I’ve had a few folks get bent out of shape recently when asked about the nature of their submitted geocache.  Basically what we are looking for is:

– A description of the container and hide.  This can be something like “A filmcan hanging in a pine tree”, “An Ammo can in a pile of sticks”, or “A small lock and lock thrown in a bush”.

– A description of the hide location with any permission information.  This can be “in a parking lot with permission from Joe Smith, manager of Walmart”, “in the Root River Parkway with permit number 123 from Milwaukee County Parks”, or “along the side of the road, accessible from the shoulder, so no permission should be required”.

– Explanation of any puzzles and translation of any encrypted text.

Why do we do this?  Well, we are supposed to be checking for guidelines issues and placement accuracy.  Since we started, we have found several cases of buried caches, a couple “drilled into trees”, a cache that wasn’t actually there (they were trying to place a virtual, but that wasn’t clear in the description), and quite a few permission issues.  Additionally, we have found many cases where the coordinates were off wildly, but appeared to be in a logical place.  It also makes publishing the caches much more efficient, as we don’t have to try to puzzle over what you are trying to do.  Occasionally we will still check the land records if it appears that your explanation is incorrect, but mostly we won’t need to.  After all, YOU know where you put your cache and whose property it is.

You can save yourself some time by using the Note to Reviewer field in the cache submission form.  We only need a sentence or two.  If the information is already in the cache description, or we can somehow figure out what you are doing, we won’t hold up your cache, but it is much safer just to use the reviewer note.  Please understand that these logs are deleted when the cache is published.  Also, note that if you use a regular note (rather than a reviewer note or an enable note), that will NOT be automatically deleted.  We try to catch these when people make that mistake and manually delete them, but they have occasionally slipped through.