A Day With Debaere: Eight Geocaching Types and a Benchmark

I really love geocaching... can you tell? Then add to the fun in a combination of geocaching with friends AND going for a particular goal makes for a fantastic adventure. So when good buddy Debaere (Dave Debaeremaeker) asked if I wanted to try and pick up eight different types of geocaches in one day... I was geeked.

A real Durham Bull!

That's right we went for a

• Traditional cache
• Multi-cache
• Puzzle cache
• Whereigo cache
• Virtual cache
• Earthcache
• Letterbox hybrid cache
• Webcam cache 
• and also found a Benchmark ta boot. 

HeadHardHat with Debaere in the background...

The cool thing is it all really was just for fun. To see if we could do it without it turning into a major pressure cooker. It really was not. We had a great time which also included a good lunch stop somewhere in the middle of the day. All in all we clocked about 60 miles or so and ended up finding a bunch of traditionals in a park after we reached our goal. That was just as the sun was setting.

So all in all, tons of geocaching greatness. Had fun with Debaere as always, got up-close and personal with a bull (don't ask), had a great tour of downtown Durham, NC, managed to parallel park in front of witnesses and not make a complete fool of myself (plus), geocached all around the Durham, Apex, Raleigh area and added several firsts to my geocaching career. Awesome!

Big thanks to Dave "Debaere" for the invite. Looking forward to many more!

-HHH
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Tonight on Geocaching World (RVNN.tv) - Viewer Request: Puzzle and Mystery Geocaches

Join Us Tonight 6:30pm EST LIVE on Geocaching World (RVNN.tv) a Viewer Request : Puzzle and Mystery Geocaches.

Many geocachers absolutely love these mind boggling geocache types while others won't give them a second glance. Where in the world are they popular and where not? What is an example of your favorite types and why?

Let us know your thoughts and we get them on tonight's show. You can view the show LIVE either on the Ustream chat room here - > http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rvnn-live  or my personal Google + Hangout. Just follow  +Andrew Smith here -> https://plus.google.com/u/0/100208679823468674324/posts

See you tonight.

HHH

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Puzzle and Mystery Geocaches... Do You Do?

It has always been interesting to me how there is such a difference between the United States and say for example Europe when it comes to Mystery and Puzzle Geocaches.  

In many other countries besides the US a good ole' Mystery cache is craved to be discovered and yet in the USA I have seen the exact opposite. Now I am not talking in absolutes here. There are plenty of geocachers in the US that love to pursue Puzzle Geocaches but as a norm, not so much. We tend to like the traditionals while the rest of the geocache types are found with much less frequency.

I am curious as to why. Do we as geocachers prefer the quick and easy instead of actually having to use our brains? Is it intimidating to have to solve a logic problem or heaven forbid a mathematic formula? As a joke I have stated in many a conversation, "How do you stop 30 geocachers in their tracks..? Give them a math problem :)". It would be sad but I have actually been there during an event and never saw so many blank faces pop up during a puzzle cache we were all trying to resolve. So is that it, we give up or don't try because we are intimidated? I will be straight out and say there are Geocaches in the Raleigh, NC area that I just stand their and shake my head. We have six or seven major colleges here and a lot of the professors are geocachers. I don't stand a chance but I do try. At least if I can't do some of the more complicated mathematical ones I do love the other problem solving ones. 

How do you feel about Mystery and Puzzle Geocaches in your area? Are you a save them for a rainy or snowy day kind of geocacher or do you even try at all? Are you a mystery guru and eat them up? What are your favorite types? I would really like to know what you think.

-HHH

Behind The Scenes: Geocaching World (RVNN.tv) Episode #906 Puzzle Geocaches - Meet and Greet

One of the advantages of writing my Behind the Scenes posts for Geocaching World (RVNN.tv) is usually I can replay the show right away (because it gets recorded) and I can then type while watching so I don't miss anything. Welllll, the show was recorded on RVNN.tv's side so you will get to see it early next week but it didn't get recorded on the Ustream side. So I am going to have to wing it. Here goes.

