During this time I, I mean they, watched the distance to the cache get relatively close, then far away, then very close again. When the cache was finally found it was discoverted that we could have walked on flat land for about a third of that distance. Guess what route I took back to the car. Though I was clueless as to the best route to take to get there, I did see some good scenery.

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well a few weeks ago i printed off 4 caches to visit and i just got to do it today. well iwent to the first one and looked and looked. Couldnt find the cache. So i assumed it was stolen. Went to log it and it was disabled and archieved.

 

TIP: Always check the cache on the net before attempting it! lol

 

aj

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

Don't be silly - NO ONE would do that would they? **BLUSH!**

:blink: I know someone who managed to hike up to the top of a hill and then all the way back down again, a good mile or two of very hilly terrain with switchbacks on the trail. During this time I, I mean they, watched the distance to the cache get relatively close, then far away, then very close again. When the cache was finally found it was discoverted that we could have walked on flat land for about a third of that distance. Guess what route I took back to the car. Though I was clueless as to the best route to take to get there, I did see some good scenery.

OK, what actually happened was that I committed the classic 'silly'. Didn't look on the map. Walked along the trail till the arrow was pointing at right angles to the trail - shortest route to the cache right? Off I went, for well over a mile through some of the worst bush I was ever in. (and I used to work in jungles searching out pipeline routes) Later I discovered that, had I parked at the other end of the trail, I would have found the path that leads to a point 100 yards from the cache. Worse, If I had looked around the next bend before leaving the trail, another 50 yards or so, I would have found the same access route.

 

Note: This post is about someone else - I am telling it in the first person for clarity only! <cough>

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The Oregon coast has is a now-archived cache called Coastal Cavern. When I was there, I had no idea that the cliff that contained the cave actually had TWO caves, a lame, narrow one and the large real one, on opposite sides of a cliff that jutted out like a thumb on the land below.

 

The first time I went, I ended up at the lame belly-crawl of a cave, which had an easily-visible container inside which just HAD to be the geocache. I WAS going to go in, but THEN I noticed that this cave featured HUGE slabs of rock which had fallen from the cave roof.

 

Flashing images of a splat-flat Sparrowhawk turned me into a chicken(hawk). smhair1.gif

 

So I just put a note in my trade item ("please put this in the cache for me"), tossed it in the general direction of the pseudo-cache and split.

 

After posting a "found it" and then shown I was clueless by fellow cachers, I made the loooooooooooong drive 6 weeks later, partially just to get that one right. :blink:

Edited by Sparrowhawk
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well a few weeks ago i printed off 4 caches to visit and i just got to do it today. well iwent to the first one and looked and looked. Couldnt find the cache. So i assumed it was stolen. Went to log it and it was disabled and archieved.

 

TIP: Always check the cache on the net before attempting it! lol

 

aj

I have two archived caches. Imagine my surprise to get an e-mail about each of them on the same day just last week. A cacher had visited (tried to visit) both based on pages printed out last year. Yeah, as the quote says, without checking them for availibility on the net.

I give the cacher an A1 rating though - for logging on line and admitting what had happened.

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...I know of a micro cache in a mine that gets frequent visitors. The cache is a Bison cylinder concealed in an ancient drill hole.  The Bison cylinder was necessary because of the traffic and the fact that a previous cache there was stolen. It's billed on the page as a log only micro, and "bring your own pen" is in bold letters.  I was there today and my flashlight hit a big, white pen sticking out

of the rock wall of the mine. I pulled it out and it was clipped to the Bison cylinder.

It wasn't me, but the drill hole was big enough to accomodate both the Bison capsule and the pen. When I found it, my flashlight had hit a shiny purple cache cylinder inside the hole, so a pen wouldn't make much difference (maybe that applies only to 6'7" tall cachers, who have the drill hole at the eye level).

Edited by haggaeus
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Welllll...back before I was a geocacher, my friend was introducing it to me. We were in Tahiti and he wanted to place a cache. So we did...in ziploc bags. Jungle insects can eat right through plastic, and the finders have reported the soggy mess ever since. It needs a decent container--but folks have still found it. I need to get back for a "maintinence visit" soon.

