Todays Buzz

I went to the zoo today.. to see fruit bats. Yep apparently.  I also went to see the Lions.  I did not see any.. any.  Are they still there? and I remember the penguins as having 20-30  this time I saw 6.  What is the deal?  I felt ripped off.  Tons of parrots.  Why?  apparently every pet owner drops off their parrot when they cannot handle them.  They get lonely and neurotic and start eating your house.

No caching today. Though I did prepare for a 190 cache series to be listed.  I just need to reach the time and hit the magic button.

I did list a few today, but they were ones that I was working through with other cachers. 

Sadly I finished archiving about 1oo caches.  About 75% were because the caches were to close to others.  Another 20% were because they just needed to tell me where they lived, so I could make sure they could maintain them, or give me some maintenance info because they lived a ways away. and the last 5% were a mix of small issues.  In National Parks, Wilderness, etc and never got around to moving them.

So live goes on. Tomorrow I should have a small group ready to go. Yes.  the fun will begin in earnest. and a caching trip with friends.  Lets enjoy the day, a holiday even.

NEEDS ARCHIVED!!

I recently was asked by someone why one cache was archived quickly and another is archived weeks later after someone placed a needs archived note on them. I thought I would take a moment to shed some light on my thought.

I should say that I save every needs archived email that I get.  I narrow that into four categories.

1. Are you kidding?  This category is for odd or dumb things.  Cache appears to be cracked, you saw a snake near it.  The cache is still there, and perhaps deserves a needs maintenance.  I usually ignore these altogether.
2. hmmmm maybe.  You report the cache as missing. Perhaps you are the first one. Or it is a high difficulty.  With these I place in a folder to look back on them in the future.  Seeing if there are more needs archived notes, or if the owner responded. 
3. Looks missing.  In this case we have an active owner or a number of DNF's. Perhaps the NA note was placed some time ago, and the owner has not responded.  These usually mean I will place a note for the cache owner to take a look at the cache or it will be archived.
4. Gone.  This category is for those that people have checked back on, is not there, and the owner is not active.  Poof.  the cache will go away.

All of these can be adjusted by certain factors.  Difficulty, number of DNF's, did experienced people visit or new cachers, has someone visited that found the cache before, type of cache, is the owner honest (yes some lie to us - shocking), etc.  All of these can adjust things.

Note:  if a cache is archived it can be revived.  I bring back a few each month that a cache owner has went out and fixed.  It is subject to a re review, so  it has to meet the current requirements.  (that is why virtuals, webcams cannot be unarchived). 

Hope that helps? any questions feel free to ask. (no specifics please)

Piles of caches - and What to watch for.

Wow.. today was one of those days.  Once and a while I get a ton of caches to review. Usually it consists of 5-10 people putting out 1-3 caches each.. and maybe one with 6-7.  So a heavy day is made up of 35-40 to go over.. and about 30-35 will get listed.

New people seem to have the most trouble.  That is expected.  Usually it is missing home coordinates or too close to other caches.  Less often are caches that I catch that have a business in the name.  They pop up because people think it is cute to use a nearby business, if it is a bigger company I usually catch it.

Today was one of those days.  It seemed there were 20-30 people or more listing many caches.  In the end I think I counted 52 caches that were listed with a lot that were waiting to have a few fixes by the cache owner.  That is a lot. More than I normally do.  Outside of times people were putting out a power trail this appears to be the biggest day.

So how can you get you caches listed?

The process is pretty simple.

1. Proximity.  Make sure there are no other caches around you.  Load them in your gps.  Then when you get back home do a search for the coordinates.  If you are not a premium member when you do a search it will pop up. it will not tell you its coordinates, but it will tell you SW 522 feet. Remember 528' is the rule.  There is no longer a "across the river/freeway" exception. There are some that are given, about 1-2 a month.  Usually for something dramatic, or they are a few feet to close to a puzzle, or be new. 
2. Avoid homes.  If you are publishing in a residential area, expect questions.  GPS units can be 50-70 feet off.  Are there clear hints? Is it your home? Are the neighbors aware (remember 50 feet off can be on their porch).  Do you mention you have their permission.
3. Colleges.  Every college student wants to place a cool ammo can labeled "grenades" on campus.  Welcome campus police and bomb squad.  They should know, use a clear container, or make it a micro, oh and label it.
4. Commercial.  Pizza Hut cache, or Zion's Bank Cache will not get listed without permission from groundspeak.  If you place those in your cache page you will get a similar result.  You will get tied up waiting for permission.
5. Challege caches.  Did you complete it? or is a number of people able to.  Prove it. Put the info in your description.  Oh by the way, it cannot be a list of Bobs, or your own caches.  Unless Bob has 300 and you want people to find a small number (but not your own).
6. No travel bug Prisons.  Travel bugs are not yours, THEY ARE NOT TRADE ITEMS.  Did I say THEY ARE NOT TRADE ITEMS.  You cannot say take one, leave one.  You can ask, but not tell them.  Personally if I run accross a prison, it is time for a Jail break.  If you are carrying 20 of them around, please set them free.  That is the goal, not for Bob to carry them.