Had a really jam packed show last night with our special guest Michael Weiner from geocaching team TeamDotOne. We asked Michael to come on because our show was about Puzzle Geocaches. TeamDotOne has over 9000 finds to their credit with a bunch of them being Puzzles. In fact they had just traveled that day from Ohio to Arizona to complete several puzzle series and power trails.

Speaking of power trails, a large portion of discussion with Michael discussed power trails. Creative Director, Dave Dufour was intrigued by the fact that a geocacher could obtain the number of geocaching finds from a power trail in one day. Michael went on to explain that they planned on doing the Route 66 power trail and get over 800 geocaches in a single day. Was neat to see Dave light up like that with those types of geocaching prospects.

After we finished out Meet and Greet talk with Michael we gave away two prizes from one of our Cache Stash sponsors CoinsAndPins.com.  The first was a top end Lanyard and the second was a really nice Angel geocoin.

During tonight's episode we officially kicked off the Brazos Walking Sticks Giveaway contest where any of our Geocaching World viewers can enter to win one of Brazos "Traveler" Walking Sticks. Details if you go here:
http://headhardhat-geocache.blogspot.com/2011/10/get-your-geocaching-world-signs-ready.html.
The contest goes from now until the end of day October 18th. The drawing will be done live on our show October 19th, 2011. So get your entry in soon!

Oh yeah, we had a theme to tonight's show which was Puzzle Geocaches. We discussed the two basic types which are either the ones where you have to figure out the coordinates to find the geocache or once you found it you had to get the logbook out. Tons of information but you will have to see the entire episode to get it all!

Again a packed show with a full chat room of geocachers and a whole lot of fun throughout. Again the show should be released to iTunes and all our distributors early next week. Stay tuned!

You can join us each and every week as we record Geocaching World on Thursdays at 6:30pm EST. We meet up in the chat room here: www.ustream.tv/channel/rvnn-live 


If you are a company who would like to participate with our Geocaching World Cache Stash Sponsorship Program and donate prizes for our show please email geocache@rvnn.tv for more details. 

See you next week. -HHH



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Solving A Puzzle Geocache - Bring on the Android Apps.

It was an amazingly nice spring day recently and as I was finishing my lunch I sorted over some of the geocaches that were relatively close to me. For whatever reason a puzzle cache series caught my eye. There were three in total and all with the same first name. For example lets call these geocaches Geoseries #1, Geoseries #2 and Geoseries #3.

Geoseries#3 was a puzzle geocache and to resolve it you had to find the first two and somehow come up with the final coordinates. This sounded like fun and a great way to spend a few hours geocaching. What I did not realize at the time was all the tools that I would need to get through the series. Fortunately for me I already had them on my Android phone. Let me show you how.

Geoseries#1 was a traditional geocache. The terrain was pretty rough with the amount of thick briers one had to go through to get to it. Yet once I did the find itself was pretty straight forward. To do my geocaching on the fly I used my Android phone and a Geocaching Application. There are several out there and many really well done ones are free. If you are a GroundSpeak die hard you can pay your $10.00 for their geocaching application. I will be doing a complete review of the GroundSpeak App in the not too distant future. The point is, if you do not have your GPSr with you, having a geocaching application on your phone is a sweet way to go.

Once I found Geoseries#1 I was given instructions on what I needed to do next. The OP set up a "target" for me to find and some coordinates to get there. In this case there was a sign with some words on it. After a short drive and search I was able to write down those specific words for use later.  To save the words exactly I used my Smart Phone Camera. Cameras are pretty much a staple on just about any mobile phone out there and with the afford-ability of SD cards for storage we can take thousands of photographs. This is also a really nice tool to have with you while geocaching.

Geoseries #2 was done the same way as Geoseries #1. Inside was another set of coordinates and another target to find. Again I took pictures of everything including the clue cards which gave the instructions. I did not want to have to come back through these dense brier patches.

