There's been an ongoing battle with the caving groups too. -----Original Message----- From: geocaching-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:geocaching-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Eric & Dayna East Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 5:14 PM To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [GeoStL] Re: geocaching gets negative press as a herper (reptile & amphibian lover) I have gotten a lot of grief over geocaching on some of the herp related forums. One guy in particular was worried about this very thing, that we were bringing people out to these "sensitive" areas and ruining them. Eric dana cook wrote: - In this month's edition of National Geographic there is an article about Badlands National Park. A significant portion of the article pertains to the number of fossils contained in the park and the problem of looting. The author interviewed the park paleontologist, Rachel Benton, who had this to say: "Besides outright theft, now we have to worry about geo-caching," says Lopez. The article continues: "In this latest twist to a treasure hunt, people hide a container and perhaps a trinket, take GPS coordinates, and put the coordinates on the internet. Other people go to the location and try to find the cache. Although a treasure hunt may seem a nuisance at worst, and can have the positive effect of getting people out in nature, Lopez warns of an escalation: Some geo-cachers are finding fossils in park rocks and putting these coordinates on the Web. Anyone can then come to look--or to take." Any thoughts? Not the most positive national exposure our beloved hobby/sport could have, huh? Dana Soldiers of Fortune _________________________________________________________________ Watch LIVE baseball games on your computer with MLB.TV, included with MSN Premium! http://join.msn.com/?page=features/mlb&pgmarket=en-us/go/onm00200439ave/dire ct/01/ **************************************************************************** Our WebPage! Http://WWW.GeoStL.com Mail List Info. //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=geocaching Mail List FAQ's: //www.freelists.org/help/questions.html **************************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list: send an email to geocaching-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field