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A quick update:
I’ve had an exchange of emails with Chis (Graculus) mainly pointing out that the MOD don’t own two of the ranges and asking him to amend his map. Most people seem to think that the Groundspeak reviewers have jumped the gun here without having been represented at the negotiations themselves and clearly GAGB have done us no favours at all.
I think the law of natural justice applies here “The right to a fair hearing requires that individuals should not be penalized by decisions affecting their rights or legitimate expectations unless they have been given prior notice of the case, a fair opportunity to answer it, and the opportunity to present their own case. The mere fact that a decision affects rights or interests is sufficient to subject the decision to the procedures required by natural justice. In Europe, the right to a fair hearing is guaranteed by Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is said to complement the common law rather than replace it.
I never thought I would be quoting the European Convention on Human Rights 😉
I totally agree with what dartymoor says, particularly with regard to getting the letterboxing community on side. However, I have already spoken to somebody connected with the 100 Club and they were totally disinterested. They kept saying that they couldn’t help me (even though the person was also a geocacher) and didn’t seem to grasp the likely implication for letterboxing. They somehow thought that they would be immune. It will be interesting to see what the post on the letterboxing forum produces.
As for GAGB, they seem to pull the strings and the UK Groundspeak reviewers seem to jump. I don’t understand that relationship at all. Perhaps somebody could enlightened me – I guess there is a history somewhere?
Also, can somebody from OpenCaching please give a view on this.
Thanks Clownpunchers for bringing this to our attention. This would indeed be a major blow to geocaching on Dartmoor. No sooner do I manage to get agreement on caches in SSSIs when we are hit by another problem – or should I say challenge.
I will of course be taking this up with the DNPA first thing on Monday morning. They actively encourage geocaching and it will be interesting to see if they know anything about this. I will also contact the Duchy of Cornwall – as they own most of the land the MoD use.
However, the forum does say “At the moment they have not asked for any caches currently in place to be removed but this could change.”
As you correctly point out the MoD doesn’t own either Merrivale or Okehampton, but they do own Willsworthy. Clearly they cannot ban geocaches but allow letterboxes, so it will be interesting to hear what the letterboxing folk have to say about this. It would be a very good opportunity to work together with them.
I will use this forum to keep everybody up to date, so please watch this space.
“Finderman* found Joy of Caching – No. 24 (Traditional Cache) at 6/13/2013
Log Date: 6/13/2013
You guys are incredibly inventive I don’t know how you do it! Well done for another brilliant cache.”I hope you signed the log 😉
There are no traditional 5/5 caches on Dartmoor. There is one 5/5 Puzzle cache http://coord.info/GCQKFR (Code Breaker V: CRYPTOLOGY) which is a bonus cache and seems to deserve it’s 5 difficulty rating as the caches needed are all fairly tough. Not having found it I can’t possibly comment on the terrain rating!
There is also one 5/5 Multi http://coord.info/GC2GE1N (Tavy Treasure Trail). This is an excellent cache, which I still rate as my No 1 cache of over 3,000 found and certainly deserves it 5 difficulty rating. It is one of those multis that you have no idea how long it is until you finally finish it and it has a really good final stage. However, I find it difficult to justify its 5 terrain rating as the only special equipment I needed to complete it was a pair of wellies to keep my feet dry.
And herein lies the problem for terrain 5 caches on Dartmoor. A terrain 5 cache is defined as “Requires specialized equipment and knowledge or experience, (boat, 4WD, rock climbing, SCUBA, etc) or is otherwise extremely difficult.” There is not a single river on Dartmoor that requires a boat, certainly there is rock climbing and a cache high in a quarry would certainly qualify, I doubt is diving is allowed in any of the reservoirs, but again flooded quarries would qualify. Of course, caving and potholing would also qualify and maybe there are possibilities there, but generally not a huge scope for terrain 5 caches on Dartmoor.
Any more information on the GPS Spot Beacon please? – I think we would all find that very interesting. Is it the same sort of thing that the 10 Tors teams carry?
