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How Far Do You Walk When Caching?


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What I mean is do you keep tabs on how far you have walked in a Geocaching day? I would be interested to know some totals that people achieve.

 

When I go out caching I tend to zero the GPSr track log, and also switch off the GPSr during car journeys. Then I can see how many miles I clock up walking, it makes me feel good if I see I've walked a good few miles.

 

I find that when I'm out caching, it doesn't feel like I've walked as far as I have. Following that pointer and watching the distance go down seems to dilute the perceived distance.

 

I haven't been on any long distance treks so can't report any spectacular mileage, a typical caching day will probably yield between 4 and 8 miles.

 

I'd like to hear other cachers experiences/results.

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We'll often make a guesstimate at the end of the day, but don't go to any technical lengths to log the walking distance. Maybe we could use our spare yellow eTrex for that - there's no way we're turning the legend off between caches, that's the only way we find our way to the next one.

 

I reckon our maximum day is about 8 miles. They tend to be much shorter, maybe 4 or 5.

 

Cheers,

 

Stu

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The longest I've deliberately recorded was 12 miles on a circular walk in Hertfordshire that took in "Hornet's Hide 13", "Coal Post #41" and the trig point at Hill Farm. I know I've walked further doing some of the caches and trig points 'oop north' but I didn't record the distance. Doing 10 or a dozen caches and/or trig points in one day is not unusual for me and at a rough guess, I cover 6 or 8 miles on foot doing 12 caches as I never bother to drive my ol' Astra up cart tracks. I prefer to park somewhere 'sensible' and walk in from there.

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I have a pedometer and on Sat I did 14.6 miles. That was 7 caches, Three of them were in the Lathkill dale and that was nearly 11 miles around trip.

I often park far as way as possible :P which is why its taken so long to do 100 caches, when Pyoung1s and Seasider do that many in a month :o

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We did 8 miles yesterday, But normally it's 5 to 7.

The most we have done is 13 miles when doing MarcB's wrekin series all in one day. (My hat goes off to my youngest son - who managed this when he was 6 years old!)

 

I only ever switch our Vista on just before we start to cache & so it's only ever recorded cache walking miles, It's now just shy of 200 miles after 100 caches so it's very nearly 2 miles per cache average.

 

I'll leave now, I love numbers & stats & can get very tedious... :P

 

Cheers,

Gaz.

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I also have a pedometer, which I bought for walking the dog as we're both on diets, and I try to do 5 miles a day if I can.

 

I took it out geocaching for the first time today and we clocked up 3 miles for 4 caches (one of which was a virtual we could park right next to!).

 

Over the Easter break, weather permitting, we're hoping to do Ingleborough, Pen-Y-Ghent and Whernside (N Yorks) so I am sure we'll be walking a lot further on those days!

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Last April I did an 11 mile trip from Buckhurst Hill Tube to Loughton Tube via, I think, 7 caches, but that did involve a several hour stop at a pub in Loughton with a crowd of incredibly insane, like minded individuals, and several pints of excellent ale :P:D:D and a cholesterol rich bacon butty (or 2) :o;):P , and an excellent day it was too!

 

PS To all friends in the know out there, I was re-instated to-day, with a clean bill of health, and start back at work, after Easter, after nearly 14 months off. B):P:o:P:P:D:D

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PS To all friends in the know out there, I was re-instated to-day, with a clean bill of health, and start back at work, after Easter, after nearly 14 months off. ;););):D:D:D:D

Excellent news, Dave!! :D:D

 

The most miles I've done in a day would have been when I did those 40 caches in London last month - must have been near 20 miles in total!

 

Normally when I'm on a cache tour I aim to do 15-20 caches a day so regularly get into double figures but I've never been as tired as that day in the capital!

 

Cheers!

 

Seasider

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Sorry chaps but I couldn't resist adding! During my 24hr caching expedition of 20/21 Feb this year I may have only done 22 caches but terrain rates included one '5', two '4's and a number a '3'/'3.5's! Fair Snape was at least 4 miles walk round trip. Windy hill about two and a half to three. I'm pretty good at getting the car in close (especially under cover of darkness!) so I do keep walking to a minimum. However the last 4 caches from the car park in Dunsop Bridge around Middle Knoll, Wolfhole Crag, Malcom in the Middle and Impromptu took 5 hours and covered at least 13 miles (12 between caches plotted on Mapsource), average speed over 2.5mph cross country! I don't keep the GPSr on all the time so as to conserve batteries. I use OS mapping as my primary means of navigation. When I find a cache I check the time then switch the GPSr off and navigate back to the car by map and memory! So, although I've got track logging I don't keep the GPSr on to keep a record but recon I walked well over 20 miles during the 24hr period!

