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Don’t bother me with details like that!
Better yet, just point your flashlight at the Oregon. This will save on battery life. (of the GPS, that is!)
Actually, the map they are using is just a “boundary” for where they are looking to somehow acquire land. Unlike some of the areas in western Wisconsin, this area is chock full of cities and villages, subdivisions, agricultural lands, and industrial properties (They just barely missed my house with that map!) While I suspect there will eventually be “something”, my bet is on something pretty minor.
That said, the USFWS has basically banned geocaching (including earthcaches) on their lands….except for when they allow it (meaning when THEY want to place a cache). All activities in the refuges must be “Wildlife oriented”, so something related to geology (or just something for fun) is just not allowed by the bureaucrats involved. Note that camping is generally not allowed in these areas either. In theory, hiking is not even allowed, unless it is for wildlife watching. What I’m trying to say is that the chance of us being able to actually use this land for geocaching is practically nil at this point.
I have no doubt that this is possible, and I have heard of folks doing a thousand in 24 hours in some of the desert power trails. My only question would be….Why? This doesn’t strike me as a very enjoyable way to spend time, just driving down a road stopping at every pole. I guess it takes all kinds.
In the past, when we did Delorme runs, we always tried to be “efficient”, grabbing caches as close to the corners of the pages as possible. That was ok, but we did find a lot of guardrails, road signs, and other boring hides. Our last trip to the Eau Claire area, however, was different. After getting a PQ of the area, we selected the caches with the highest favorite rating on each page (and county) and ended up with a list of 16 caches to grab. While not all of them were amazing, some were really great and the others were at least “average”. The only problem was that did manage to find every permutation of bird house hide on our journey! On our way back home, we did a similar thing, running a “caches along a route” query and picking the 12 most favorited caches. Again, we found 2 or 3 awesome caches (and another birdhouse), and really enjoyed the run. I’ve now made up my mind that we will use this same technique for caching around home. It definitely increases the fun factor when finding.
@CodeJunkie wrote:
@smashing ground wrote:
The only thing I wish about challenge caches is that the person submitting the challenge also qualifies for it
I actually thought this was a requirement. I agree that it’s not right to place a challenge you don’t qualify for yourself.
It is not exactly a requirement. If you put out some sort of “normal” challenge, such as “find 100 multis”, it isn’t required that you complete it. On the other hand, if you put out something outrageous, such as “Find 10,000 multis”, you can bet we are going to ask you for some examples of people who have completed the challenge. I think it is technically possible to find that many multicaches, but I doubt that many have done it. And if you place something impossible (“Find 1,000,000 letterbox hybrids”), those just can’t be published at all, as the cache is technically not findable.
Looking at the caches pending for the event, I only see one with a high terrain rating, and that one appears to be…..questionable.
Well, a challenge cache is a “permtted” ALR. The idea was to allow caches like the Delorme Challenge, County Challenge, etc., that many people enjoyed finding. Unfortunately, people responded with a combination of mundane challenges (Find 10 multis) and stupid challenges (Find 100 caches with “Goldfish” in the cache title). I lobbied as hard as I could to have a list of approved challenge types (which could obviously be modified if someone comes up with a really good idea), but that was squashed because it discouraged “creativity”. From a reviewer perspective, I can tell you that we try to publish EVERY cache that gets submitted, including challenge caches. The rules are pretty complicated, but most people can adjust their page to meet the guidelines.
The only negative to these is that they sometimes take up space in areas that can’t afford it. If you don’t like these challenge caches, I suggest that you write the cache owner and express your disappointment.
Not sure if it is the case this year, but in years past, Wal-mart has allowed people to camp in their parking lot. Not a lot of amenities, but the bathrooms are nicer than many campsites.
Google is your friend….
@gotta run wrote:
Back in the day, with the “old” maps, I used to be able to do a search by city, then based on the results, there was a “generate PQ” option that would pull up a query generator with the center of the map as the center of the PQ radius.
Now I can’t find a way to do that any more. Am I missing it?
Assuming you have a premium membership, it is right below the place where you can filter out various cache types. If you hit the “Save as Pocket Query” link, it puts in the coordinates and the radius that is shown on the map.
Also, don’t forget that even the new Etrexes have paperless geocaching built in, at just over $100. They have added so much to these low end units that I would have a hard time justifying a more expensive unit.
Do I need to put in another rule? “No Picking on Becca”?
Or, you can just go here:
You can’t recalibrate the GPS part of your GPS unit. What is going on is that the Dakota (and others in the series) do some “averaging” of your location to make the signal look less “jumpy”. That just means that you will have to be a bit slower when searching, as the GPS response will be a bit slower.
You can recalibrate the altimeter (that is in your manual), but GPS altimeters are notoriously poor. I believe the Dakota 20 has a barometric altimeter, so that is about as good as it gets. Maybe you are the one with good altitude reading?
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