i stumbled upon a cache at the nature center where i worked, right before i left it to be a cartographer full-time. symbolic? maybe.

it was two years, however, until i bought a gps unit and started caching.

a month later i hit 100 caches.

a month after that, i hit 200 caches.

the holidays slowed me down, and now ive decided to hibernate, mostly, until warm weather. Ironically, I chose to host an Event Cache in the bitter cold! ROFL!

Like many, I first learned of Geocaching from the cable channel program on “Lost Treasures of America” or something like it. Intrigued, we soon had a Legend from Amazon.com.

I often use the Legend for driving directions, even use it when I know where I’m going cause I’m geeky that way. Flying to Florida in March and can’t wait to turn the thing on in the plane and know what I’m looking at.

I too was at Lambeau, GO PACK, on Sunday.
Cold weather doesn’t get to me as much as the wind does. Wind chills below zero would keep me inside, but my two young sons keep us indoors for most of the winter, unless it gets balmy.

I Bought my first GPS back around 1993. I bought it to use for hunting and fishing. Marking lake structure, deer blinds, parking spots. I soon found myself looking for more uses for the GPS.

My love for the GPS soon led to a keen interest in topo maps. I liked to find interesting features on the topo map and then firgure out the Lat/Lon for the feature. I bought one of these Lat/lon templates, with the minutes and seconds of lat/lon on the clear piece of plastic. Once I determined the lat/lon of the target, I would program my GPS and try to find it. I still like to do this, and have found some interesting spots. Once such spot was Muskelunge Tower in Vilas county, where I have since placed a cache.

Around 2000, I was researching mapping GPS units. The Lowrance Globalmap 100 was one of the first units to have the maps on a CD-Rom. Most of the others had pre-programed chips you had to buy by region. I found a great website dedicated to GPS. The Website is GPSinformation.net This is a great website for comparing GPS units, or finding anything you want to learn about GPS.

On the GPSinformation website, the was a link to Geocaching. After viewing Geocaching.com, I became very excited. This looked like a great new use for my GPS, and would give me an opportunity to put it to the test. A quick search of the website revealed about 8 Geocaches in Wisconsin. The Closest two were Kbraband’s Pike Powder hike, and New Prospect. The next day I picked the kids up from school, and told them were going to find some treasure. We found Pike Powder Hike first, then drove up to New Prospect and found it as it getting dark. We were hooked ever since.

It’s never too cold to go geocaching. The only thing that has kept me away is deep snow, and rain. There isn’t much use in searching for a cache is it’s under 2′ of snow. Writing in a log book while it’s raining can lead to disaster. Damaged books, and muddy cars. Last January, Ken and I found some caches in -20 degree weather, and strong winds. It was a blast

GrouseTales:

kbraband:

[This message has been edited by GrouseTales (edited 01-12-2004).]

We first learned about caching in the Journal Sentinel while Geoff was laid off of work. He showed me the article and it looked interesting so we went out and bought a GPS. Now we’re caching-junkies.

We haven’t used the GPS (Howie) for much more than caching. We’ve played around with it though to find out the hunting/fishing information and the sunrise/sunset info. We recently used it to find out how much the speedometer is off on a classic car that Geoff’s dad bought.

We cache all through the winter. Not as much, but we’re still on the trails. Sometimes we ask ourselves why we’re subjecting ourselves to the elements, but we’d do almost anything for a “find”.

I orginally bought my GPS for hiking and was learning how to use my new Garmin Legend and stumbled onto geocaching.com online. I saw that there was a cache .8 mile from my house in an area I knew quite well. Off I went and after discovering that the North numbers went up as I went north and the West numbers went up as I went west – I found my first cache in the most primitive of ways. I was hooked on day one. When I got the welcome message from Trudy & the Beast I laughed at their suggestion that someone would do 400 caches in a year . I figured if I did 40 that would be a lot. Needless to say I managed to meet their challenge.
I also use my gps for traveling and mapping. Much better then a paper map.
I also take it on vacation as my play toy on the beach. For some reason I thought it was neat in Jamaica last spring to see the altitude number go from 3 feet to zero as I stepped into the carribbean. Guess I am easlily amused sometimes.
How cold to not cache? I guess no day is too cold as long as there is a cache to be found.

I learned about it from my wifes cousins who are active Geocachers in the Milwaukee area.

I crew for an SCCA ProRally team and have used the GPS to find the fastest way to our driver/co-driver/car when they run into problems.

The cold doesn’t bother me, as long as I’m prepared for it. Best thing to cache in is a nice steady snowfall =) I’ve never cached in the summertime actually. Not sure I’ll want to as I have this unhealthy fear of snakes.

-Brad – Team bjs539

Our sister-in-law stumbled across a link to Geocaching.com while searching a weight loss site. Since both my brother and I both already owned GPS’rs (he for fishing, me for both fishing and hunting) she thought it might be something we would be interested in. My years in the service provided me with a background of map reading and I’ve always had thing for maps. I had an extensive collection of topo maps during my service years and even taught map reading and navigation. When I saw my first GPSr I knew I just had to have one. My decision was justified during a duck hunting trip with a neighbor to the upper mississippi. We were caught miles from the landing with a thick heavy fog that came out of nowhere and dusk approching. To say it saved our lives would be a stretch, but it did keep us from spending a cold miserable night out on the river. He was so impressed, the next week my neighbor went out and bought his own. I still haven’t been able to talk him into caching….yet! Cold? I guess around 20 below would be my cut off. The snowcover would be more of a concern, both in finding the cache and leading muggles to it.
Bob

[This message has been edited by Cashing Out (edited 01-12-2004).]