Geocaching Leather-man

When we started this hobby, it was to get exercise by hiking in remote areas. In order to push us to do it, we set a goal of 100 finds by the end of 2006. That number meant we only had to find a couple of caches a week. Sounds simple but our leather business picks up in sales around the end of August and gets down right crazy by November and December.

We knew we would have to push it during the summer and there were times when we were to busy to go hiking. Our solution was to go for caches that were simple hikes but to target 6 to 12 a day to make up the numbers we needed. We never hit 12 but did get 11 in one day. Our average day of hiking is around 6 miles but we did do 12 miles last month in a single day for only 4 caches.

This weekend we went caching both Saturday and Sunday. Saturday we hiked 6 miles for 4 caches back in the area in this post, Geocaching: The Highs and Lows . On Sunday we had to make up some ground so we went to the town of Victor, NY where there are around 20 or caches pretty close together that don’t require miles of hiking. After finding a few caches on the rails to trails system like this:

We both got pretty bored with the terrain, the scenery, the cinder trail beds and the vegetation. Maybe you get to see a curve in the trail and once we even went over a bridge and a stream. Other than that is just straight trails with few or no points of interest. We have gone to less interesting places while geocaching in order to keep our find count up. With our 100 goal in site, we are now wondering what we will do to keep our interest up for 2007. We do get exercise by going for the easy caches, but none of the places we have been while doing them are inspiring enough to warrant a return visit. I guess we are spoiled by where we live and the trails we have here. Traveling farther to be able to just hunt these types of hides would be tricky because of our limited free time and the price of fuel.

With less than 20 caches to find by the end of the year and so little free time to get them I’m sure we will have to visit another cache dense area for at least one more numbers run. For next year we may drop back on the number of finds we set for our goal but add a number of hides to the list so we can still get our exercise but by placing them and maintenance runs to take care of them. I’ll keep you posted.

Last weekend 7/23/2006 we set out a course for a twelve mile hike. Six miles up and six back down.

This hike was for four caches, two going and two coming back. It was a day full and we took some friends that had never been caching. This weekend we also got to watch some eagles flying above this lake which was the down side of the hike:

A couple of the hides were pretty tough and when we looked them up, they were hidden by a cacher here that is known for tough hikes followed by tricky hides. We did another of his caches earlier this year and it was in the middle of a quarter acre of briars.

This was the view from the top of the hike:

It’s a long way down there and for some reason, it is even longer going back up

Now that I’m about caught up I should be posting more often as time permits. In the mean time, HAPPY CACHNG!!

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During the month of July we did some great caches in our area.

The oldest cache East of the Mississippi is only 8 miles from our house and is named “The Spot“. It was a great hike and reminded us what this whole activity was like when it first began. That is how we have set up our hides and will continue to do it the same way even if very few people want to put in the effort to find a cache and have an interesting experience along the way.

Here is a shot of the lookout about 100 feet above the cache site:

When we were leaving the area a young eagle began circling us and singing all the way back to the car. It continued to follow and circle us as we started for home. All in all, it was one great day.

It’s been a month or so since I have had the time to post.

Yesterday, I moved the blog from Blogger over to this domain and set it up with WordPress. So far, I like the way this system works but it took a little scripting to get it close to what I was looking for.

We did a few nice, long hikes and there are some images to go with them. I’ll get them listed here in the next day or so as time is tight while we get ready for the Park Ave. Art Festival next weekend in Rochester, NY.