I certainly do not wish to upset any letterboxers and totally respect their hobby as I hope they respect ours. In fact many participate in both hobbies and I agree with the “live and let live” sentiment.
I have never advocated that anybody should remove a genuine letterbox from the moor but I do maintain that the very obvious rubbish boxes, often ice-cream cartons and saturated, should be removed as they are litter. Surely it is up to all of us to look after the moor we love and to remove litter whenever we see it.
As for reporting these boxes to the DNPA, that is not sensible. They point out on their web site that they are not responsible for litter removal, but do so unofficially. They clearly have no resources for this aspect of maintaing the moor and it is up to all those who love the moor to clear litter when they see it.
I will be interested in seeing other replies to this topic and will be very happy to amend or delete that note on my cache if that is the general consensus.
Hi Matt, Congratulations on your achievement. Most of the route (and I walked much of it in completing the caches) is far from easy and for much of the route there are no trails but just the odd boundary marker and tor top. Without wishing to detract in any way from your achievement, it makes you appreciate just how tough the 10 Tors is. They walk 55 miles (88km) over much the same sort of terrain but have less than 2 days to complete it. In fact many complete it in about a day and a half! Did you use your gps or just walk map & compass?
I must apologise for not having been able to check this one out, now it has been logged as Needs Maintenance I will do so asap. I note in your log that you say that it is a really good idea for a cache. I agree but I’m afraid we are in a small minority, as only 6 attempts were made at this when it was first placed. It is difficult enough to get cachers to go into the more remote places on the moor, almost impossible to ask them to do it without looking at their gps every few seconds!
I suppose the whole idea of geocaching is to use your gps, and to ask cachers to use only map & compass is depriving them of their prized gadget. Moreover, the reviewers get a bit difficult if you place a cache which can be found WITHOUT using a gps.
If anybody can suggest a form of cache which can ONLY be found using map & compass I would be very interested. But as soon as you give any sort of bearing and distance it can easily be entered into a gps.
Mystery solved, the SoD 1 TB has resurfaced. The cachers immediately prior to Reb10 had forgotten to log it.
A new script has been released tonight which works on my Mac using Firefox, but unfortunately not using Chrome (which is now my preferred browser). I haven’t tried this new script on a PC yet, but the previous version worked ok anyway.
Hi Vodkashots – welcome to our web site and thank you for your reply to this topic and your closing comment, most appreciated. Please let me know what you were looking for when you visited the web site and I will try and help you. Many thanks again, Dave. Email: davidgmartin@me.com
If we really analyse it the membership fees are really very low compared to other things in life. If I fill my car with diesel it costs nearly £80 and I can only drive about 400 miles, less on Dartmoor lanes. So not too many caches to be found for £80.
If you go to a premier league football match it can cost you anything up to about £60 for one game and even Plymouth charge £20. Any club or organisation you join will charge some sort of membership fee, so maybe our fees to Groundspeak are relatively cheap.
However, they make their millions off the backs of lots of volunteers. The reviewers must spend many hours each week administering the caches and they get paid nothing. Not to mention the COs. If nobody placed any caches there would be no geocaching!
I think we all have to accept that Groundspeak is a multi million dollar business and we have to play by their rules or not at all. It is not an association or a committee which can be influenced and they don’t really seem to care what their members think – and it’s not just the Brits, there are plenty of disgruntled US members as well. Not long ago they introduced that little tab on the left edge of every screen which took you to a suggestion site – that soon disappeared as they got so much criticism on it. As you say, the two alternatives are not really worth considering, so if you want to geocache you really have to embrace Groundspeak.
One thing we could all do which would help, is to refuse to place any premium member only caches. I have argued before against their use, but still COs insist on placing them (including that new 60+ series on Bodmin Moor). If we refused to place such caches fewer people would feel the need to take up Premium Membership.
I hope I wasn’t the guilty party here as very few of my caches have ever gone missing and I try to get out to them very quickly if they do. At the moment out of 173 caches I have one disabled and one needing maintenance, which is probably as good a record as one can have. I have also only ever archived one cache (as I said recently – a cache is for life and not just for placing).
