Gimpy-grrl Geocaching

[+Mosaica]

Do any of you recall any previous threads dealing with any aspect of geocaching from a chair, or by other physically challenged folks? I'm interested in everything from the practical to the subtle. Otherwise I'll have to start a new topic and just talk to myself :-) There are all sorts of interesting bits associated with my early experiences, both challenging bits and super-coolio bits, and I'd like to discuss it all.

 

Thanks!

 

../Mosaica

[+Mopar]

Hi! You might want to read this, then shoot Pye an email. I'm sure you and her can share. You can often find her in the geocaching chat room too.

Edited May 25, 2004 by Mopar

[+Renegade Knight]

There is a small team working on a handcaching guide. If you have experience ideas or want to help feel free to shoot me an email.

 

I'm especially curiouse about the mountain bike vs 10 speed type wheels on a chair.

[Pto]

There is also a webpage set up to list wheelchair accessible caches

Check here

 

Its got quite a few listings in some states,but hopefully with contributions it can grow.

I will be listing 2 in MN there in the future.

Edited May 25, 2004 by Pto

[+Pyewacket]

shoot Pye

What did I ever do to you, Mopar? Harumph!

 

Mosaica, I got your very nice email; I'm sorry I haven't responded yet, but I've been really busy with Today's Cacher lately, and when I do any writing, it usually has something to do with my duties there. I apologize. If you'll do a search in the forums for "handicapped" and/or "accessible", you'll find a lot of threads discussing caching for gimps, with the kind of information you're looking for, I think. Granted, it's a bit harder for us, but that means our caches count more than bipeds, right? Cache on, Gimpy Grrlfriend!

 

RK...I've had both types of tires on my manual chair. While a mountain bike tire is great for outdoors, it's a bugger to push across long stretches of smooth surfaces, because the ergonomics are completely different than that of a smoother tire. You definitely get more grip with knobby tires, and less slippage on slick surfaces like wet leaves.

 

Back to the salt mines, before El Diablo and Sept1c Tank decide to sentence me to 33 GeoLashes with a Groundspeak lanyard...lol.

[+flask]

i'm thinking that in a perfect world you'd have a chair for every activity so you don't have to change tires. oh, wait... in a PERFECT world..

 

anyway, one of the best ways to get information about whether a cache is appropriate for your specific abilities is to ask the owner. or some hiders. often it's hard as a placer to judge how accessible a cache is. a person with good upper body strength and no other medical issues will be able to do a LOT more than even some "bipeds".

 

as a cache owner, given some information about your strength, size (reach can be important), mobility and sheer pig-headedness, i can give you good advice about what to expect.

 

parenthetically, i serve on the bike patrol for a fairly well-known marathon. we do not patrol the wheelchair race; those guys simply do not need our help. i have never even so much as SEEN those people on the course, except for at the start line. they're that fast. my traditional beat is the part of the course where the "bipeds" start to break down, if you don't count the one corner where they all seem to puke. i don't stand there. you couldn't pay me enough.

 

since you expressed an interest in telling tales of your caching exploits thus far, i'm going to say that i'm interested. go ahead.

[+Pyewacket]

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

I will type sept1c_tank's name properly.

 

Must......resist.......temptation.......to.......capitalize........

Must......ignore......punctuation......

 

Those GeoLashes are torture, I tell ya!

[+Mud Puppy]

A buddy had a type of Mtn bike tire that has a narrow ridge in the middle and tapers away at the sides. On pavement only the center ridge touches but in dirt or any other soft surface the tire sinks in and the entire tread digs. On really soft surfaces he would let some air out of the tires to flatten the tread.

He used a small CO2 tank similar to this one to air the tires back up if a air pump wasn't handy.

 

 

He also had one of those garbage gripper things to get stuff off the ground or from up higher, but he couldn't squeeze it so he fitted it with an electric servo.

[+Mosaica]

Thanks for the excellent posts! And boy, that forum search function sure is handy. I've spent most of yesterday reading the results of searching all forums for the term `handicapped.' Wow. The drama! Many of the issues that I've been pondering have already been delved into, and the discussions have been fascinating ..

 

RN: I'd be glad to hear more about your handcaching project. Feel free to email me regarding it.

 

Miss Pye: woo! Great essay over at Today's Cacher.

 

Flask: Yay, a VT cacher :-) Your name comes up often as I search my area for caches. I've taken the approach you suggested for nearly every cache I've done so far (writing the author of the cache to ask for more details) and mostly I have good results from that. Thanks for the invitation to relate a caching tale --I will! I'll post one over in that The Hunt / The Unusual forum, as that seems the place to do so.

