Removing Hate from Geocaching

With the current racial turmoil at the forefront of the conversation in the US after the events in Charlottesville, VA and the president's reproachful response, I felt it necessary to show the inconsistencies the geocaching community has between it's mission of teaching and having fun, while also allowing caches at places many see as hateful.

Email to Central Texas Geocachers:

All --

You can read my forum post and below my email to Groundspeak regarding caches that involve the Confederacy.
I think it's wrong to let caches

• continue to use hate symbols like the Confederate flag; 

• encourage people to visit such monuments / parks / statues that may upset members of the community; and

• leave out of descriptions what makes such a geocache a fun learning experience for all

The geocaching community is far from inclusive or diverse. Please try to imagine your black friends and neighbors, new cachers of color being affronted with caches that implicitly promote hate.

This is a wonderful platform to promote healing, peace and unity; we need only speak up and speak out against hate within our community.

Thanks for reading,
strontium87

Email to Groundspeak (company that runs geocaching.com)

Note: I have not received any response as of 23 August:

I'm writing to report the first of MANY geocaches that use hateful / racial symbols like the Confederate flag. See the background image of this cache: https://coord.info/GCH4B0

But more importantly ask: Why should caches like these be allowed given the uprising against hate and the backlash to racial violence in the United States?

When is Groundspeak going to address specifically the conflict between a family-friendly, inclusive game for all and caches that implicitly promote white supremacy?

I urge Groundspeak to update its Term of Usage and send an email to all geocache.com users calling out in specific terms what hate speech / symbols / locations will NOT be allowed going forward. Possible rule changes could include:

• No usage of hateful symbols like the Confederate flag on the cache page

• Descriptions must include SPECIFIC context about why the Confederate-related place / monument / statue is reflective of Groundspeak's perspective of using geocaching as a teaching tool.

From Groundspeaks' TOS: 

Section 2. D. RESTRICTIONS paragraph vii

Upload, post, transmit or otherwise distribute (including by emailing us) any content that threatens or attacks others on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age, disability or disease; is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, profanity, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, embarrassing, harmful to minors; or is otherwise reasonably objectionable to any person or entity.

I eagerly await your reply,
x

How To Create a Soda Bottle Container

I remember the first time I saw a geocache container made from old soda bottle caps. I thought, "That is so cool! I want one." Then I forgot about it for several months until one day it dawned on me how to make one.

Project Description

This how-to is for making a container out of old soda bottle caps. My preference is to use three liter bottles because of the size, but two liter and 20oz bottles work too. I have experimented with several bottle types and I think the soda bottles work best because the plastic is stronger and the length of the bottle neck is larger, giving you more coverage for the bottom of the container.

Time: 15 minutes
Cost: If you can find soda bottles, this is free!

Soda bottle cache made from three liters

Supplies Needed for This Project

• two plastic bottle caps of the same size and type and one plastic bottle
• box cutter
• scissors
• super glue

Instructions

These are the steps I took to complete this project. Please modify to fit your own project. :)

Step 1

Start by selecting what bottle type you want to use for your project. This how-to uses a three liter bottle. You need two caps and one bottle.

Assorted bottle types 

Step 2

Cut the top off the plastic bottle as close as you can to the bottom of the neck. I find this is done most easily with a sharp box cutter but scissors can work too.

Cut the top off the bottle using a box cutter

Top of the bottle after being cut off

Step 3

This step is the trickiest. You now need to trim down the cut soda bottle so that the second bottle cap fits snugly over it. I find good scissors work best for this stage, but you can also continue to use a box cutter. Trim as much plastic as you can to remove the curved material, leaving just the bottle neck. Check periodically if your second bottle cap fits over the trimmed bottle neck. This will likely take several tries.

Trimmed soda bottle neck

Step 4

Make sure the second bottle cap is fitting correctly onto the soda bottle neck before this step. At this point you want to apply a little bit of super glue to the outside of the soda bottle then screw on the second bottle cap. The glue is meant only to keep the second bottle cap from coming off; it does not make the container waterproof.