In my experience of finding (or not finding) caches I think the worse culprits for lack of maintenance are those who have only placed a handful of caches. The more caches you place the more likely they are to be maintained. I do however think that one’s record should be taken into account when a reviewer publishes a cache. Those with a bad record of maintenance or of archiving caches should certainly be restricted when it comes to placing new caches. I also think that you need to have found a minimum number (say 200?) before you can place any cache.
Finderman: No I wouldn’t, but I expect it will happen and if it does I will try to be FTF on all of them 🙂
Dartymoor: Of course roadside and remote can co-exist, I have no problem with roadside caches and we often pick them up. However, its the sheer number that is the problem. You don’t need caches placed at 0.1 mile intervals. If the object is to enjoy a nice drive then 3 or 4 a mile is perfect. I don’t know this Bodmin Moor road, but I doubt if it is suitable for this sort of power trail. Is it a single track road? Are these placed in passing places? Clearly not for the disabled as none that I’ve noticed have a terrain 1 rating. It won’t do your car much good either unless you leave the engine running, imagine stopping and starting your car engine 60 times in about 7 or 8 miles! So it really needs a team to tackle this or better still walk it, but it appears not to be circular.
In order to get the new userscript to work on my PC using Chrome I had to download Tampermonkey and that worked ok. Similarly for my Mac, I have also had to download Tampermonkey. However, the script does not work properly as although it tries to shown you all the map layers it then overwrites it when the maps load. So, no OS maps on the Mac using Chrome at the moment 🙁
Well done Tri, that’s gets OS Maps displayed once more on a PC using Chrome. I’m away at the moment and will have to see if that works on my Mac.
Unfortunately the refresh button has disappeared! I hope it gets put back as that was a very useful feature, although it always took you back to the default map, which was a pain.
This has gone way off topic (and I was to blame) so I have split the existing topic to form this new one. Clearly there are differing views on this (and everybody knows my view) so I will shut up (for the time being :)) and let others have an input – please!
Yet another candidate: “We’ll have to admit defeat on this one. We spotted some suitable locations for a clever hide, but they proved to be wrong. It was good fun, and with help from some youngsters we might have gone further.”
Obviously a DNF, but no another “Write Note” 🙁
I’ll let Hobo confirm, but I don’t think this post refers to the CCC and I don’t believe they were walking 🙂
Stopped using Firefox some weeks ago and now prefer Chrome, but Greasemonkey suddenly stopped working on it last night which is most unfortunate as I always use the OS maps, not really interested in anything else. Unfortunately I’ve been far too busy today to do anything about it.
Anybody else having similar problems with Greasemonkey?
That’s a very good reason not to leave trackables in C&Ds! I almost always only leave them in caches that are at least fairly remote.
Dare I ask who DanglyHotcakes is 😉 😉 😉 !!!
I’ve just done a couple of short walks on a part of Dartmoor which is definitely “real moor” but not remote, to plan this new trail and see where I might place the caches.
However, it is not easy. The obvious hides are in dry stone walls and in gorse bushes. The former is definitely a no-no and nobody really likes the latter. But the choices are very limited and will probably end up “under a rock” or somewhere on a tree!
Certainly a minority, but not sad 🙂
I’ve just checked mine and found lots of duplicates on caches I’ve adopted but almost none on caches I’ve placed. I’ve also got no duplicates myself, but lots of own caches logged where I’ve adopted them.
I think most are genuine errors and the four times in as many minutes may have been from a mobile phone.
As we have already seen on this forum there are COs who won’t delete a found log when the cacher admits not having found it, so I doubt if they will be prepared to delete duplicates.
There are probably not as many missing as you think. One of the problems is that cache owners can’t be bothered to mark them as missing when clearly they haven’t been in the cache for months. If I notice that a trackable has been missing for several months I always add a comment asking the CO to mark it as missing, then it won’t show up in the cache.
