Geocaching, geocoins and the many roads of life.
This is made up of stories from my caching and my reviewing. It is a collection of those along with comments and thoughts. Photos, and maps of some adventures and lists of some of the oldest caches.
I put together a list of Utah's oldest 100 caches.
Actually there were 99. I realized after I was done so oh well.
Guess what ... Potters Ponds is still the oldest cache. Hopefully you have found many of the caches that are on the list.
I have had so much to do in the last few week that I have not had a chance to do anything. Despite having the plan to sit down and pound out a few notes, thoughts, and ideas, I never had (took) the time to sit down.
I have had a few really good caching trips this last week. It includes a run through the new Sienfield road about 200 caches that run from Payson to Mona and back up over the mountain to link with the 
Shakespeare/McGyver road caches. I think that makes a string of nearly 400 caches in length. Peanuts Parents is the cacher that spent a lot of time getting it all put together. It took me about a week to get them all done, working them in with others so as not to delay them all.
I went with family and was going to place a few caches in the Richfield area, but never got around to it. But never really had time. I wanted to place one on the peak, but did not make it.
I came back from a break to find well over 100 caches for me to go through. Lots of new people with problems. So I do not know how many will actually be listed.
If you sent me an email I have not really gotten to it, likewise if you had problems with your cache it may be a little bit before I get back to it. I will work throught the new ones before I stop and really go through my email much until that point. So hold on and I should get through it today or tomorrow, and start dealing with my emails. I know if you have an issue that can be annoying, but bear with me.
Wow things seem to move fast.
I updated my stat page today. With many of the stats that I have tracked for the last sixteen months. I am a stat junkie. Things of note..
For me.
For Utah
It will be interesting to see if Letterboxes keep up the rise and match the numbers of Earthcaches in the future.
I wonder if we will keep up the growth, we seem to keep growing faster and faster. Will we have 2300 by next year? Will we slow down?
Well no more boring stats today.
In trying to find a way to make Geocaching more helpful,
a week or more ago, Geocaching added a few more attributes to the mix. I wish more would use them (Including myself) this allows people to filter their Pocket queries. Many of the new geocaching GPS units are also allowing the use of the attributes.
Most of them are self explanatory.
Night Cache.. woo hoo. many wanted it as its own separate category, but this is where it ended up.
Park and Grab. For all those pesky ones on the side of the road, and the emergence of power trails.
Abandoned Structure. For all those people that like old buildings, bridges, and other such items (like me)
The hike distance. Nice to let someone know how far they will need to hike to actually get the cache.
Dangerous animals. I am sure this is because in many parts of the world snakes are not the animal that you need to worry about.
UV Light Required. Though this is not common around here. It is very common in Europe.
Snowshoes. Obvious. I am trying to figure out when this one would be used. 10 feet of snow and it is waist high with snowshoes?
Cross country Skis. Woo Hoo Cervine girls winter ski event will have its own attribute.
Special tool Required. HAHAHA I love this one. For some strange reason.
Well that is all for this small installment. I will be posting some stories of events coming up, along with some stories that I have gathered.
I use it more an more now as time goes by. I do not think I would have been this kind had I written the review a week ago, but as I use it more and more and take the time to play with it, I am really pleased with how it works.
The biggest drawback for me was loading a gpx file. When I spent 15 mins for a small 500 cache GPX I was starting to worry about the program. I liked everything else. But i was really disliking that one thing. I decided that I was rarely going to use it. Then when 1.0.1 came out I decided that I would take the time to do it again. 2 mins or a little less.
Apparently there was a crash on the droid systems. I am guessing that the UI was interfering with the phone. Until Google gets a handle on those kind of issues it will plague all android devices. If they let every phone manufacturer tinker with their own version of the UI you are just asking for disaster. That was a good example.
I think the biggest failing now is with those from other countries. Once again Google strikes. There is no market to pay for apps in other countries. This means that people in most of the non North American market will not be getting a paid app for some time. Time to get on the ball Google.
Geocaching could do something on their own, but it requires that the owner of the phone turn off a security feature that keeps a bad program from being loaded on the phone. Phones are set by default to only be allowed to download apps from the app market. Anything else is trudging in grey areas. You do not know what you could get. They may have to play on the workaround.
After playing with 4-5 software suits c:geo, geobeagle, geohunter, columbus, and another that I cannot remember. This is my favorite so far. There are features of others that I liked but this appears to be the best considering that it is a 1.0 version. It is fast and easy once I got the hang of it. The others seemed kind of messy.
I will be more happy when you can pick up and drop off trackables. It will let me pick them up in the field and that is something i want now. I was playing with an app that would do that, but gave up after a little bit.
I have not had a crash since 1.0.1 so hopefully that luck will continue. I find myself using my Oregon less and less. I do not field note on my Oregon at all now. I log directly from my phone. I sometimes will post a note when I want more than a line to the cache owner. If I want to post a bigger story I will wait until I get home.
Love my phone, love my android, love my caching. It all seems to come together.
Android Geocaching App - Part 1- Initial Impressions
Android Geocaching App - Part 2 - Searches, Trackables, and Settings
Android Geocaching App - Part 3 - Geocache Navigation