Treasure Chest

[+Mathatalist]

I have posted this question at Texas Geocaching to try and get some suggestions. Maybe someone here can give me a little insight.

 

My desire is to place Treasure Chest around Texas. These chest would actually just be a code phrase inside a cache and I would snail mail the winner the the prize after they answered the phrase. I wanted to do 12. One each month. I am not rich so the total value of each chest would probably be less than $100.

 

Dapper Dan did something very similiar to what I have wanted to do for a long time.

 

The problem is some Groundspeak rules as I understand them. I would prefere not to have to create a new page for each chest. A single page that just keeps getting added to would make it easier for people to track.

 

I would not burry anything requiring a shovel or like item to get, but it would be covered or concealed very well.

 

I DO NOT want to give the exact CORDS. That kind of defeats the purpose I think. I wanted to give everyone about a 200' radius to start off with.

 

As long as the reviewer is honest and would not tell anyone I would be willing to give a revier exact cords or even take them to the site myself. (in the Brazos Valley)

 

Any thoughts, suggestions, phone numbers, e-mails? Someone suggested for me to try Terracaching.com because they might have a little more flexebility in there listing.

 

Thanks for the help

 

Mathatalist & Crew

Edited January 17, 2005 by Mathatalist

[+Mopar]

What you propose is fun, but it's not gonna fly here. It pretty much violates all the guidelines. There have been about 1/2 dozen like what you're thinking of done in my general area. They were not listed on any geocaching site. The hider set up his own website to do it. That's probably the best way to go. In a rush right now, or I would point you to actual examples.

[WH]

About a year ago, a local cacher by the name of geospotter set up a treasure chest type hunt called "Captain Kidd's Treasures". You can read all about it here.

[+Mopar]

I see WH got one of the one's I was thinking about while I was gone. The other one is here.

[+geospotter]

About a year ago, a local cacher by the name of geospotter set up a treasure chest type hunt called "Captain Kidd's Treasures". You can read all about it here.

Boy, those were fun!

 

Could you be a little more specific regarding your idea? Would the phrases be placed in existing caches?

[+briansnat]

Why can't you just make them regular caches, perhaps with the code phrase glued inside the lid...or on a card inside the log book..or mabe a stamped, self addressed coupon that can be mailed to you. First person to e-mail you with the code phrase or the person to mail the coupon to you gets the big prize and the cache stays there for everyone else to find.

[+Mr.Benchmark]

Why can't you just make them regular caches, perhaps with the code phrase glued inside the lid...or on a card inside the log book..or mabe a stamped, self addressed coupon that can be mailed to you. First person to e-mail you with the code phrase or the person to mail the coupon to you gets the big prize and the cache stays there for everyone else to find.

I suggested the same thing to him on another forum. However, there is a good reason for wanting to do a 1 time hide - you can do stuff that you simply CAN NOT do with a permanent cache. One of the Dapper Dan Treasure Chests I attempted was absolutely the most mind-boggling and amazing hide I'd ever seen. It was a multi-cache. The coords took you to the middle of a soccer field. There was no place to hide anything within 100' of the coords. People tried *all kinds* of crazy stuff to figure this one out. The hint was "In plain sight."

 

What it turned out to be was the coordinates for the final were encoded in the soccer field itself. DD had planted small, round plugs of rye grass at what looked like random intervals on the soccer field. But they weren't random. If you counted the number of plugs in each grouping, you got a digit from the coordinates. (The groupings were spaced pretty far apart - 20 feet or so.) This was hidden in the winter, so all you saw was a soccer field where the grass was dead except for a few, random looking patches. Looking for coordinates that covered an entire soccer field was not something anyone expected. Everyone was looking for something small, of course, not something colossally huge. No permanent harm was done to the field, either - the Rye grass dies off in the summer here, and grass from the rest of the field fills the dots right back in. No way this one could have been permanent, but it was amazing, at least in my opinion.

 

Not very many people figured this one out - 20 or 30 people looked for it on the day it was released.

 

I'm not saying you can't hide really tricky caches under the current guidelines - you can and people do it all the time. But freedom from cache permanence can be used to the hider's advantage. Also, since the point of these caches is the winner-take-all aspect, the location of the final might not make for that fun of a cache experience as a regular cache.

[+Monkey Toes]

I suggest you hide one in Victoria.