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t wasn't me, but the drill hole was big enough to accomodate both the Bison capsule and the pen. When I found it, my flashlight had hit a shiny purple cache cylinder inside the hole, so a pen wouldn't make much difference (maybe that applies only to 6'7" tall cachers, who have the drill hole at the eye level).

 

I didn't think you'd do something like that. Anyway, it is now wrapped in camo tape...and yes being 6' 7" does make a difference. It is hard for me to see since I'm relatively short 6'. In this case the pen was projecting about 4 inches outside the hole. And it was white, which really stood out.

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

 

That is pretty common. I found a cache once that had another near it. I bushwacked from cache one to cache two and then saw the trail right by the second cache. Doh! :D

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

Are you talking about me?? That sounds like something I'd do . . . I can't help myself . . . I have this overwhelming urge to follow that stupid arrow sometimes. (sigh) And, I have the scars to prove it.

 

How about the one where the guy logs that he took a Where's George out of the cache and leaves nothing claiming that he doesn't have anything to leave but he's hungry so he's taking the dollar to by a candy bar. Hmph! I set him straight and he was none too happy about it.

 

Whatever . . .

 

Happy caching and stuff! :o

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

 

That is pretty common. I found a cache once that had another near it. I bushwacked from cache one to cache two and then saw the trail right by the second cache. Doh! :o

Yes this is pretty common especially when caching out of your "known" area. I was in Idaho and hiked up a very steep hillside only to find that I could have driven to within about 50 feet of the cache. Oh well, ti was a fun hike just unnecessary.

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Well there's always the story of the guys who bushwack half a mile to a cache when really you can follow a trail for a mile for all but twenty feet...

 

That is pretty common. I found a cache once that had another near it. I bushwacked from cache one to cache two and then saw the trail right by the second cache. Doh! ;)

Yes this is pretty common especially when caching out of your "known" area. I was in Idaho and hiked up a very steep hillside only to find that I could have driven to within about 50 feet of the cache. Oh well, ti was a fun hike just unnecessary.

Second that. Did just that in Missouri. The trail head was blocked by a bunch of dead timber pilled up so that the trail head was not visualizable from the parking area and there were no signs. 250 vertical feet later, cache found. Took the trail down. :o

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A fellow geocacher and I went to an event this winter in a park with lots of caches. While looking for one of them another guy came up and started looking too. We found the cache first, and it was frozen under a tree. After a bit of work we got it out, all while the other guy just stood there. I said that it was really frozen in there, to which he only said "I've dug caches out of 9 inches of ice". I doubt that's even true, by the way. He also told us he found the cache earlier that morning. Funny thing is, the snow above it was undisturbed, there were no foot prints and we were the first ones to sign the log that day. Although maybe that wasn't a case of being clueless, and just being a habitual liar.

 

Some other genius put a big piece of pink foam and a huge pile of rocks infront of one of my caches, too.

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Living, as I do, near the Greenwich meridian, can also cause problems.

 

Spent an hour hunting for the cache. Found where I though it must be - but no cache.

 

Then realised I was looking in the western hemisphere, not the eastern! Cache was probably a mile and a half away.

 

Mind you - I did find a good place for a cache! If I ever get permission - I am gonna call it "Mirror Image".

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Would 'clueless' include placing a micro outside the men's room of a full nude 'Gentleman's club'?

 

Wulf

Cool which cache is this? ;)

ahem cough cough I mean um, How Offensive! What a stupid spot for a cache! ;) However did it get approved? :o

Of course for every clueless cacher there are 100's of clueless muggles. They just go about their mundane existences, never knowing that they just walked past a clever urban micro. :P

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Just visited a cache which seems to be intentionally misplaced by the time it's logged next, every time - no exceptions. You can see it in the logs. Half of the cachers find it under different rocks 100 ft away from the mountaintop, and another half finds it right at the top. I was in the second category. In addition to the ammobox, there was a waterproof red plastic storage box, and two sets of sturdy ziplock bags, all with their own notebooks and all used as summit registers and/or trash depositories. Tried to hide the box from the summer crowds as well as I could, and wrote in fat leters that this thing is not a register and shall not be moved to the top of the peak ... but I have virtually no doubt that it will end up in plain sight at the highest point as soon as the first summer visitors pour in.

And it is officially a 5-star hide! With hundreds of logbook entries and half-eaten rice crispie bar inside. Arrgh!