 

Pto: I found the list you pointed me at a while ago --more info is cool. The list for VT did list one (the first one) that's actually in Alabama though. I love to travel, but that one will have to wait :-)

 

Chris S: I love your pal's ingenuity, not to mention his cool tires. My chair is a piece of junk, and I'm not likely to get a new one for a while, but I'm going to explore getting some alternate wheels.

 

Other than the specific wheelchair/accessible information that I've been reading, the one topic that leapt out at me was the LNT (leave no trace) discussion. For each of the caches I've searched for so far, it's this issue that's caused me the most anxiety.

 

I'm a self-professed tree-hugging liberal uber-conservationist type, and since I need to get out of my chair and scuttle along on my butt to get to the caches, I've been worried: my butt-print is substantially more, well, substantial than the foot-prints that most two-legged cachers will leave. Each of the caches I've searched for have been in wild & wooly forested areas, and while I work hard to erase evidence of my visit (I scuttle out backwards, using a branch or twig to disguise my, er, butt-prints.)

 

I've actually come to some peace about this during the past couple of weeks. I believe that while I do leave more of an impact (even with my twiggy disguise attempts), a single good rain/wind will generally erradicate my traces. While I still hear the internalized chiding voices of super-dooper-uber conservationists in my head saying: you're defiling nature with all your galumphing, I've decided that -I- am actually -part- of nature, and that it's Okay for me to be engaging with it, even on my less graceful terms. Still, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some cache owner to get mad at me for even trying.

 

Anyhow, I try to do my part --I'm used to picking up trash while out in the wilds, but it's amazing to find what is clearly cacher-trash out there! At the one I'll describe over in the caching-tales forum, I found SEVEN cigarette butts right at the spot where another cacher had clearly sat and written in the log book. As a former smoker who's been field-stripping cigarettes since she first learned how, it irks me to see people just leaving their stubbed-out butts around. Plus, these butts were so out of place that they were a clue. A stinky clue!

 

On a more humorous note, at another cache I found a perfect curl of pencil-sharpening shaving on a stone a foot or so from the cache hiding place. Maybe it's because I'm looking from a sitting position, but that pencil shaving really stood out, and I knew I was Real Close Now :-)

 

../Mosaica

[+briansnat]

I'm a self-professed tree-hugging liberal uber-conservationist type, and since I need to get out of my chair and scuttle along on my butt to get to the caches, I've been worried: my butt-print is substantially more, well, substantial than the foot-prints that most two-legged cachers will leave. Each of the caches I've searched for have been in wild & wooly forested areas, and while I work hard to erase evidence of my visit (I scuttle out backwards, using a branch or twig to disguise my, er, butt-prints.)

 

I wouldn't sweat that. Now if 10 people a month were scuttling on their butt to get to the caches, that would be an issue, but I don't think one person every few years is going to cause permanent environmental damage.

[GrandpaCannon]

I've actually come to some peace about this during the past couple of weeks. I believe that while I do leave more of an impact (even with my twiggy disguise attempts), a single good rain/wind will generally erradicate my traces. While I still hear the internalized chiding voices of super-dooper-uber conservationists in my head saying: you're defiling nature with all your galumphing, I've decided that -I- am actually -part- of nature, and that it's Okay for me to be engaging with it, even on my less graceful terms. Still, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some cache owner to get mad at me for even trying.

 

I agree, you are a part of nature and should not worry about making "prints" in the dirt. I can't imagine any cache owner complaining especially with the usual geotrails that often develop around caches. Your's probably won't be recognizable to anyone who doen't know what they are looking at.

[+Mud Puppy]

Your butt-prints are probably putting less pounds per square inch on the ground, so they will be erased faster than footprints that sink into the dirt farther.

 

BTW this thread has started me thinking, so I am going to ensure that at least one of my caches will be wheel chair accessable and will say so clearly in the listing.

Edited May 26, 2004 by Chris S

[+Mosaica]

Your butt-prints are probably putting less pounds per square inch on the ground, so they will be erased faster than footprints that sink into the dirt farther.

 

Mosaica . o O ( this is clearly a man unfamiliar with my butt )

 

:-)

 

Actually, I might be one of the minority who would prefer not to see a handicapped or accessible icon on cache descriptions. I've been reading (and reading and reading) much of the discussion that's gone on about this, and after reflection I think I'd prefer a system that's useful and informative to all humans, rather than one geared specifically toward handicapped humans. As many folks have already said, words such as `handicapped' and `accessible' and even `wheelchair-friendly' are practically non-useful because of the range of abilities present in the larger human community (that is, which includes various disabled people in it).