With all the information now in my hands, err, camera. It was time to do some problem solving. What needed to be done initially was the words found on the signs were to be converted to numerics. To do that was a simple conversion where a letter needed to be substituted with a number. For example, A=1, B=2, Z=26. Now I could have taken the time to write all 26 letter-number combinations but I happened to have GCC: Geocache Calculator on my phone. This app has over 80 different encryption decoders at your fingertips with one of them being this format. All I had to do was plug in the words found earlier and I instantly had the numbers that I needed.


Finally all was needed was to take the numerics I had just decrypted and compute a mathematic formula which was in the description of the geocache itself. Again using a geocaching app to verify everything was great and to do the computations I had my handy dandy phone Calculator. The next thing you know I had the coordinates for the final geocache but was my conclusions correct? In this particular case the only way to know that was to go and find the final geocache. Luckily for me I was correct and my prize was waiting for me. There is however a really cool geocaching validator available called Geochecker. What geochecker allows is for the geocacher to put in the correct answer to the puzzle which in this case is the coordinates and see if you are correct BEFORE actually taking the chance at being incorrect.

So there you have it. A really sweet puzzle cache series that needed a series of tools now easily found right on your smart phone. Now does this mean you have to have a smart phone to go geocaching? Not at all, just remember that if you do attempt puzzle caches that you may need to bring some other ways of resolving them as you go geocaching...

See you out on the trails...

GeoCache: I'm NOT Obsessed... Right?
http://headhardhat-geocache.blogspot.com/
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Let Me Tell You A Story About A Geocacher Named Whitemithrandir

You have heard me say it in the past and I am going to say it again here. Geocachers are some of the nicest and most friendly people on the planet. Geocaching in itself is a fantastically fun activity but when you include other geocachers with you, it brings a whole different level to the game. Here is a prime example, I would gather you have had similar experiences.

My good buddy CarolinaTrombone and I were out a while back working on a brand new series of geocaches. For me it is one of the most fun that I have ever been on. While we were out looking for one of the 22 some odd  components of the series we stumbled upon another geocacher looking for the same one. His geocaching name is Whitemithrandir. We all saw each other about the same time, smiled and knew what we were all up to. After shaking hands and introductions we started looking around for the elusive geocache. While we were scraping at bases of trees I of course started asking general questions, hey it's what I do. Whitemithrandir has one of those instant like personalities. He has a friendly smile and is the type you can just kick back with and shoot the breeze. After a little while we found the geocache and traded the information needed for the series amongst ourselves. We asked if he wanted to follow along but unfortunately he had to move on but invited to go with us on some other day.  Later that day I received an email from Whitemithrandir giving me his phone number of which CarolinaTrombone and I immediately asked him if he wanted to go out the next day to finish the series. The rest is how they say - history.

This series was amazing and had us climbing trees, scouring woodlands and crawling in water drainage pipes.
While we went from cache to cache we got to talk a lot and I found that even though Whitemithrandir has not been caching for a long time he has geocached with a ton of other local geocachers. He just has that magnetic personality and a genuine "go gett'm" geocaching attitude that makes this activity so much fun.

Some of the highlights for that day was a couple of geocaches up in trees. Whitemithrandir was kind enough to go first on these and then set it up for us to sign the logs.

Whitemithrandir Geocaching

The one here took him almost an hour to get up this very slick angled tree.

We had a ball that day going from one geocache to the next. There were Traditionals, Multies and Puzzle caches to solve. Each with a clue to the final geocache.









One of our favorite parts was going into a four foot cement water drainage pipe to find the geocache. This was my first of that kind and quite frankly I can't wait to try some more. Below is a shot I took of Whitemithrandir as he was coming out. Man that was fun. Note the skateboard that helped save us from completely becoming soaked.

Whitemithrandir rolling from a geocache

Needless to say we eventually found all the needed components and the FINAL geocache of the series. It was a ton of fun and we had a much more adventurous time with the massive help of Whitemithrandir. So if you see him out in the Piedmont of North Carolina or at an upcoming geocaching event. Please be sure to say hi. Then invite him along to one of your geocaching adventures, like so many other geocachers. You will be glad you did.