That is pretty much the major things I run across.  Hopefully these help. Oh by the way there is one thing that you should remember.  Patience.  If I have a question or a problem I move on.  Why have a load of caches waiting because someone wants to hide a camo taped pvc pipe in a the bushes by the courthouse 300' from another?  I will spend time writing it up, so I move on. 

I may have some concerns and I email another reviewer for their opinion, or put it on the reviewer forum for all of them to give their ideas.  I also may not review for a day.. or two. I do have a life and go caching, or get out of town.  So a delay may be for a few issues.

Emailing every 120 minutes will not help.  If there was some issue, please post notes on the cache page.  If in a few days no response is coming along email me.  Give me the GC code so I can find it.  I have over 350 caches on hold right now (some waiting to be published others for issues).  Yes I do need to clear them out.

Thursday night.... the mountaintop.

This last week was very fun and very enjoyable. 

Thurday night was one of those geocaching adventures that you remember for some time. 

Jacob had called about heading up the canyon.  I did not have anything else planned and my wife was taking the kids off to seven peaks and I was going to be home alone, so off we went.

The goal was to get some information for an earthcache or two up the canyon.  On the way we decided that we would place a few as well.  There was a side road that we followed up and we each placed a cache that overlooks Diamond Fork. 

I love to just find odd names for my caches.  It tends to make them a bit more memorable, and stand out.  My caches named country roads will not stand out to anyone, but Geezerfable or Flippy Widget the Gas Hog may make someone chuckle for a moment.

Well this time the new caches was to be names Blimey my Knickers are Showing.  Jacobs new one a little ways a way was Fork of Diamonds.

There were a few more that we put and and a few more that we found on the way. I wanted to get some information on doing an Earthcache.  So we slowly worked our way up the canyon to find a few of the caches and grab some as we went. 

My favorite on the trip was the cache The Sun Also Rises.  There were a few families there rapelling down some cliffs that were nearby.  A few were climbing, but most were rapelling and just wathing them.  We worked our way up the canyon and up a side road, and found a sun carved in the side of the sandstone cliff. It was actually pretty cool.

I snapped the picture here of a natual arch that is forming.  I wonder how long it will be until it colapses or it forms into a nicer arch.  It looks like a number of people have been climbing on it.

The we ended up at the place that I wanted to make the Earthcache at a spring in the side of the mountain. A sulpher saturated spring.  It was really quite impressive, for a little spring.  It did stink. Pretty bad actually, and a bit of a bog around.

Then the sun started to go down.  There was a bit of debate on which side would be easier to descend.  Diamond Fork or Hobble Creek.  We were heading uphill so off she went. We grabbed one or two caches on the way up.  Then we decided that we were near the highpoint of the trail we might as well descend the Hobble Creek side. 

As we aproached the hilltop we stumbed upon a surpise.  The trail that went to Mollies Nipple was open.  We sat there for a few minutes looking at the trail before we decided to drive up the road.  There were a number of logs dragged accross the road.  I assume it was the farmer trying to keep kids from joyriding up near his cows.  I was the slave labor to drag them off the road.

The bouncing went on and on.. and it got darker and darker.  We finally pulled into a group of trees.  It was very dark at this point.  We scrambled for batteries, lights, and a few thinks as we scrabled up the hill.  I was wondering if we had made some horrible mistake climbing the hill at night.  The oak brush and the wild roses surrounded us for the 15 feet that we could see.  So up we went.

A few minutes later I heard Jacobs voice.. "here it is" I was pretty sure that we would not find it, and had debated wether a hike to a small peak in the middle of the night for a cache that had not been found for three years was a smart idea.  I figured that it would take another trip in the sunlight to do any good.

So there we stood on some mountain.. in the dark signing a log.  It was kind of surreal. Sadly my phone had died and I had no pictures on my phone.  I had made jacob grab his.  So we did grab a few pics.

We wandered down the mountain and had a good time.  It was a great evening.  It had been on our lists for a number of months but we could not force ourselves to do it.  It was just a chance that it was open tonight.. and the choice was made.

Geocaching Blogs

In the last day I did a search of blogs, looking for ones that I thought would be interesting.  Here are a few that I ran accross.

The Mad Cachers Geocaching Blog - Nice looking with a pretty good amount of info.

GeoCache: I'm NOT Obsessed... Right? - Has some neat ideas for containers. 

Mikes Geocaching Blog - From Oregon, and has some great descriptions of his trips/cache runs. One of the better bloggers.

Iowa Admins Geocaching Blog - From Iowa ... duh.  Another reviewers blog that I ran accross.

Mtn-man's thoughts - A former reviewer here in Utah, and still reviews and plays as moderator in the GC forums.

Geocaching Online - Nova Scotia Canada.. a blog from our northern neighbor.  Good day eh.

Last but not least

Latitude 47 - The offical geocaching blog.  It even featured a Utah cacher in the Geocaching caption of the week.  Dr Jay

Update on 2010-07-16 06:02 by firennice

Of course tonight I got told there was another I should know about

Jac0bs Geocaching  - From our local cacher... he takes pretty cool pictures.