Friday, January 13, 2006

Let's be REALLY careful out there

These items are becoming more frequent:

BOISE, Idaho – Scot Tintsman says he never had any troubles with the law until his girlfriend introduced him to what became his all-consuming passion: the satellite-navigated treasure hunt called geocaching.

"She got me hooked," said the 33-year-old Idaho man, who faces criminal charges for hanging a green bucket beneath a concrete bridge on a major state highway last September.

His "cache" was placed for other players to find using handheld Global Positioning System units. But before he could even finish adding the requisite trinkets and log books to the cache and posting its GPS coordinates on the Internet, it was indeed discovered – by a state bridge inspection crew.

That triggered a seven-hour road closure and emergency response from officials who feared a bomb had been rigged to the bridge.

Unaware of the alarm, Tintsman was returning to finish rigging his cache when he rounded a corner on his motorcycle and was confronted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain that it was all a misunderstanding.

"I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on their holsters," he said. "I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator."

Follow the link for the full story.

Oh, and in case the attitude of the officers as the geocacher approached seems familiar, it is.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Sunday, January 01, 2006

FTF Follies

One of the brass rings of geocaching is being FTF (first to find) on a new cache. In our area, two cachers are most notable for FTFs, Bigbunch and Bisanabi (we'd like to to be FTF on caches, but you'll soon see why that happens so seldom).

Well the typical FTF log around here is from Bisanabi and it goes something like this:
FTF! Checked the site just before bed and saw this cache. Decided to get dressed again and do a midnight run. Headlamp, backup flashlight, boots -- total overkill for this easy cache. At least I remembered a pen! TFTC
Bigbunch thinks Bisanabi has an inside source:
I'm convinced Bisanabi gets new cache notification before me. TFTC 2diggers.
Well we can't say for sure, but our most recent FTFs might give one pause to think:
FTF! Found it at 8:56 am. Bigbunch and Bisanabi must be out of town this weekend, otherwise we'd be 3rd to find!
and
FTF (at 6:55 am )! And our first find of the New Year! GPSr bounced a little but we still went right to it. Other notable area FTF-ers must still be sleeping off last year's festivities. SL TFTC!

So the only time we can get FTF is when the other FTF-ers in the area are otherwise occupied.

RIP, My Jeep Travel Bug

My soon-to-be-ex Jeep travel bug First, has it really been 12 years since I blogged about geocaching? My bad. Now, after nearly nine y...