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I guess I have to confess. I pulled into a local park and parked at what seemed the closest area. I bushwacked for about 150 crawling through heavy brush, and I wast literally crawling through and under it. I then came upon an opening that was actually next to where I had just started. So I climbed over top of this giant 7 foot pile of trees towards where the cache was, and where there was no brush. After climbing over the tree, I noticed that there was a nice little path around it, but the path didn't go into the woods. And so I start heading towards the cache. And I come upon a rather steep ravine with a creek at the bottom and a trail next to it. Thinking that I wanted to be somewhere near the trail. Once I got to the trail, my GPS settled back down and said I needed to go back up the steep ravine. And did I follow the trail up? Of course not, I whipped out my mini grappling hook. (It's actually just some kind of tie down that you'd use on a truck.) And I lassoed a tree up at the top of the ravine. I climbed up and found the cache inside the tree I had lassoed. While I was signing the log, the cache slid down the ravine, and the contents were spilled all over the trail. And so I had to go back down the ravine, cleanup all the stuff, and then climb back up ammo can in hand.

 

Needless to say, I followed the trail back up, and even though it winded back and forth a lot more than my trail, it ended up being no more than 50 feet from where I entered the woods originally, and no more than 100 feet from the car....

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I guess I have to confess. I pulled into a local park and parked at what seemed the closest area. I bushwacked for about 150 crawling through heavy brush, and I wast literally crawling through and under it. I then came upon an opening that was actually next to where I had just started. So I climbed over top of this giant 7 foot pile of trees towards where the cache was, and where there was no brush. After climbing over the tree, I noticed that there was a nice little path around it, but the path didn't go into the woods. And so I start heading towards the cache. And I come upon a rather steep ravine with a creek at the bottom and a trail next to it. Thinking that I wanted to be somewhere near the trail. Once I got to the trail, my GPS settled back down and said I needed to go back up the steep ravine. And did I follow the trail up? Of course not, I whipped out my mini grappling hook. (It's actually just some kind of tie down that you'd use on a truck.) And I lassoed a tree up at the top of the ravine. I climbed up and found the cache inside the tree I had lassoed. While I was signing the log, the cache slid down the ravine, and the contents were spilled all over the trail. And so I had to go back down the ravine, cleanup all the stuff, and then climb back up ammo can in hand.

 

Needless to say, I followed the trail back up, and even though it winded back and forth a lot more than my trail, it ended up being no more than 50 feet from where I entered the woods originally, and no more than 100 feet from the car....

:o:P:o

 

I'd have paid to watch that!!!! I can almost hear the Looney Toons theme already! ;););)

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It was 105 degree day. Along for the hike was my girlfriend and my 12 year old daughter. At first it looked like it should have been about a half-mile hike. Instead of following the arrow to the shortest route, my mapping software showed the trail we were on that would loop around and eventually lead right to it in a circle. After up and down hills and over 2 miles and a couple hours of walking we finally got to the cache location. Fortunately, we ran into a couple of horse riders that pointed to the nice wide short-cut for a half-mile return walk! Whew! After that I learned to pay better attention to the distance scale, DOH! AND look for short-cuts! My tag-alongs were obviously not too impressed with my navigations skills. :o

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There was once a micro cache here that included two items and to log the cache all you had to do was email the owner what the two items were. One of the items was a trimmed down Albertsons grocery card... and one day our area's most clueless cacher traded for it. His logs are often confusing and contain many misspelled words... no one in the area has ever seen him. I hope to meet him someday just to see who he is.

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The Oregon coast has is a now-archived cache called Coastal Cavern. When I was there, I had no idea that the cliff that contained the cave actually had TWO caves, a lame, narrow one and the large real one, on opposite sides of a cliff that jutted out like a thumb on the land below.

 

 

Hmmm. I heard of some clueless geocachers who followed their GPSr straight to a large wall of brush. Faced with an option of heading right or left around it, they proceeded to the left, ended up in a very swampy area at the base of the cliffs where a small stream dripped down the rocks, persevered though the mud threatened to rip their Tevas straight off their feet, scrambled through the brush, thorns and loose rock to reach the cliff face. Struggling along the cliff they finally made it to the cave entrance...

 

... and the easy trail that led in from around the right side of the brush wall...

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