 

Green welly boots from Asda, £7. Absolute bargin!!

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Depends what mood I'm in but generally not far. No double figure days that I can think of but then I normally only have half an hour to two hours including driving. Do tend to run round if I'm on my own. If I'm playing chaufer to Tigger Two a lot slower.Probably explains the speeding tickets but there you go.

 

However the longer you do this game the more time you spend driving and I've only been doing it for a few months.

 

Better go before Tigger Two reads this. ;)

 

Cheers

 

Tony

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I'd say the most I've done in a day has been about 6-8 miles, when I went down to cornwall caching. Although a large amount of that wasn't in pursuit of the cache, but the beaches near the caches.

 

Generally, though, I try to make it a personal challenge to get as close in as possible (and legal) with the car. several times, I have found a much shorter route than the placer, and one local one that lists a 4 mile hike roundtrip, I have found a spot about 1/4 of a mile's straight walk from.

 

I just don't seem to be able to get more than a 4-6 caches done in a day, even with waypoints loaded into autoroute and all the cache pages on my Palm. (although, I did manage an easy 6 last sunday with a late arrival at the caching area, thanks to pocket queries)

 

It does seem that getting out caching early is not something I ever seem to be able to get done. perhaps if I got out there at dawn, I'd do more. Or, perhaps if people stopped putting caches in such interesting places that I get distracted and not crack on with caching. :D

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We try to combine caching with a good amount of walking (usually 10 to 15 km). Yesterday we found Watership Down1 (~2km) and walked from WSD2 via WSD3 to What Mast? and back (with a little detour in the wrong direction ~17 km). Unfortunately we couldn’t find a direct footpath from WSD1 to WSD2, that would have made a great round trip :D.

Mostly we spend a whole day on caching and we try to combine as many caches as possible on foot. We don’t record the total distance we’ve walked, but some great trips we’ve still in mind are the New Forest “No Tree cover” caches (~17,5 km in bright sunshine with 32 degree C), the Bracknell Forest caches or South Downs Shenanigans (after 12 km we decided that we finish the remaining 4 steps and a lot of miles by car B).

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I haven't posted any logs for these caches yet but last night I went out to clean up central London. I haven't got an accurate total yet but the finds will be in the low-40s (Sorry Seasider!) and the total distance covered -- not including tube/bus/ferry -- was a hair over 27 miles. I left my accommodations at 4:30pm, started my first cache just before 5:30pm, my last find was about 5:30am, and I walked back into my hotal at about 6:45am. I hadn't meant to do so many but I was feeling pretty good around midnight so I just kept on going. And going. And going.

 

There are now only a few caches in central London that I have not found. I will try to get to them over the next few days. (But after my body catches up on sleep. My eyes are seriously dragging this morning -- I have actually fallen asleep a number of times while walking!

 

I will post more info when I have a chance to figure out what caches I actually found yesterday/this morning.

 

OzGuff

 

P.S. Now is the record for a 24-hour day (midnight to midnight) or a 24-hour time period (anytime to the same time 24 hours later)? :lol:

 

Edited to delete duplicate word.

Edited by OzGuff
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Game on!!

I thought that that would get his attention! :lol: He is probably going to come out of his self-imposed retirement and find 1000 caches in 6 months...

 

Hmmm -- since I started with two lunch-time caches yesterday I actually have about an hour to find a few more caches. I wonder if I have time to take a taxi ride up to get The Hornet's Weather Top cache that I failed to find... :lol:

Edited by OzGuff
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My daily maximum is 28 miles for only two caches. I was hiking in border area between Germany and the Czech Republic and there was no border crossing for 8 miles, then I missed the train and had to go another 6 miles to the town... I did about 20 miles several times, but usually from 5 to 8 miles.

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For Pedometers, visit here - Field & Trek or Exercise & Fitness or (the best one) eDirectory

 

I haven't reset my Geko 201 since I started Caching and it says I've walked around 38 Miles. This isn't too accurate as I don't tend to switch the thing on until I get within half a mile of the cache !

 

Come the better weather, longer walks will be the order of the day. We aim to do a few that require a 1-2 hour walk.

Edited by MoonHerb
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Early in my 6-month London work tour, I took a friend up toward Epping Forest, and we had mapped out 10 caches to locate. We started at the southern end and worked our way up, ending in Theydon Bois (sp?). That was a Sunday in the middle of winter, so daylight was limited. We started walking at 0830 and finished at 1730, stumbling into town tired, hungry and thirsty.

 

I had forgotten that there were no pubs in the forest.

