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When we were at Crater of Diamonds State Park they told us the best tinme to visit is right after the field is plowed or right after a rain. You should be able to get their plowing/tilling schedule to help determine when to go. If I remember correctly they plowed it weekly, but can’t remember which day.
I’m on Facebook, and joined the Madison Area Geocachers group a while back. Didn’t realize that there was a WGA group out there, too.
PCFrog,
Were you ever able to get your PQ to run? I just created a new PQ with the route and it ran, sending me the email in less than a minute.
I don’t know much about benchmarking, having only found a couple, but it sounds like fun and I’d like to learn more. I don’t think discussions about it belong in the EarthCache forum, though. A forum just for benchmarking would be nice – you might get more people hunting and discussing them if they have a specific place to go ask questions.
We had a great time at the event last year. The ability to download the coordinates the night before, or even early the day of the event, would be really nice. Maybe add in some ice-breaker games, like cacher bingo, for something to do between the time the sheets were handed in and the time the prizes were drawn. It seemed like most people sat and chatted with their group – there didn’t seem to be much mingling going on. Maybe by then people were too tired to mingle anyhow.
We probably would have gone even without the big prizes, but hanging around for the prize drawings did cause us to eat at a West Bend restaurant instead of heading out of town right away.
The Natchez Trace is a pretty area, but since much of it is a National Park I don’t remember there being many caches along it, especially if you like hiking. There is a public route on GC.com of the entire trace, if you want to use ‘caches along a route’ as quick way to see what’s available.
The Arkansas Ozarks are a beautiful area and would provide lots of hiking opportunities.
I’d suggest checking out the Land Between The Lakes (LBL), a national recreation area just past the tip of Illinois in Kentucky and Tennessee. There are at least two EarthCaches there, plus lots of other caches to do, too. Hiking, fishing, and history all abound (I’m starting to sound like a commercial). We were there mid March last year and the temps were in the 50s then.
Not too far away from there is New Madrid, MO where the big midwest earthquake occurred in 1812. Lots of EarthCaches in that area – most on the Kentucky/Tennessee side of the Mississippi river. Most are new since we were there so I don’t know how good they are, but I remember ‘Earthquake Lake’ GC112BZ was pretty interesting.
When we went last year we drove all the way down to New Orleans, where there are some interesting EarthCaches explaining the levee breaches. We made it down and back home (Madison area) in a week, but a lot of people don’t like to as much driving in a day as that required.
I hope you have fun where ever you end up going.
Lisa
A great map to use is World 66 – http://www.world66.com/myworld66/visitedStates. You can select the states visited and they give you the html to put in your bug’s description. Once its in the description its easy to add more states – no need to go back to World 66 each time a new state is added. To see how the map would look you can check out my TB Forest Four Wheelin’
Oh yeah – the camera !!!! 😯 I keep the camera in my regular caching bag, not the EarthCache kit, so I completely forgot about it when thinking about the kit. Definitely need the camera. 😳
In my EarthCache kit I have a pool thermometer – get temperature of water at a spring site, pH testing kit – measure pH of a stream, measuring tape (stiff metal one) – depth of a spring, measuring tape (soft cloth one) – wrap around a rock, compass (school type for measuring angles) – estimate angle that rock has been moved from horizontal, and a notebook for notes. Its all kept in a one-gallon jug – to measure rate at an artesian well. I’m sure there are other handy tools that I don’t have yet.
The kit doesn’t take up much room and stays in the trunk of the car so its there if I happen to be near an EarthCache.
It depends.
Around my home area I include everything active & unfound by me with less than a 5 terrain rating (we have no boat/canoe/kayak) and unknown/mystery. For unknown/mystery I have a PQ that I’ve never actually submitted to get an email, but use that to list puzzles. Once I’ve solved a puzzle, it can be solved on site, or is just an ALR I add it to my solved bookmark list, and have a PQ of that bookmark list run weekly. I then slice & dice the caches in GSAK.
If going with my nieces & nephew out of my home area then I run a PQ for that area, eliminating multis, mysteries, and micros, none of which they like.
If just traveling through an area for some other reason (not a caching trip) I’ll limit it to traditional, virtual, and Earthcache with lower terrain rating, since I know I won’t have much time to cache. I tried to eliminate nanos, which I don’t like much, but lost the Earthcaches.
If headed to a cache dense area for a while I’ll create a PQ like the home area, but try to eliminate nanos, which I don’t like much (again, losing the EarthCaches).
I could get everything for everywhere and just use GSAK, but having a lot a caches in GSAK slows it down and it seemed to crash more often on me when I had tons of caches loaded. I’d also have to set up more PQs to cover the same amount of territory if I include pretty much everything.
For me its easier to exclude the caches up front in the PQ that I know I’d eliminate in GSAK, rather than running lots of PQs, getting a big, slow database, and in the end not loading most of the caches to the GPS anyhow.
Not only do EarthCaches require some preparation, they also often require special equipment. Even if the info is printed or loaded into a PDA, if it requires a measuring tool, thermometer, pH tester, etc. and the cacher doesn’t have the equipment, the cache gets skipped.
Its more likely that the nearby regular cachers will have something at home they can use, but if tsomeone’s just driving trough or just happens to be in the area its less likely that they’ll have the needed “stuff”.
Another possibility for some of it – I had changed my PQs to exclude ‘unknown’ container types to try to eliminate the tiny nanos that are often listed as unknown container around my area. That also eliminated EarthCaches, even though I had EarthCache selected as a cache type. Others could be inadvertently excluding the EarthCache from their downloads if they did the same thing.
Check out the Travel Wisconsin fall color report. Shows a map of Wisconsin counties and how close to peak the colors are:
My favorite decoded hint:
See the image with the caption, “The Cache Is Right Behind You!”
Which would be fine if we weren’t out in the middle of the woods with no computer or internet access.
I have a TB, Prancin’ Pony that has 19,182 miles on it. I started it off near home, then dropped it in a cache in Thailand. From there it made its way back to a cache only 10 miles from home. Around the world in 6 months! Unfortunately it was then taken to California where it promptly disappeared. I really hope that some day I can mention this TB as one that was missing for years, only to resurface again.
The most miles one of my currently moving TBs has is 8,145.
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