Apply super glue to the bottle neck

Side note: I have experimented with several types of glue for waterproofing and ease of use. Both Gorilla Glue and hot glue can do the trick, but they are messy and hard to get right to keep all water out. Most recently I have experimented with using caulk around the inside of the container as it is designed to be waterproof and is easy to work with. This is what I recommend using if you really want to make sure water stays out.

Step 5

That's it! Your basic container is ready. You can now do all sorts of things to make it your own. Here are some things I've done:

• spray painted the outside black
• glued a magnet to the inside of the bottom
• used the plastic ring beneath the cap as a way to secure a zip tie
• drilled a hole into the bottom and attached a chain with a small screw (the cap that is glued in place)
• glued camo to the top of the outside of the container (the cap that screws off)

Finished soda bottle container

My cat Gavin with a soda bottle container to show scale

What cool ideas have you come up with to personalize your cache container? Let us know in the comments.

Geocaching Stats for December 2013

It's been a busy couple of months and I am just now getting around to updating my caching stats properly. I had lots of fun adventures but have slowed down my caching recently since buying a house.

Here's a run down of the highlights:

September

• Placed a new challenge cache in Austin: What size is that? Challenge
• Attended my first Lone Star Roundup event. This year it was held in Tyler.

PyroYo007 and strontium87 at the Lone Star Roundup

• On the way to and from the roundup event, I cached in eight new Texas Counties (88/254)
1. Falls
2. Limestone
3. Freestone
4. Henderson
5. Smith
6. Van Zandt
7. Kafuman
8. Navarro
   

Cached in eight new Texas Counties

• Placed a new cache in Falls County along I-35 to give people an easier way to cache in this county while barely travelling through it: Falls county I-35 Southbound
• Found six more TxGCC13 caches, bringing my total up to 58/80 for the challenge (and had one DNF at Purtis Creek)
• PyroYo007 and I placed our first ever night cache: Copperfield Night Cache
• PyroYo007 and I finally finished up Walnut Creek Super Cachers

Super Cache Member logo

• Closed out my second month in the 365 day challenge by caching every day in September

October

• Cached in a new state and got a new souvenir: Colorado

First Colorado cache with my nephew

• Filled my 2000-07 Jasmer spot by finding Tarryall (GC18) with my mom

Finding Tarryall in Colorado

November

• Attended four events including one for geocaching in space and earned a new souvenir

Geocaching in Space souvenir - November 2013

• Revived a cache out near my parents' house that had been archived: Xerophilous

I think I'll probably continue blogging every quarter instead of every month about my caching stats. As always, you can find my caching stats on my website: strontium87.com. Until next time!

Create a Geocaching Search Engine in Chrome

The Chrome browser from Google is simple and power. It provides the option to set up your own customer search engines for sites you use a lot. Well I use geocaching.com a lot to look at cache page by their unique IDs or GC codes. This post will show you how to set up a custom GC code search engine in Chrome but the steps can be applied to any site with search.

Step 0

You need Chrome, so if you don't already have it, download the Google Chrome Web browser for free.

Step 1
Click on the Tools menu icon in the upper right corner of your screen to display the Tools menu. From the menu, click on "Settings." This will take you to the "Settings" page.

The Tools menu in Chrome

Step 2

On the "Settings" page, scroll down to the Search section and click the "Manage search engines" button. This will open a popup window.

Settings page in Chrome

Step 3
In the "Other search engines" section of the popup window page, look for the three fields for adding a new search engine:

• In the first field, enter a name for the search engine. I chose "Geocache Finder."
• In the second field, enter a shorthand code for using the search engine. I chose gc.
• In the third field, enter the search link for geocaching.com. Copy and paste this: http://coord.info/%s
• Click "Done" to save your new search engine.

Create a new search engine

Step 4
To use the Geocache Finder search engine at any time, enter the shorthand code, such as gc, into the address bar at the top of the browser and press the tab key. This will initiate the search engine. Then enter the GC code for the cache page you want to view and press enter. For example type in GCK25B to view Geocaching Headquarters.

Initiate a search in the address bar of Chrome

That's all there is to it. I hope you find this as useful as I do.