Obviously some do get stolen, but probably not as many as it appears. I normally only place trackables in remote caches as I think they are safer there than urban caches or C&Ds.
NEVER place trackables in National Trust caches as they loan out GPSs to complete beginners who would not know what a trackable is and may treat them as swaps 🙁
We didn’t know it at the time, but the first cache we found was Parliament Rock. We had gone for a short walk from The Cherrybrook to Wistman’s Wood and back via Crockern Tor, when somebody spotted the cache under a rock. It was never very well hidden and could easily been seen when walking uphill. I can’t remember if we opened it or not, but just assumed it was a letterbox and then forgot all about it.
Some time later, a couple of our guests (Punch & Partner) started talking in the bar each evening about what they had been doing during the day, which was geocaching. Having always been interested in maps and walking, and already on my 3rd GPS (which was also a PDA) I was immediately interested and wanted to know all about it. Before they left us I had already signed up and found several caches – the first of which was Parliament Rock, the cache we had already spotted!
It sounds as though she makes a habit of doing this sort of cheating. You are not being unreasonable, just taking your responsibilities as a cache owner seriously. I would ask her how many other caches she has logged as found which she didn’t find. One of the main reasons for DNFs is so that the CO gets an idea that a cache may have gone, but even if it has it still shouldn’t be logged as found.
This is what Groundspeak say “As the owner of your cache listing, your responsibility includes quality control of all posts to the cache listing. Delete any logs that appear to be bogus, counterfeit, off-topic or otherwise inappropriate.”
Now you understand why I started this topic! I saw that DNF come through earlier and I also wondered WHAT??!
At least this cacher didn’t log a find and hope it was OK as so many do 🙁
If I were finderman I would send the cacher an email stating that I didn’t think he had quite complied with either the spirit or the rules of geocaching AND attach a link to this topic 🙂
An interesting, but not unexpected, side effect of the new Brentorboxer trail is that it has attracted a stack of new visitors to two of my caches – Smallacombe Bottom and Gibbet Hill. Of the 25 or so cachers that did the new series half found my Smallacombe Bottom cache and a third walked up to Gibbet Hill. This gave me a total of 20 finds on these two caches earning 4 favourite points (20%) whereas the only cache in the new series to attract any favourite points at all is the last cache. In total there were approximately 375 finds but only 12 favourite points awarded – just 3%. So, lots of visitors for the “numbers” but not very appreciative ones.
I am mystified and somewhat saddened by the motivation and tone of PR’s post? I just don’t understand what is going on here. However, this cache has been now published on OpenCaching and is available to be found and logged there: http://www.opencaching.org.uk/viewcache.php?cacheid=797
Hopefully this will prevent it from being removed by PR.
Dartymoor – thanks for this post, some very interesting points.
In my own defence the 1,000 limit was purely there to limit the mammoth task of pulling these statistics together and the tardiness is due to exactly the same reason – just a lack of time.
I love statistics and numbers and ranking lists etc and have no problem with any of that at all. However, I do have a problem with the quality of many caches that are currently being placed and also their location. As soon as you concentrate on the quantity then the quality takes a nosedive. In my opinion one good cache is worth 10 rubbish ones and the vast majority of cachers would agree – you need only to look at the logs of a decent cache and the number of fav points it gets. Power trail caches get virtually no fav points (I analysed this on HALO) and it tends only to be the last cache in a series that gets any points.
You mention your first series. I thought at the time (and I still think) that this was an excellent series with some good hides, and if I remember correctly, several home made caches that you had put considerably effort into. I hope you won’t be upset if I say that I prefer this first series of caches to your recent series. I really enjoyed the latest walk but I would have enjoyed it just as much if there had been only 12 caches and would have enjoyed the series more if the caches had been more difficult to find and more varied. I know others will not agree as they only count the number, but I hope you see the point I am trying to make.
I really am planning a trail for you, it will be called Dart’moor’s Dozen and will have only 12 caches over a 6 mile walk. Hopefully the caches will all be interesting and different to each other and will definitely not be trivial finds. Hopefully it will get you out on to the real moor, which I don’t think you get on to very often, but will not be remote. But I’m not going to rush these out tomorrow, they need thinking about and planning.
