Surprise FTF

 I was caching in the Fort Wayne area while there for business.  I made a first visit ever to the town of Garrett and found a fun hide in a cacher's front yard.

I was really planning to visit Auburn for ice cream and a few caches, well mostly for ice cream.

Tasty Treats and  a toy Jeep to play in.

After the ice cream I headed to a nearby park.  There were a couple unfound caches there.  I found the first quickly than enjoyed a walk to the second hide.  I was surprised when I opened the cache and found a blank log book.

My first thought was owner maintenance.  Then I decided to check the phone for previous logs.  I was quite surprised to find this had been published two days earlier and was still unfound.  It's been an odd year for us with four previous FTF's.  One FTF in a year's caching is big for us.  Five is record setting.

The ducks were fun to see as well.

19,000 Finds

We were finally at our 19,000 milestone.  At the start of 2020, we thought we might make the milestone by the end of the year.  With COVID, we ended the year 100's short.  We still had the same plan as the day drew near, a find in Pennsylvania and a find with a terrain of at least three.  We knew of two hides well off the Tanbark Trail near an old camping area.  We had been here before and remembered the terrain was up to our expectations.  It was a grey day as we headed out on the Tanbark Trail.

Phin and I headed up for a path through the rocks wile Ali and Lizzie angled to meet us.

With past dogs we've been able to set the camera and take an image.  That isn't in Phin and Liz's nature.  Our test image was maybe the closest we've gotten with them on a milestone cache facing forward.

By the time we took "the image" Lizzie was distracted.  At least we had fun.

There was a second cache beyond this one.  We made a bit of a tactical error here by deciding to make our way through the mountain laurel rather than taking the high road over the top.  Anyone who has been in mountain laurel can imagine the pain when we realized the mountain laurel was not going to go away before we returned to the stream.

At least our journey through the mountain laurel led us back to the very pleasant stream.

Who knows when the 20,000 find will happen.  We will just keep enjoying the journey.

Fun Field Puzzle Cache

We found this fun field puzzle cache placed by a creative hider in Virginia. 

Logging the Locationless CITO

 We thought a bit about where we wanted to do a CITO for our locationless find.  The decision was actually easy.  We chose a stretch of the Allegheny National Forest along the Allegheny River.  This area was the home to our first cache many years ago.  We walked a long stretch of trail and filled much of two full garbage bags.  It's a beautiful location and deserving of having the trash removed.

Brokenstraw Creek

A nuthatch we spotted on the walk.

Our CITO efforts.  The dogs believed they helped.

This was a great idea.  I hope Geocaching.com makes this an annual offering.

Geocaching Love Affair...

 We stopped for a cache in a Pennsylvania State Game Lands recently and noticed this log...

We flipped the log book back to 2014...

Congrats to Chelsea and Mark!  💘 Geocupid hit the target.

Blue Switch

 We earned our blue switch souvenir.  We made a small circuit hike at Warren's Washington Park.

It seemed fitting to find a few ammo cans on the walk.

We stopped for a cache called Mountain Hollow II.  It was almost 16 years  since we had visited the park for the first Mountain Hollow Cache.

Geocaching in Ohio State Parks and Forests

Strouds Run State Park

Ohio State Parks has made changes to the state parks' geocaching policy.  It no longer permits placement of premium-member only caches with the following statement...

"Caches shall only be permitted if available to the public without a fee. Caches advertised only to a fee-based membership group will not be permitted."

                                       Barkcamp State Park

Hiders in Ohio State Forests are still required to obtain a special use permit for hide in state forests.

"Special events and activities held on a state forest often require a waiver of specific rules.  The chief of the division has to approve these activities.  Filling out and sending in this permit begins the process.

Examples of when to use this permit:

• Placing a geocache."

The site has no mention of geocaching in State Nature Preserves where geocaching has been typically off-limits in Ohio since the start of geocaching although there have been permission exceptions granted in a few Nature Preserves over the years.

Ohio State Parks offers great opportunities for hiding and finding caches.

Nelson Ledges

Still Practicing

I'm still improving my geocache puzzle skills with practice daily Sets.  😉

A Long Time

We stopped today for an ammo can find in a State Game Lands.  It wasn't a long walk.  It wasn't a difficult find.  It was the first ammo can find in a game land in over six months.  The last twelve months have been a strange, stressful, and sad journey.  We have been lucky.  At this moment all of our loved ones are here, and we are all slowly progressing through vaccination.  Hopefully there are brighter days ahead for us all.  Stay safe.  Wear a mask.  We are not through this yet.  May we all meet again to sit around and talk cache.

