Ewwww

There is just something wrong with an HQ Trackable being forced to move through the world....

attached to a piece of the other location based game.

We decided to not move it.

Fall Colors

There are lots of lonely ammo cans out there waiting for a visit. These were finds in Allegany State Park.

It's not too late, and it's a long time 'til spring.

And your geodogs will thank you!

Toledo Library Cache

I enjoy hunting library caches so on a recent trip to Indiana, I couldn't resist stopping for a library multi. The first stage was a container outside sending the finder indoors to look for a book on the card reader.

Uh oh, it's missing...

I needed assistance with this find. ;)

It seems the book was there all the time.

This was an elaborate and well done container. I was truly surprised to see the professional library cover on the spine.

Little League Geocache

While walking back to our hotel after dinner, we spotted sculptures on four corners of an intersection. Williamsport is the home of the Little League World Series. The sculptures were assembled to resemble a baseball diamond with home, first, second, and third bases. Each base represented some historical point in the history of Little League Baseball and the whole infield held the answers to a fun puzzle cache.

Home Plate

First Base

Second Base

Third Base

We had fun finding the puzzle answers on a mild fall night. We walked to the final during the day. If you are in Williamsport, this is a worthwhile puzzle sharing history of a significant part of many youth's summers.

Moving Cache...

Excuse me, but that ammo can appears to be a moving cache...

We were in Williamsport walking to dinner when we spotted this. Ali says she has seen bikes with ammo cans before, but this was new for me. I resisted the urge to open it up and add a log book. ;)

I Got You a Small...

When Ali found a cache with a different hiding technique recently and dangled the decon container, I thought of the State Farm shopping commercial and started laughing.

I Got You a Small!

Ooooh, you almost had it.

Visiting Cowenesque Lake

We recently made our second visit to Cowenesque Lake in northern Pennsylvania near the New York border. Cowenesque is a 500 acre lake/reservoir formed in 1980 by the Army Corps. The Army Corps has been wonderful in permitting caches at the reservoir. If you like old time caching with lots of regular-sized containers and twenty-two caches including a letterbox, three multis, and ten puzzles (two night caches) this is a great destination place.

The hides are well maintained and there are multiple parking lots available if you like shorter walks or miles-long trails if you want to leave the geomobile and roam.

Summer 2013 Visit

Fall 2015 Visit

Wildlife and wildflowers are plentiful.

Bring your UV light if you visit. You will need it.

We still have a few unfound caches remaining for a return visit, including a cache at Nelson Falls.

Two Years Lonely!

SGL #208: Cache at Night! was published in September 2012. It was found thirteen times up to August 23rd of 2013. Then it went cold. Today we hiked Darling Run and Turkey Path in Pine Creek Gorge. We were hoping for a few cache finds after leaving the gorge so we headed for nearby State Game Lands #208. We found our first cache after a quick trail walk. We made the wrong approach to the second cache and saved it for later. Next came the lonely night cache.

We couldn't spot the first tack at the start but working off the cache page information we walked off 200 feet increments hoping to spot a fire tack. We soon located one. It was the reddish brown type with very little reflection.

We walked for a long distance (well past the actual hide) and missed seeing anymore of the elusive tacks. I walked back to the waypoint for the first tack and switched flashlights. The first tack was a little brighter. I started walking and suddenly there they were. We soon walked the distance to the endpoint and began working through the directions and markings to find the final. It was many minutes later when Ali said she had found it. Success! Happiness! Celebration! This lonely cache was found. We signed the log, added an unactivated Volunteer tag for the next finder and were ready to head back to Wellsboro and dinner.

Two years is much too long for an ammo can cache to be alone and unfound in the woods.

The image doesn't do justice to the red glow at sunset ending the day. This nice hide will get a favorite from us when we log it.

Still Benchmarking

We've added three new states recently with benchmarks found. In Florida, we stopped in Arcadia and made a nice find at a traditional disk set in the grass on the Desoto Courthouse lawn.

The Enger Memorial Tower was one of the benchmarks we found on vacation in Minnesota.

Besides being a benchmark, the tower gave a great view of life on the water.

We also found our first benchmark in Wisconsin on the same trip.

Since the lighthouse is the benchmark, we could have found this one from afar, but we had a much better time dodging sprains and broken bones crossing the breakwall to get up close and personal.

We've missed finding benchmarks in a few states along the way, but we have found them in 21 of the 34 states where we have cached.

"Needs New Logbook"

We completed cache maintenance on cache in July.

Seven finds later the logbook is magically filled.

I never thought geocachers would slide to the point where we had to do this.

The Problem With Favorites

One third of all the finders of this cache gave it a favorite nod. It's very creative and very novel, but it doesn't meet the guidelines. If even a few of the finders take this buried cache idea back home and copy it in their area, that's a few more potential unhappy land managers. With logs like this it is bound to happen.

"Wow fricking awesome container had my hand on it several times before I decided to just check. You make the membership worth having for premium caches tftc."

"Omg nice hide."

"I'm in town from Boston for the holidays and finally had some time to go for a walk down the towpath this morning. What an awesome container."

Geocaches are never buried, neither partially nor completely. If one has to dig or create a hole in the ground when placing or finding a geocache, it is not allowed.
Geocaching.com Cache Listing Guidelines

It takes a profoundly creative person to make a super creative container that also meets the guidelines. Most of us aren't that creative. It is the reason why the best hiders are so special.

