[Az-Geocaching] Failure and Suggestion

[Brian Cluff]

On Sat, 2002-08-24 at 12:20, Jerry Nelson wrote: 
> This game itself is so new that we are all newbies, although I suppose
> relatively speaking, someone who has been doing this close to a year or
> more is considered an old timer.  Those who are very new may not have
> noticed the "geocachers' etiquette" link on the snaptek site so visit
> http://www.azgeocaching.com/etiquette.html?gsc=8a2e851bf9c215e62974ea6cad
> d4f8fc
> if you haven't seen it.  Even though the last paragraph is still a bit
> controversial it states the reasons quite nicely for posting timely
> "can't find" logs after one try.  

> I love the idea of a "cachers code" to identify others.:o)  I also would
> enjoy seeing more accounts of experiences like below.  Can anyone here
> write fiction?  A story with a geocaching theme would have a small but
> certain audience.

How about, "It's a great day to cache in on" for a code word.

I personally just tell any other hikers that I might talk to what I'm
doing.  They are either not interested, or they might join you.

On the persid metor campout last year when I was at the bottom of the
rim after almost killing myself taking the "really quick way" to the
bottom, Jason and I ran into a hiker who was checking out the partially
finished railroad tunnel near the Rim RR depot cache.  We did some small
talk and then told him that we were looking for a geocache, and then
explained geocaching to him.  He was fascinated by the idea and proceded
to help us turn over the side of the mountain looking for it. 
Unfortunatly the coords were severly off, and it was pretty well hidden
so the cache wasn't found till a few hours later when a whole pile of
cachers attacked it and then found it by sheer luck after having given
up.

It should be fairly easy to get a day hiker into geocaching, they
already do half of geocaching,  we can give they day hikes purpose.

The only person that we went out of our way NOT to talk to was on our
very first geocache which of course was "Geocache" by dan since it was
the only geocache at the time to find.
Anyway, we parked on a wide spot on the road and started to hike towards
the cache.  We hand only gotten a little past the other side of the road
when a trans-am pulled up near my truck and a couple of shadey looking
characters got out and were looking around suspitiously.  I then got a
little nervous for the safety of my truck so we decided to go back and
move it somewhere safer.
The 2 men then went into the trunk and pulled out a rifle and a turtle. 
I then decided that I REALLY didn't want anything to do with a couple of
guys, scratch that.. sick asholes, that would use a turtle for target
practice.  We got the heck out of there and added .3 miles to our hike
by finding a better parking spot.  I still feel bad for the turtle.  I
can only hope they wanted to release it in the middle of the desert, but
were afraid of an attack from those Arizona desert rhinos that were
mentioned in that guys caches log.  Althought, if I'm going to defent
yourself from a rhino I'm going to bring something better than a .22
though would probably just piss him off.

Brian Cluff
Team Snaptek