28 March 2021

19 September 2020

New Cache

 We've placed a new cache....

Our travel team Lucinda and Signal joined us for the journey.

We were happy we were able to take the GeoDogs with us.

Have fun.  Check out NASA's Mars Photo Booth.

Printed Containers

 We've seen a couple printed containers.  We recently found a trail of them.  All we have seen seem well designed and appear to have a chance at remaining waterproof.  It would be interesting to know how much one of these cost.  I spotted one printed owl cache container at Cacher's Corner Store.

Find Dates Shifting

 I started to log cache finds and noticed our finds calendar had changed.

This was the finds image from  December 31, 2020.

This evening I noticed our calendar grid had changed.

It appears that lab cache finds just shifted one day.  There were ten Adventure Labs at ASP Geobash.  The find date shifted from 21 May 2016 to 22 May 2016.  The Mega event was held on 21 May 2016.

😡😡😡😡😡

Back in Pennsylvania

With COVID-19 travel restrictions, almost four months had passed since our last cache find in Pennsylvania.  We were happy to be back and very happy to be looking for birds while geocaching.  Our second find was an older style ammo can in the woods.  How fitting...

The birding wasn't bad either.  😊

Someone's Hide Design...

 You can guess where this cache is going...

New, For Me, Puzzle

 A local hider placed puzzle caches based on the card game Sets.  I had not heard of the game and never seen the game played before.  I looked for information on YouTube and found a few videos.  They are informational, but they didn't really help me with solving these puzzles.  For my next step I looked for an on-line game.  I found the best way to learn with a daily on-line game.  I've even found all six sets in the daily game a few times.😂

With a much better idea of the game, I tried to find the best way to solve for the cache.  I finally decided on printing the twelve-piece puzzle cache "set".  I arranged six copies of the on-line "set" on a powerpoint page.

Once printed, I looked to identify a set from each group cutting out the three items making the set.  Once you have built six unique sets, you have a solution.

The individual tiles can now be grouped in like tiles which then provide information to easily complete the math portion of the puzzle.

I don't typically spend a long time on puzzle solutions.  The rest of my life's commitments don't allow me to work with puzzles that may take hours/days/weeks and yield no geocache solution.  With Sets puzzles, I can solve these in reasonable time and enjoy a fun find when I am in the area of the hide.  When we are allowed back in Pennsylvania, I look forward to placing one of these fun puzzle hides.

Barbie Lost Her Backpack

Barbie was hiking in the woods in New York and left behind her backpack complete with a logbook.

Goals

 Maybe it was just lucky that we never really discussed goals for 2020 beyond 35 finds in each calendar day.  We hope 2021 has a bright ending.  With that hope in mind we made a few caching goals for this year.  They are...

• 38 finds in each calendar day.  January will answer early if we can actually pull this off.

We need to cache over half the days in January to make this goal.  Our overall sight is 50x365.  We started 2019 with 138 days of 50 or more.  We ended with 156.  At the start of 2020 we needed a total of 2,462 finds for 50x365.  We started 2021 needing 1996 finds.

• 19,700 Total finds...  We toyed with the idea of 20,000.  We've made 1300 in multiple years, but life and responsibilities have changed.  1,000 finds will be a nice improvement over last year's 784 total and would mark the first 1,000 year find in three years.
• 2,250 3+ terrain or higher finds...  We ended the year at 2,107.  In a normal non-COVID year this would be an easy win, but our travels will be limited for a significant part of the year as COVID still prevails.
• One new state...  This would have been 2-4 in a normal year, but we have both agreed the only possible air travel will be for me if I must for work until the vaccine greatly reduces risk.
• 950 multis...  Four a month is doable.  It would be more if we were free to travel.

Our last goal is 426 events.  I set this one off on its own as we currently have 425 events.  Yes, we are quietly hoping we will be able to attend at least once this year say hello to our caching friends.  Our last in person contact with another geocacher was 29 March when we said a socially distanced hello to petroypa70 along a rail trail in Matua, Ohio.

Stay safe.  Cache well.  Make memories.

The Challenge of Using Plastic Ammo Cans in the Woods

Plastic ammo cans have been increasing in use for geocaching containers for a few years now.  They are now commonly available at many retail stores and on-line.  Many of them have issues with leakage and condensation, but the plastic itself is a challenge for use as a container.  We have seen the results of ammo cans chewed by porcupine and ripped apart by bears.  While these are easy to find and cheap to buy, they are not a great substitute for steel cans.  The images below are from one afternoon of caching in Shinglehouse at a Pennsylvania State Game Land.