Just in case I haven’t said this before, I love this hobby. I have had nothing but good things happen so far and this may be one of them but it will take awhile to see just why:-)

On June 11/2006 we hid our second and third caches. The last one was the best one I have seen to date. We where hiking into a trail about 1.25 miles up the trail I stepped off to look for a hiding place. I found a couple possibilities and as I was getting things ready for the chosen spot I turned to get my notebook and there it was, the perfect spot.
I grabbed my things from where I thought I was going to do the hiding and moved them to the new location. Here is an image of my GPSr laying right in top of the hiding place:

The image above is what you would see coming from the trail to ground zero where the GPSr is laying. Here is another shot of the hiding spot from another angle with the 30 caliber ammo can in place:  

The image above is what you would see coming from the trail to ground zero where the GPSr is laying. Here is another shot of the hiding spot from another angle with the 30 caliber ammo can in place: 

Here is the ammo can peaking out of it’s new home:

We came home and listed the 2 caches we hid and waited like kids on Christmas eve. I just couldn’t wait to hear what people would say about trying to find the one above. The next morning I got an email saying one was approved, but not this one so I waited some more. Finally, on Monday evening I get the email. It said my brand new, perfect hide had been archived because I was on the NY State High Tor Wildlife management area property.

I knew I was on state land but I was sure I was off of the WMA by at least 150 feet, so I drove down to the DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) offices to give them the GPS coordinates so they could check the location and give me permission. Well, it looks like they added a 200 foot strip to that edge of the WMA and I had placed the cache 100 feet inside of that area.

I felt my heart drop. I don’t remember feeling so down and out about anything since my dog died. I waited until the next day to make the hike and retrieve my container. When I did I looked around and found a couple of other places off of the WMA but nothing as good as I had above so I just packed it in and came home.

In my talks with the DEC they mentioned passing the “No Geocaching” rule a year or so ago. They wouldn’t say why but my guess is they are trying to work out a way to make some money on this hobby that’s taking off. Only time will tell. I am keeping all of the information on the hide above so if they do open it to caching, I’ll be back there the very next day.

Happy Caching!!!

I spent a lot of time hiking the hills and trails in this area trying to find a challenging and scenic place to hide our first cache. Here it is:

 

Here is a shot of just the view from the hiding area:
 

We ran into a small problem as we were hiding it though.
After picking the spot, filling the container with log book, swag and notes we made the 1.25 mile hike up the side of this mountain and looked for the perfect hiding place. I saw the spot and went to hide the ammo box and get the coordinates for the geocaching web site and low and behold….There was another ammo box there. I got out the log book and read every entry. It seems that it was the end stage of a puzzle cache and because of that it didn’t show up on our cache maps. After hauling all of our things up there I wasn’t about to call it quits so, we signed the log for the cache that we found and went up the trail the required 528 feet and we were just about to another, even better, location.
This location is the one in the images above. So instead of hiding one today, we found one and hid one and found an even nicer place to put our first one.

I started this hobby in the winter when there was little or no tree cover , no insects or snakes and getting a fix on the satellites was a breeze.
This weekend we hit a few deep woods caches like this one:

I just love the hiking in this kind of terrain but getting a good satellite connection was tough.
This image was taken around 12 noon on Memorial Day. We encountered a few snakes and deer on this hike but the deep green colors of the spring vegetation are what stands out in my mind.
You just have to love Up State NY in the spring. 

I may be rather new at this whole game, but after less than 40 finds I have all ready found my favorite kinds of caches to go for and the ones I just ignore.

I started this for the exercise and not to try and out find or out number the next guy. A nice hike in a rural wooded area is right up my ally while lifting a lamp post skirt in a mall parking lot to find a magnetic key holder is a waste of time for me. Yes, I have found a couple of the lamp post micro caches just to see what they were like.

I have also cached in a couple of suburban parks and found that to be an OK experience it doesn’t come close to my preference of the deep, wooded hike where the chances of even seeing another person are pretty slim.

Perhaps in another 10 years or so when it becomes tougher to make the harder terrain hikes I will have a different attitude but for now this is the kind of place I like to do my caching.

Here’s another hike I took my grand kids on: 

They just loved the moss on the roots of this large tree where very few people have walked in the last few years. That not something you can experience hunting down micro caches in a parking lot. 