 

I'm looking, in these early days of my geocaching adventures, for a number of clues: the terrain rating is helpful (but only in a limited fashion because of differing abilities). Even more helpful is a good description of the general location (distance [roughly] to cache, woods, downed trees, gullies, streams, etc). And most useful are the responses I get to queries which I email to the authors of the caches I go searching for.

 

Since I'm more often in my kayak than in my chair, I'll often email to ask, for instance, if a given cache is reachable from my boat, or if I need to disembark and scuttle some distance on land, etc.

 

Anyhow, my 3 cents worth. I'm in a place right now where, while I value the usefulness of a disabled parking spot as much as the next gimpy chick, I'm sick to -death- of anything that seeks to confine me in any catagory, including that of handicapped/disabled/differently-abled.

 

../Mosaica

[+Renegade Knight]

Mosaica

 

Your ideas on terrain rating are where we are heading. While the intent is mobility, the result should be that anybody can look at them and say "today is a park and bag day, no hikes" and then they can filter out the hikes.

 

We have talked to one application writer to see if an embeded code is possible for a realistic terrain rating and it is. Next we need to figure out a realistic, simple, and useful terrain rating system.

 

I'll email you later.

[+rusty_tlc]

A buddy had a type of Mtn bike tire that has a narrow ridge in the middle and tapers away at the sides. On pavement only the center ridge touches but in dirt or any other soft surface the tire sinks in and the entire tread digs. On really soft surfaces he would let some air out of the tires to flatten the tread.

He used a small CO2 tank similar to this one to air the tires back up if a air pump wasn't handy.

 

 

He also had one of those garbage gripper things to get stuff off the ground or from up higher, but he couldn't squeeze it so he fitted it with an electric servo.

Maybe they call them comfort tires? Anyway that is what I have on my comfort bike.

[+Mosaica]

Hrm, I just had a thought.. I'm writing up the tale of my second cache hunt to post over in that The Hunt / Unusual forum, and it occured to me that even there I might need to be careful about spoilers. Is this correct? What is the ettiquete for posting stories about finding caches?

 

Thanks!

 

../Mosaica

[+flask]

well, there is this thing about spoilers. for instance, there are some things i will tell to a person of limited capacity that i will not tell to other people.

 

for instance, i have been emailing some cache owners about terrain lately because i have managed to damage my patellar tendons and i have some limits about terrain. when i am uninjured, i wouldn't dream of asking for information in some cases.

 

sometimes terrain information is a spoiler. and sometimes it isn't . the cache owner will best be able to judge how you can enjoy (or hate) the cache in as close to its intended form as possible. other finders may be able to tell you what you need, but they may be missing some subtle points that the owner would know. of course, if the owner is unavailable or unwilling to give you what you need, all bets are off.

 

there's a cache in which i am interested. i am willing to pile crutches in the car and a kayak on it if i'm going to need a boat. the kind of cache is a mystery to me, and for all i know, the usefulness of a boat may be part of the mystery. the cache owner has graciously agreed to tell me that i needn't go to the bother. no boat. terrain possible with my injury. but i had to think of it.

 

on the other hand, there are some completely able-bodied uninjured cachers who skip right to the hints and as many hints as they can get, which kind of circumvents the cache difficulty.

 

if i have a cache with a 1 or 1.5 terrain difficulty, i will usually say something about what kind of terrain one might encounter. i know full well that "handicapped accessible" doesn't supply a lot of information.

 

mosaica, it's admirable of you to sweep your prints. you are right to be concerned that they will be a spoiler for another cacher. you are also right to consider that you have as much right as anyone else to use an area. there are few absolutes. i think you are right on the money to minimize your impact AS FAR AS IS PRACTICABLE FOR YOU. AT THAT CACHE. AT THAT TIME.

 

if i visit a remote winter cache hours before a big storm, i do not bother to sweep my tracks. if i visit a convenient winter cache with no snow in the future, i may sweep my tracks with a broom as well as creating decoy search areas and false trails.

 

sometimes i back out over my prints, or use a regular hiker's. i try not to trample vegetation and i try not to leave things behind.

 

when you tell your story in the log, there are ways you can phrase things so that only people who have been there understand. for instance, good examples of this can be seen in wheel15's log for my cache "that sinking feeling" and in my log for "mississquoi multi".