Geocaching Stats for August 2013

August 2013 was the busiest month of geocaching for me so far. This was partly due to Groundspeak's 31 Days of Geocaching challenge which incentivized people to find a cache every day in August by rewarding them with daily souvenirs. I wasn't chasing souvenirs but it gave me community support to start streaking and I'm now to day 40.

So much happened in August that I wanted to jot down these caching events:

• Most finds in a day: 50. On 3 August, Mh171 and I went out to chase the Texas 50 State Star geoart puzzle series finding 47 of 51 (four had been muggled).
• Most finds in a month: 148
• Cached in two new states, Washington and Oregon, allowing me to complete the 10 States and Provinces Challenge.
• Filled five Jasmer spots, clearing out 2002 and 2006, finding the 2nd oldest active cache GC12 5/12/2000 in Oregon and finding Iron Horse (2000-10) in Washington.
• Finished up the AlphaNumeric Cacher Name Challenge (need to sign the log!) by finding caches placed by 50 State Star, 6 Pack Rats and 86suzuki.
• Logged 13 Geocaching Labs caches (which have messed up my stats because they counted towards total finds but nothing else) including the Microbrew Tour before the Block Party and special event caches during it.

Microbrew Tour Lab Caches in Seattle - 15 August 

• Reached my 800 milestone by attending the 2013 Geocaching Block Party for the first time in Seattle, WA on International Geocaching Day, 17 August.

2013 Groundspeak Block Party - 17 August

• Completed the Triad Challenge by visiting the Original Stash Tribute Plaque, Geocaching Headquarters and the APE Cache in Washington.
  
  

  

  Going APE - Snoqualmie Tunnel, WA - 18 August

• Brought my souvenir total up to 52.

New souvenirs for August 2013

• Rounded out the month by caching in 11 new Texas counties (81/254)

Day 31 of 31 Days of Geocaching

• Found four more TXGCC13 caches, bringing my total up to 52/80 for the challenge by visiting Mission Tejas and Martin Dies Jr. state parks.
• Last but not least, I was picked for the Texas Geocaching Association's August 2013 Member Spotlight, thanks to being nominated by the Caching Dead, TXGA's education directors.

My stats are updated monthly around the 7th and can be viewed on my website at strontium87.com.

International Geocaching Day 2012

Saturday, 18 August 2012, was the second annual International Geocaching Day. So, a couple of friends and I got together and set out to find some caches. I had a list of 12, then we couldn't find two and it thunderstormed, then someone had to go, then we went to find four others I had been meaning to get, then we ran out of time on the last one but all told I got 13 finds--one shy of my 250th find.

These are the finds we made:

1. TreyB's 5K cache.
2. Climb #4 - Beware of the Apple Guards
3. Yett Creek Four
4. Bread, milk, eggs and a cache!
5. Another YARN or is it?
6. SRPS #6 Rubber
7. SRPS #7 Power
8. SRPS #8 Animals
9. SRPS #9 Steel
10. Paul's Walkabout
11. XANN-Welcome to Pflugerville!
12. Smooches
13. The Old Austin Executive Airpark

I chose these mostly based on proximity to our start location and the number of favorite points. My favorite cache of the day was probably "TreyB's 5K cache" because it was just a nice hike to an ammo can and I love ammo cans.

The two we had trouble with were:

1. Paper, Scissors, Rock
2. Climb #14 - Bee Careful

"Paper, Scissors, Rock" is a multi-part cache and while step one almost defeated us, we eventually found the first redirector. The second redirector was easy enough but while searching for the final cache container, a thunderstorm blew in and we split before making the find. I emailed the cache owner for a hint and he said we were on the right track. We went back yesterday and found it very quickly; and I got my 250th find!

"Climb #14" is another matter. We just couldn't see it up in the tree (granted it was raining still) but the same person gave me a hint as to where it was and it happen to be MUCH higher up than we thought and in a different tree. We spotted it right away yesterday but it started to rain, again, and it was still too slippery to climb. A lot of people use tools like ladders or sticks to get these caches and to me that seems against the spirit of the cache given their high terrain ratings, but apparently I am in the minority on this one.