Posts Tagged ‘Geocaching’

February 2008 Geocoin Club Geocoin

This is the February 2008 Geocoin Club Geocoin. Wow, what a mouthful. It is a pretty neat coin. I like the back, but since I don't know how to cover up the tracking code and still get a neat photo, I'm not going to post it. I believe I snagged this one out of the  One in, One out cache in Sandy. Whatever it was named, it was under the skirting of a light pole. :p

This particular geocoin belongs to Ad0or. The Ad0or team consists of a couple named Jacob and Helen. They are pretty avid geocachers. I believe they have over 6000 finds/hides. They really seem to enjoy hiding micros. Some of them are pretty tough. He drops a lot of them in trees, and we are getting pretty good at finding those. The down side to looking for Ad0or caches is that the cords on a couple  of them have been off by quite a bit. When I found this coin, I vowed to hang on to it until I found a micro that he had hidden in a three story parking garage. It sucked, because once we got the cords, it could have been on any of the three levels. Add to it that the cords were off a bit. It lead to three attempts on my part, and even more on my caching partners part to find it. Even then, it was only achieved  with the help of a hint from another cacher.

So if you want to find the "So, here's to you" cache, it is located on second level of the staircase. It is about the size of a large pill. It is magnetic. When you come down the second set of stairs it is up high and on the left. More or less under the top staircase, but more on the frame of the cage.

Now that I've found it, I've got to release this coin back in to the wild!

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Uckermark Geocoin

This is the Uckermark Geocoin. I didn't actually retrieve this one. A friend of mine hiked up to the snowshoe cache and found it for me. The picture doesn't do it justice. It is a really beautiful coin. This particular coin has a pretty generic goal to travel the world. It belongs to tokencollector and was released in North Carolina on Sept 12th, 2007.

I deposited it in a local stargate. So hopefully it makes an international jump some time soon. I actually dropped of 5 coins in the hope that they are moved around the world. Interesting thing these stargates. (loved the movie and the series by the way). I was under the impression that things needing to move would be marked. However, I took 5 coins and once I logged them I discovered that 4 of them have international hopes. So I'm thinking the system is flawed. Or, at the very least the box needs to be emptied more frequently so that outbound items are not picked back up by people like me. I'll be making the 30 mile drive again next week to drop off the items I apparently pinched. Incidentally, I also dropped off that California Poppy. The Stargate (assuming it works) will get the swag closer to its goal than my dad can.

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Unite for Diabetes Travel Bug

This is another one that is close enough for me. I think that if it had someplace big enough for it to actually hold a legible number they would have slapped it on there and called it a  geocoin.  The goal of this coin is to spread awareness of Diabetes.

I picked it up in a rather unusual cache. There are tons of caches hanging in trees. There are plenty of ammo boxes  stuffed under  bushes along trails, here in Utah there are even quite a few hidden at the base of lamp posts. However, you don't just find a lot of caches in the middle of a parking garage. It wasn't even a micro. (Yipee) It was discovered in a pill bottle that had been wedged in a gap in the support wall. Very creative. It was all the way down by the ground and was covered with bits of dried grass. I love finding urban caches that aren't micros.

We went back a few days later to drop off another coin and someone had stuffed it in the crack about waist high,  fully exposed and empty. I think that maybe it had been muggled.

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Wood GeoCoins

This coin isn't trackable, but it was still cool to find it in the cache. I want to say it was the second coin I found for the day. I didn't take it though, I just snapped a photo. I figure with so many missing geocoins I could leave this one for someone else to find. Besides, I can keep a photo, guilt free.

This was a quick cache. We literally pulled in to the parking lot right in front of it. As soon as we got there I knew where it was. Under the box at the base of the street light. I've never seen caches hidden this way until I moved to Utah, although I don't think I've ever noticed a box around the base of a street light before. At least not one that moved. However, this seems to be the preferred hiding spot locally. Well, that and micro's in pine trees....

The first one we found like this was actually pretty funny. My cohort in crime and I wanted to be first to find. So,a t ten pm we headed out to the cords. The cords, put us dead center in the middle of an empty parking lot. THere were two strips of grass with a few sparse bushes, a light pole, and not much else. We were bickering over where it could possibly be when the sky opened up and the hail began. I didn't expect this to be a long hunt so I was underdressed for the weather. So was my friend, but it didn't stop him. I watched him wander aimlessly around the parking lot while I sat in the warm comfort of the car. As it turns out, he's a hard core cacher. Eventually the hail let up and joined him in his hunt. I think it took us about 40 minutes. Kind of hard to be discreet when hanging around an empty parking lot for that long. :p

Eventually he wandered over to another light pole. The box was loose on that one and when I saw him pick it up, the light came on and I turned and lifted the box at the base of the light right next to the car. There it was, a brand new empty tube. All that work, and we didn't even get to trade. But, hey, they can't all winners.

Now whenever we see a light box at the cords it is always the first place we look. More often than not we find the cache.

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Custom geocoin

This coin is the first one I found. I know, I know, you thought the poppy was the first one I found. The poppy is the first trackable coin that I found. This one can't be tracked, so I get to keep it. I found it in the Bear Creek Bridge Cache. I didn't even have the GPS with me. I looked at the geocaching website, saw there was one in the area and commented on it when I took my kids up on a hike. It took my son all of 30 seconds to find it. He disappeared under the bridge and popped up a few seconds later with the container in his hand. My friend was with me and he was all "what's that?", and then I got to tell him all about geocaching.

I signed up to geocache a couple of years ago. In the few weeks since I found the Bear Creek Cache, my friend has surpassed me in caches found. It is an addictive hobby. Its almost become a competition between the two of us

I also need to sit down and have a chat with my son. This isn't exactly Oregon. He really needs to look before poking around under things. There are lots of snakes here in Utah. As a parent it is always fun to put enough fear in to the kids that they remember to pay attention to their surroundings, but not so much that they don't want to go.

Back to the coin. I am assuming that this is a signature item. A signature item would be something that someone buys (or makes) a lot of, so that they can leave the same thing in every cache they find. At least that is my understanding of it. So far I've found a cool wooden chess piece, some wine charms and now a geocoin that 3 costco guys had made up. I don't currently have a signature item, but I think I should. I think I need a really cool coin.

I give you: 3 costco guys:

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Try Something New! Geocaching Art!

Bored? Have lots of time and a GPS? Creative? Very creative?  Then this hobby may be your thing.

Take your gps and map your co-ordinates to create an image.  The artist below decided to do a self portrait.  Very ambitous!  Me, I would probably do a square or something.  =) 

Earlier this week, some Swedish dude got a lot of notoriety for pretending to "draw" a planet-sized self-portrait using GPS tracking. Today, we bring you a Finnish guy who is doing it for real, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale.

Antti Laitinen has used a GPS to "draw" his face across maps of various European forests and cities. He started by tracing his portrait on a map. Then, with a GPS recorder in his pack, he started trying to walk the line he drew, using just a map and a compass to get his bearings. (The GPS was just for recording his path.) When he was done, he uploaded the GPS path to his computer. The result: A self-portrait of the artist as a drunken psychotic. But hey, GPS lines are a little wobbly.

"All pictures are different even if i used always same photo," Laitinen said in an email to Wired.com. "Because  in the cities i cound't go through buildings and in the forest there were lakes etc. And in the forest it isn't easy to go the exact route just with the compass and the map."

Laitinen repeated his project in a variety of locales. Each of his walks took about 6 hours and covered about 30km (18.6 miles), he says. He assembled all of the "drawings" into one composite image that, he says, "starts to look a little bit like me."

Read the rest of the article on Wired

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