Last Day of 2010

The last day of 2010. It has been a very up and down year. Geocaching wise it was my slowest ever, but it did have some memorable moments. Geocaches in Las Vegas, the Oregon Coast, and even a trip up the Willamette Pass Resort gondola to find caches on Eagle Peak. And of course a bunch of great caches at home. Some of us locals even spent a day introducing kids to geocaching at a local science fair. Some highlights for the year include:

• The Super Science Saturday event (sadly my only "hide" this year)
• Reached the 1900, 2000, and 2100 cache milestones
• Found 29 & 31 caches on February 13 & 14
• Found 32 caches on July 4th (with 11 DNFs)
  

Some of my favorite caches of 2010 include:

• Blazers Rock
• Rip City Rhapsody
• Canyon Creek TB Bed & Breakfast
  
• Welcome to Las Vegas
• Hellooo !!
• Safe House
• What a View
• DARE TO PEAK
• Remembering the past

Hopefully 2011 goes a little better for geocaching, but 2010 had it moments. Thank you to everyone who hid all the caches found... and all the caches to find for next year. See you out on the trail.

Another year down

I think it is safe to say now that I won't be doing any geocaching the rest of the year. I opened my garage door this morning to leave for work and was quite surprised to see snow falling. Unless I want to find night caches in the snow.

So I will end with 221 finds for 2010. By far my worst year ever. It doesn't help that I have had a lack of enthusiasm for the sport. Let alone the whole FDIC takeover thing at work.

I have had a bit of the geocaching bug lately so that might help 2011 be a little bit better. Also now it may be easier to find quality caches for the weekend with the cache favorite system recently put in. If more people will take the time to mark some of their favorites then it will be a good system. That way you could find a cache with a few votes and plan a trip to get it... and get a few others in the area and on the way that maybe don't have votes but you might as well grab. Last year one of my goals was to be more "picky" about the caches I'd seek. What I really ended up doing was not going out to find any. Maybe this will help.

I am a bit dissapointed that my favorite personal hide doesn't have a favorite vote. My top vote getters are Mt. Ashland Outcropping which is a cache Sally and I hid. I adopted it from her, but the outcropping was a place I picked out to hide a cache. Tied with it is Roxy the oldest cache in Southern Oregon which I also adopted. Roxy had a dificulty and terrain of 1-1.5 when I went to find it. I thought that was a little low so I adopted it and changed it.

Look for my final 2010 write up on Friday.

Christmas Caching Video

Merry Christmas

Every year since I started geocaching I have made an effort to find a cache or 2 on Christmas. Its a nice time to go out because things are pretty quiet. Today I lined up 4 caches and found them all. The last was # 2100 for me.

Look but Don't Leap
big trouble IN river city
Fed Up with Power & Phone
Remembering the past

I hope everyone had a good Christmas. Soon I'll be wrapping up 2010 with my list of favorite caches and other bits of useless info.

Geocache Ratings

Geocaching.com has introduced a new ratings system. I'm not sure if only premium members can see it. But the idea is that you have so many votes (1 for every 10 cache finds) and you marke caches as your favorite. The more votes they have the better the cache (in theory anyway) so far the top caches in this area:

Rainie Falls
Oregon DeLorme Challenge
Chief Sam's bluff
Safe House
BIGFOOTS LAIR
Bigfoot Cache Revisited
Waldo Cemetery Cache
Steps of Stone
Pyramid Rock

While I haven't found the last 2 on the list I think its safe to say that all of these caches are good ones. Now those are on my "to do" list and I otherwise might not have known. I encourage you all to rate some of your favorites. I've gone through and put in votes for about 40 caches and will probably do a few more. I think this could be especially useful when you want a "special" cache to mark a milestone.