Amen... Happykraut and I did such a cache yesterday. Fresh Mulch in the flower bed and we had to walk right through it. I hate those kind of caches. No hint either! ARRRGGGHHHHH! Give me the woods with tons of acres and put a regular sized cache out there! ----- Original Message ----- From: k Sneed To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 3:17 PM Subject: [GeoStL] Re: Using accurate coordinates A great big DITTO on this one! If folks are continually saying coord are off 50+ feet and on top of that, there is no hint, they are asking for the landscape to be torn up! We looked for one in a park in Springfield, IL a while back. Coord took us right smack in the middle of a flower bed with the park sign in the middle of it. There was either no hint, or a useless one. Tried to look around the area without disturbing the landscaping, but gave up in disgust. If I remember correctly, it was a fairly new cache and only 2-3 people had found it, but their traces were already evident in the landscaping. I would hate to see that flower bed now. What a way to aggravate the parks dept.! At the very least, if placing one near an area like that (hopefully, it wasn't really in the middle of it, but you never know, as there wasn't much else around), put something in the cache description stating to stay out of the landscaping because it isn't there. On 5/9/07, M. Bollinger <lazylightning3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Accurate coordinates are nice, but even more critical are USEFUL hints. This is a pet peeve of mine. I have often seen damage by seekers that could have been avoided by having them find the cache instead of just looking for it. Here's one I tried last week that is an example of one of the offenders: STL Tar-egg by humanaquarium with NO hint. "From the previous logs, I knew not to trust my machine, so I put it away and just went hunting." Translation: "just went ripping up everything in site" If everyone would have good hints like under the big flat rock, at the base of the forked tree- (not: email me if you can't find it; park at this place; or some other gibberish or no hint at all) people won't be so inclined to overturn every rock, rip out every plant, stomp around in a flower bed, take every rock out of a wall. In every instance where I talked with land managers who were turned off by caching, it was because people we looking in a nearby spot (like a planter bed) that they shouldn't have been or disrupting and area while looking. ----- Original Message ---- From: k Sneed < sneed14@xxxxxxxxx> To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Wednesday, May 9, 2007 9:28:23 AM Subject: [GeoStL] Using accurate coordinates Part of the Geocaching Creed mentioned earlier: ...Minimize My and Others' Impact on the Environment a.. Obtain the best possible coordinates for your cache to reduce unwarranted wear on the area. Recheck and correct your coordinates if finders report significant errors. This point wasn't brought up last week during the discussion regarding accurate coordinates. I have seen micros hidden in woods with log after log saying the coordinates are 50-60 feet off. When you go to hunt those caches, you can tell everyone's coord (except the actual cache) were in the same spot. Then a 50-60 foot area is totally trampled and torn up. This is contrary to "leave no trace" and a good reason for having accurate coordinates. Obviously, depending on what type of an area the cache is hidden in, the impact could be less or more. A pavilion cache, for example, may have coord that just "take you to to the pavilion and now find it". However, in an area where many people hunting will have an impact, "leave no trace" ethics would dictate the use of as accurate coordinates as possible. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.