Goodbye Opie, We Never Knew You

In case you missed it, Garmin has pulled the plug on Opencaching.com. The "free" geocaching website which came alive in December 2010 expired quietly without a whimper. I signed up for the site to protect my player names, but never saw a reason to take a look for any of the few exclusive caches listed on the site.

To me, one of the biggest plus points of Geocaching.com is the Volunteer Reviewers who work to protect land managers as a big part of the review process. Opencaching.com was never able to provide that service. It tried to crowd-source the review process, but it irritated me to see the site admins ignore caches listed without permits in areas like Medina Parks and Geauga Park Disrict. They lost me early when one of their first seed hides placed for the launch of the site was placed in Medina Parks. It told me there was no concern for land managers. Like Munzees, it was a site that effectively supported caches placed in restricted areas with no effective infrastructure to prevent improper placements. I wonder what will happen to all the geo-litter.

The site had its supporters, but they were few. We were surprised in 2011 to see the North Country Trail GeoTrail NCTGT) placed with containers covered with Opencaching stickers and stocked with Opencaching pins (the image above).

Hopefully Garmin can get back to making a decent gps again. It was during their foray into geocaching website management that my trash Oregon broke. I gave in and switched to Magellan and haven't looked back. I stood by and sadly watched hundreds of dollars spent on a Garmin 62S that never worked properly. Ali finally gave up and lost a City Navigator license to that piece of trash. Maybe the company can concentrate on saving what's left of the hand-held market.

I won't miss Opencaching and Opie the Squirrel, but I do think competition makes all products better. Geocaching.com made some nice improvements during the Opencaching challenge.

Road Trip - Favorites

We're not very concerned about souvenirs on Geocaching.com. They are mildly more interesting than badges, but other than the state, country, and Mega souvenirs which represent caching memories for us, the rest just seem to be a promotional tools for the site. We've been participating so far this summer because we cache a lot and the requirements work for us.

Favorites have always been a lukewarm tool for selecting geocaches for us. Some caches with many favorite points are great caches and deserve all the votes they get. Others not so much. There seem to be too many caches with lots of favorites because they were near a Mega or are some sort of gadget cache which often doesn't meet the guidelines. Also total favorites doesn't really matter. The true measure of how much your cache is liked is the percent favorites.

I happened to be in Spokane and had an opportunity to earn our souvenir by finding a gadget cache made by one of the best. I had already found his first Little Free Library Cache by his home. This time he had enlisted a non-caching homeowner to allow a second placement of a Little Free Library cache. This one was just as well done as the first and well deserving of the 75 favorite votes and 77% favorite rating. I also got to visit with the kind and friendly landowner who permitted us to have fun on his property. Kudos to him and his family too.

No spoilers here

It's a super bit of craftsmanship!

I didn't expect to find two eligible caches on the Spokane trip, but I also didn't expect to have an hour free on my airport drive. I was looking for a multi and not expecting to find the grave of George Cache.

Yes, that is a real true stone marker some dedicated cacher spent money having engraved. It was very funny and surpising. It also has 67 favorites and a 77% favorite vote as of this posting.

So we have earned our Fun With Favorites Souvenir. It seems a number of cachers participated in this souvenir promotion. I am not sure why Groundspeak feels the need to add that we were "#129,454 of 274,222 to earn this souvenir." We would have looked for these caches with or without the souvenir. For a company that has always indicated it is not about the numbers, this seems to be a push to promote numbers and competition. I just hope this is not some poorly thought plan to replace Challenges with a weak souvenir game.

As of this post, we've "beaten" 144,768 cachers to earning this souvenir. That and 99 cents (plus tax) will get me a Coke tall boy at most gas stations after a day of caching.

Lamp Posts

I hope these weren't damaged by geocachers...

It's ironic, the cache page for the one at the top includes the text, "The cache is not in the pole. Please keep your hands out of the electircal wires." The cache is a pill bottle below a rock at the base of the light. It was obvious from twenty feet away.

The lower one is in North Carolina. The cache isn't even in the damaged light pole.

Red Jeep

I was a little surprised to spot a red Jeep travel bug in a cache recently. I thought all the Jeep travel bugs were in private collections by now.

This travel bug was actually well traveled for being one of the disappearing Jeeps. This one has logged over 14,000 miles and shows the miles in the scratched and missing paint. At one time the annual release of the Jeep series was one of the highlights of the geocaching year. We started in 2004 after the release of the yellow Jeeps which were the first annual series. Over the years seven of them passed through our hands.

For 2005 the colors switched to a larger white Jeep and my favorite of the series. Twenty white Jeep tb's passed through our hands including one we used in images to photoshop the geodogs riding in it.

The large white Jeeps were my favorites of the series. With the overwhelming number of micro and small caches placed now, the white Jeeps would fit in very few caches.

The green Jeeps were also a nice travel bug. They were available commercially as well so there were a few knock-offs created including our Stoney Man Mountain travel bug.

The red Jeeps were by far the least favorite of the series. While the first three were the highly popular and traditional Jeeps, the red one was a model of a Jeep that wasn't overly successful in its real form. The series ran its course and came to what appears to be a permanent end with the sale of Chrysler to Fiat after bankruptcy in the downturn. Too bad, the new Renegade would make an interesting model for a return of the series.

The Jeep trackables were a different time for geocaching. Now it seems many traval bugs and coins are gone within the first caches they visit while most promotional trackables never see the inside of a container (not that they would fit in a micro).

Steampunk

We recently found these two well done caches. Both are a tribute to Steampunk.