-HHH

GeoCache: I'm NOT Obsessed... Right?
http://headhardhat-geocache.blogspot.com/
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GeoSnippits Mystery - Puzzle Cache Footnotes

(Mutant Mantis TB Sighting)

I had such a good time yesterday shooting and editing my latest GeoSnippits episode about Mystery and Puzzle caches. One of the first realizations while putting it together was the amount of information available to create it. When you start out thinking "wow, how am I going to fill out five minutes on this?"and end up with "wow, how can I do this in only ten minutes?"

I started out by doing some research and asking information from the people who know, geocachers. One of the first things I wanted to know was how much geocachers liked or disliked mystery caches. The results were rather interesting:

• 28% Felt that they would go out of their way to find a mystery/puzzle cache
• 10% Like mystery/puzzle caches as much as traditional caches
• 55% Thought that they would do a few mystery/puzzle caches a year
• 07% Completely ignore mystery/puzzle caches as too much effort

This meant that over half of the geocachers polled would go for a mystery/puzzle cache but only a few times a year. This would explain why the amount of traffic for that type of cache is reduced when you check out the logs. In fact on both forums a rather heated debate ensued.

On one side are the geocachers that love mystery/puzzle caches. They live to unpuzzle the puzzles and will put in whatever time and effort to do so. Quite a few posts told of how they use these type caches on rainy days to fill the time and as the number of resolutions pile up enough they will then go out and well, resolve them.

The other side of the coin was actually the most vocal but according to the above statistics is the smaller percentile, go figure. One post after another describes how mystery/puzzle caches are not even part of the equation. They are ignored as if plagued and to be avoided at all cost. Many have stated the amount of time and effort is too much for a smiley. Who wants to spend the wasted time figuring out math problems, solving letter sequences or heaven forbid decode a double super secret handshake message. Nay they say.... Nay!

If the coin somehow landed on it side it would represent the geocacher who sits on the fence when it comes to mystery caches. To peak their interest into actually going out and resolving a cache requires a special balance. The puzzle cannot be too difficult to resolve and yet have enough of a challenge to make it interesting. Too complicated - forget it, takes too long - nope, down right evil - there's plenty of traditionals out there to find. Though if you can manage a good combination of interest, placement and a feeling of "a game in the game" geocachers will beat down the door to figure it out.

It really is a shame that I ran out of time so quick but the show must go on. I am glad to be able to put out this footnote. I personally want to thank all the people who contributed to either the forum discussions and the poll (NCGO and Geocaching.com). It is greatly appreciated.

You can see my GeoSnippits episodes by going to YouTube and putting GeoSnippits or Headhardhat in the search field.

GeoSnippits - Geocaching For Mystery - Puzzle Caches

The latest in the GeoSnippits Series is on YouTube. This episode of GeoSnippits hosted by HeadHardHat gives you four caches in one. We take a road trip to find out about Mystery and Puzzle geocaches. Our first adventure takes you to two traditional caches which give you the complete coordinates to the secret mystery cache. Then on to an unusual puzzle cache indeed. Follow HeadHardHat as he gives useful information to all about the game, hobby, obsession of geocaching.

If you would like to see more about Geocaching and all the GeoSnippits episodes, please go here: YouTube GeoSnippits Channel

It's A Mystery I Tell Ya - A Real Puzzler

My next GeoSnippits episode came in as a suggestion from one of our regular subscribers. It describes Mystery/Puzzle caches and how the Geocaching community feels about them. Let me tell you if anything it opened up a broad spectrum of conversation on two of my favorite forums. I also posted a poll and you may be surprised as to the results.

The episode will actually take you on a three stage mystery series and will also show a couple other puzzle caches along the way. It should be packed with helpful information for all.

If the weather holds out I should have it shot by the end of the weekend then edited and on YouTube shortly after. Keep an eye on my blog and or my Geocaching Channel on YouTube. Just put in headhardhat and subscribe to get all the upcoming episodes.