 

When we started, I zeroed the GPS and it recorded 10.5 miles when we got on the train in Theydon Bois.

 

We didn't mind the distance, although we were tired. We just wished we had taken more provisions than a bread roll, 2 pieces of cheese, and one water bottle per person.

 

At least we got all 10 caches.

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I just realised the thing to do the other day, I set out on my second cache marathon of the Bank holiday, (23) as I left home, I zeroed the odometer on the van and the GPS. I kept an eye on the sync of the two on the 50 odd miles to the CZ (Cache Zone) and they were pretty close, at the end of the day, I subtracted the van milage from the GPSr and got my walking figure.

 

I was amazed that I'd managed 23 rural caches, and only clocked up 7 miles on foot (not counting the extra half I had to walk back to collect my dropped GPSr.

 

The previous Marathon (34), was about 10 miles on foot. (I'd have made my objective of 37 to beat the 2 C's day trip if I had pre-read 2 of the cache pages, and done a little research, and the third I needed was DoomSlayer's nightmare Hide that I couldn't get to due to randy teenagers)

 

I'm thinking of upgrading to a Platinum or colour soon (have gold) and I'll mount the pair in the van, and take the new one to the cache, then I can compare the two at the end of the day to get my milage.

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On Tuesday this week (13/4/04) Dan and I did a big tour of Oxfords caches. We started out of town at 2202's boggy Bombs Away!!! and it was probably about 12pm when we found a good place to park and walk from. It must have been nearly two miles to the cache and back. From there it was shorter walks to MBC's Ghosts of Hampton Gay, 2202's University Challenge 9 and then Bagley Wood.

 

There was a little walk up in Headington to get UC5 and a much longer on around town collecting UC6,8,2,1,7,3 and 10, in that order. To finish on there was a mile-and-a-bit walk-and-back to UC4 at a bit past 7pm.

 

I think we must have covered a good five or six miles on foot. Pity poor Dan who did them all in trainers still damp from the first cache of the day! Anyway, 13 caches in about 7 hours bodes well for the 24 hour 'big numbers' marathon I have planned for June. I'll probably take a spare pair of boots and socks to that one, just in case... :lol:

 

SP

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We did 10 miles on "Le Vase de Sevres" (GC6EB7) cache in the Tarn Gorges.

 

We parked at 655m, and the cache was at 884m. We did the whole thing with a 2 litre bottle of water between the four of us and in 42degree heat.

 

Magnificent view, though, and a highly recommended walk, just take stupid amounts of water and start early, not at midday.

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I just realised the thing to do the other day, I set out on my second cache marathon of the Bank holiday, (23) as I left home, I zeroed the odometer on the van and the GPS. I kept an eye on the sync of the two on the 50 odd miles to the CZ (Cache Zone) and they were pretty close, at the end of the day, I subtracted the van milage from the GPSr and got my walking figure.

That's a very elegant way of keeping tabs on how far you've walked...like it :lol:

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I don't keep the gps on during long hikes anymore. Batteries cost almost as much as gasoline!! But I know that yesterday I walked about a total of 5 miles while placing 5 caches.

Rechargeables work well for me (2100 MaH) lasting about 12 hours per pair.

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We try to walk as far as possible and so tend not to go for as many caches in a day but to bag the furthest walk. Yesterday Whernside (11 miles), last week Ingleborough (9 miles). We even felt guilty not doing the entire of the Stocks Reservoire Walk and only walked 3 to cache and back. I think it depends on how you want to play the game really...

One for an interesting challenge though. Yesterday I put 'Miss Ewe' out to grass on Ingleborough. If she completes the entire of the Three Peaks in and out of caches in one go and within 24 hours (completing the Three Peaks guidelines so booked in and out of Horton in Ribblesdale) I will provide a bottle of bubbly for the people who can prove it (and even greet them with it if they tell me when they intend to make the marathon walk (24 miles I think). Go out then, I challenge thee...

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In the last couple of weeks I've clocked up quite a few miles on foot whilst geocaching. Not quite just geocaching: I was walking the northern half of the Pennine Way, but picking up geocaches on the way. There are a few which are pretty much on the footpath itself. The hardest day with a successful cache find was Hauxwell House (GC7A2F) with about 17 miles of walking over rough and boggy moorland. The hardest cache of all was "Reivers Revenge" on Windy Gyle (GC132F): I reached Windy Gyle in thick mist after about 12 miles of very hard mountain walking, consulted the PDA with the cache details and discovered that the cache itself was half a mile back towards the Cheviot. Across a small valley. With about another 15 miles still to go that day, I thought "S*d that!" and continued towards Byrness...perhaps I'll go back one day and take the short way up there (3.5 miles each way).

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