I first heard about geocaching on a television program about New York Outdoors.
They had a few people up in the Adirondacks with little electronic gadgets (GPRrs) looking for old military ammo boxes. It looked like fun so I looked up the term geocaching on the web and after finding the geocaching web site I began to read all I could.

It didn’t take long before I started hunting for the best GPSr unit I could find. I found a heck of a deal on Amazon for a Garmin Map 60c and ordered it.
Then I looked at the available software for working with the waypoints from the geocaching web site and settled on GSAK as it was a full featured product that was free to use but the author would disable a nag screen for a $20 contribution. After playing with it for a couple of days, I sent him the money as it would do every thing I needed and more.

The order from Amazon was going to take a couple of weeks to fill and I started getting antsy to try this whole thing out so with the aid of GSAK and reading the logs of several near by caches, I picked one out that I thought I could find and went out in early January to find it, sans a GPSr unit. It took a bit of hunting, but we found it, signed the log and came back home to log it on the geocaching web site.

The new GPS unit arrived at the end of January and we were off to the races, kind of. You see, we live in Upstate NY and when the unit came it was 5 degrees outside and we had about 3 feet of snow on the ground. I couldn’t just wait for warmer weather so I took a friend and we went to a county owned park about 40 miles from home as there was a introduction class into geocaching put on by the NY Geocaching Organization during a winter carnival there. By the time this event was to take place all the snow had melted and I wanted to meet some of the local cachers and try out my new toys. We went to the building where this class or introduction was to take place and we couldn’t find anyone to talk to about getting started. We milled around for about 15 minutes and decided to go out side where we fired up the GPSr and it showed us a cache about a quarter mile from where we were standing so off we went.

I didn’t prepare for doing this and had not read the description of the cache or any of the logs but we went for it any way. We didn’t see any path so we took off through the woods in search for the container that we new nothing about. It didn’t take long before the GPSr said that we were 10 feet away so we started looking around and there it was right in from of us under a log. We pulled it out, signed the log, I dropped of a little leather key ring and we closed it back up and hid it again. When I clicked on the “Found It” section of the GPSr so I would know which one to log when I got home, an option popped up “Go to Next”, I clicked that and another one showed up another quarter further away so we went for that one too.
It was another pretty easy find and my friend and I decided to call it a day and to meet up again to do it again some time.
When I arrived home and looked at the map of where we had been I saw that we could have driven the car to within 100 feet of both of these hides instead of hiking. I wanted to get into this for the hiking. When I go back to that park, where there are 15 more caches, to find the rest of the them I think I will find a central place to park and find them by hiking and not driving around for the quick grab.
Since that first day I have made up a special trinket to leave behind. Of course it’s a leather key ring with my caching name on it.

Before I go off on all of the different levels of geocaching and tools that are used I’ll start with the basics.

So, what is it?

It’s a game that involves the use of a Global Positioning System receiver (GPSr). Some one hides a container and records the latitude and longitude coordinates for the container. They then post that location on a web site. You see that posting and pull out a GPSr and go looking for the hidden object or cache.

Where is this web site?

geocaching.com

What’s the point of this activity?

For me, the point is to get out of the shop or office and back in the great outdoors to get some exercise. Others do it for the competition of finding more caches than the next person.

What is in the containers?

That depends on the size of each container. The largest ones may be five gallon buckets and the smallest ones could be little nitro pill containers. For the most part, they each have a log book or paper for you to sign to prove you were there. In the larger ones there are trade items like toys, coins, tools and personal signature items.

What kinds of things to you trade?

I always leave a leather key ring with my geocaching information on it and maybe a small toy or two. There are a lot of children that love to do this with their parents and finding a hidden box with a few toys to trade for can be exciting for them.

How hard is it to find a container?

The smaller the container, the harder. The best containers I have found so far are military surplus ammunition boxes. They may be pretty large, but hiding them is half of the fun. Some of them are hidden in hollow logs or under piles of rocks and others are camouflaged so well you can look right at them and not see them. The hunt is one of the best parts for me.