If you were not a geocacher you would have a very valid argument that says active geocaches are as much litter as archived ones, its only geocachers who can tell the difference. Even geocachers can often not tell the difference as we have all found several that have been geocaches disguised as litter, but what is the difference between that and litter disguised as a geocache!
Environmentally, I have to admit that ALL geocaches (and letterboxes) are litter, but they only form a minute part of the overall litter and many of us do try to hide them 🙂
I think the argument re the 176 yard rule 🙂 is not valid as once a cache has been archived it is off everybody’s radar including the reviewers, otherwise replacement caches at the same spot would not be allowed.
Oh Hobo, do stop hedging and say what you really think 🙂
It sounds as though I made the right decision in heading off for dartymoor’s series rather than 15 FTFs here – but I do know this down and guessed that a lot of gorse would be involved 🙁
I know hobo & miss were not that impressed by my Smallacombe Bottom hide, but it sounds as though it is still the best in the area, although I notice that dartymoor didn’t make the small diversion to have a look?
Anyway, looks as though there’s scope for improvement for the next trail. I must see if I can come up with something that suits Dartymoor, but it will definitely be longer and have less but more varied caches.
Thanks for the info reb10. I will be very unhappy if the SoD 1 TB has gone missing. This is a very remote cache hardly likely to be found by a non-geocacher – I will leave a note on the cache and hope that the next finder will check.
Just a little background on this subject. Two years ago, for some unknown reason, the Dartmoor National Park Authority removed their detailed Letterboxing Guidelines from their web site. Nobody noticed this for about a year when suddenly somebody at GAGB noticed that the link from the land owners database to the DNPA no longer worked. The reviewers interpreted this to mean that the DNPA had removed their permission for us to place geocaches in SSSIs. Nothing could be further from the truth as their stance on geocaching (and letterboxing) had not changed. However, the reviewers stopped us placing geocaches in SSSIs.
I decided that action was needed and spent the next 2 months negotiating a set of new geocaching guidelines that were not connected with letterboxing. Negotiating with the DNPA was fairly easy, but it was much more difficult to get the reviewers to accept the new agreement. Eventually I had a new agreement in place which was accepted by all parties and which was published on this web site and we were up and running again.
During these negotiations with the DNPA the question of nesting sites and several other similar issues were discussed, but it was agreed that these would not be included in the guidelines, rather the DNPA would keep a eye on the placement of geocaches and see how it developed. This is still the situation today and although the odd geocache has been placed there is certainly no concentration of such caches. When I placed my recent caches I ensured that I avoided the Tavy Cleave and placed one at each end.
In reality these remote caches get almost no visitors. The Cut Hill Wilderness cache has only ever had 65 finds in nearly 4 years and only 10 in the last year. The impact of these caches is negligible when compared with other footfall on the moor. For example something like 10,000 Ten Tors visitors each year, the majority in the bird nesting season, and countless DofE and other activities.
It is also worth remembering that whilst geocaching and letterboxing are similar activities they are not the same. Geocaching is far more rigourously policed than letterboxing as anybody who has tried to place a cache will know. We are often made to jump through hoops to get a placement, whereas there are no formal controls for letterboxing at all. Geocaches have to be maintained and they are constantly monitored and abandoned caches quickly taken out of play. The same is not true of letterboxing and there must be at least a 100 letterboxes on the moor for each geocache, many of them totally abandoned.
We had planned to do dartymoor’s new series today and were just about to leave when up popped this new series. The choice, rush over to Tavistock for the chance of lots of FTF’s (I’m sure we would get there first) or stay with plan A and walk what looked like a very interesting and varied walk in an area we had never visited before. I knew the Tavistock trail was on a rather uninteresting common full of gorse and bracken, so it was no contest. We stuck with dartymoor’s new series and got a really enjoyable walk. I’ve had no time to log my finds yet but I’ve no doubt that we made the right choice 🙂
