[Team Deejay]

There are several virts in the WGA Recommended Caches bookmark list. That is a start.

[Team Deejay]

It is a state park program. Not much info online, so I’d suggest you call the ranger station.

[Team Deejay]

Upload your “myfinds” PQ to inatn.com and then check it. Or, some nice person might actually do it for you…. Link See what you get for publishing your stats in a public website…

[Team Deejay]

The strange thing is that from all of those locations (except 2, I think) you can walk a trail that would have taken you to the event. You cross the Ice Age trail on the way to the juvenile facility, which would have been the most athletic approach. Remember that for next time.

[Team Deejay]

I just did a quick review of the “revisits” in the month of September. There have been 34 revisits. Of those, 31 were owned by owners who had either found or placed a cache in the months of August or September (note that 19 of the 31 were for 3 particular owners, none of whom would be remotely considered inactive). Of the remaining 3 caches, all their owners were logged into gc.com during September 08, and one is still a premium member. I don’t think any of the owners would be considered delinquent.

I suspect you are referring to one specific cache. I would suggest that you post NA logs on that cache whenever you feel it needs it, and I can guarantee you action will be taken if it meets the standards.

[Team Deejay]

From what I can discern, the LaCrosse event is being run without “experienced” help. I have been getting quite a few questions from the person running the event which indicated to me that they didn’t fully understand the process. That said, they are planning on making nearly all the caches permanents. I just hope someone is maintaining them after the event.

[Team Deejay]

You can try this one if you want. It is what I use. Right click on the following link and save it to your macro directory.

Delorme Macro

This will go through whatever caches are displayed in your current filter and change the Userdata field to the Delorme page number. Note that if you have anything else in this field, it will be wiped out. (Some people put counties in this field.) If you have caches in the filter which are not in Wisconsin, they will be ignored.

Note that this is NOT a public macro, and I have not uploaded it to the GSAK website. I don’t feel this macro is of sufficient interest to “the general public” for me to maintain support on the GSAK boards. On the other hand, I am more than happy to share it with my friends in the WGA. Just don’t blame me if you hose up your DB.

[Team Deejay]

I too like this idea, but unfortunately openstreetmaps is not the answer. This site suffers from several “fatal flaws”. First, the software is really designed to upload “trips”, rather than routes, and therefore requires accurate timestamp data for the upload to succeed. If someone created a GPX with multiple trips combined into one map, the software fails as the timestamps just don’t make sense. You could theoretically edit the GPX file to adjust the timestamps, but that is painful enough that most people would not want to do it.

Second, the site has no search functionality. None! And even if you find a track you want by scrolling around on the map, you cannot find that particular file to download.

My thoughts are that the world needs a “trails to tracks” database, with good search/upload/download capability and built-in file conversion between GPX, Garmin, Magellan, and Lowrance file format (and probably others I haven’t thought of). I see no reason to limit the scope to state parks. In fact, I would suggest that county parks and state wildlife areas are probably a greater need. I have played around with the concept only long enough to discover my web server doesn’t support PHP, which seems to be a requirement for this sort of thing. I would also need a server supporting Unix scripting to allow GPS-Babel to be incorporated “under the hood”. I haven’t had time to dig into getting a different server, but its just a matter of getting enough time to do the design.

FYI – I first approached this looking at creating custom Garmin maps instead of track files. This was just too time consuming and not practical, plus, it leaves out probably 80% of the GPS owners, considering that many low end units have no map capability, and, of course, other brands cannot use the Garmin format. I am 100% in agreement with hogrod that track files are the way to go.

[Team Deejay]

Not to mention that REAL geocachers are not stopped by rain, snow, hail, heat, cold, ticks, mosquitoes, deer flys, bears, alligators, or any other obstruction. Unfortunately, my parents are having some serious health issues which will prevent our attending this year. Find a couple for us!

Dave and Julie

[Team Deejay]

I’m sure we’re all happy that you chose to be responsible and return the cache to the site. We were all new at one time, and everyone makes mistakes. Come on down to the picnic and meet everybody. I’m sure you will have a good time.

[Team Deejay]

We found a cache last weekend in Ashwaubenon with the hint “Watch Out for Gangs!” We both chuckled about this, but we did stop and talk to the group of kids hanging out by the parking area. They knew all about the cache already (something about seeing strange people bushwack into a group of tightly clustered pine trees for no apparent reason…) and took us to the cache. Not everyone out there has bad intentions, folks.

Another example: I was heading for a cache hidden on a pedestrian bridge over I-43 in a relatively poor section of Milwaukee. (No gang warning on this one 😆 ) As I find a parking spot, I notice a significant number of teenage boys wandering around the neighborhood. Since I was driving my old pickup, I figured there wasn’t much to lose, so I decided to go for the cache. As I was getting out of the truck, one of the boys approached me. I thought “Uh oh, what is this about?” He handed me a postcard size flyer and asked “Would you please vote for my mom? She’s running for alderman.” I thanked him for the flyer and for helping with the campaign (her opponent in the race is now a felon convicted of bribery and extortion). Just shows that there are a lot of good people in the world, even in the “bad” neighborhoods.

I guess my point is that, even though these caches were in “bad areas”, there is no reason to remove them without the owners permission. Presuming to know more than everyone else, without bothering to go through channels, is not only arrogant, but just plain wrong.

[Team Deejay]

I don’t want to go into all the details, but the cache is located in Fond du Lac. If someone wants to go out and replace this one, let me know and I will fill you in. I do have the coordinates for the final, but I do not have the coordinates for the second stage (the first stage is virtual, so you should be able to determine where to go).

[Team Deejay]

Actually, if you look at the new “hide a cache” page, there is now a link to the “Clayjar” site for rating caches. I think this shows Groundspeak’s intent to try to standardize on some sort of system. Unfortunately, most people will still not use it. To be honest, the difficulty rating is completely subjective. I kind of think there should only be two ratings: One star = Cache I can find, and Five Star = Cache I can’t find. 😀

Terrain, on the other hand, is fairly explicitly called out in the Clayjar system. For a cache to be rated 1 star terrain, it needs to be paved, flat, less than 1/2 mile hiking and no overgrowth. As someone who has done just about all the 1 star caches around my area, I’d say about 40% meet this standard, 50% are actually 1.5, and the remaining 10% are 2 star or higher.

[Team Deejay]

Just for clarification, I wasn’t referring to incorrect or not very helpful hints, but those hints like “you don’t get a hint”, or “Ha Ha, you wasted time decoding this”. Technically these are not allowed, but we don’t hold up a listing for just this.

On the other hand, STUPID hints (Parking locations, “Don’t fall in the lake”, “Don’t forget to mark the location of your car”, “Across the street from Lee’s Deli”) we generally leave alone.

[Team Deejay]

1. If the owner is active, contact them and see if they want help. Some people are just slow at getting out to pick them up. It is also possible that they are maintaining the listing on another site, or as a private geocache.

2. If you find a cache which has been involuntarily archived, submit a mission to have it picked up. Those are probably NOT being maintained by their owners (which is why they were archived.)

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