my first terracache

[chadbishop]

ive seen a few people sign up today on terracaching.com today. i suspect from TnT mentioning it in the thread that BSA534 started about locationless caches. i hope you guys signing up arent discouraged by the lack of hides in arkansas, it must be how the pioneers of arkansas caching must have dealt with a few years back.

i found my first physical terracache and wanted to share my adventure. they emphasize quality over at tc.com so you dont find many pngs (not that i have anything against them, in fact, i love them). theres not many caches listed there for arkansas and about 5 or so in little rock. the cache i found was hidden by cupstack and was hidden in early 2008. it had 3 finds all of which were more than a year ago. me and jr climbed a hill in burns park which turned out to be a great look out point. the cache was in perfect shape which surprised me. what i thought was really cool and i think it would be a great idea on gc.com, is that it had a confirmation code written on the logbook that i had to enter to verify my find. they also have "first finders" verification codes that you can put in a cache for first to find. of course these are optional for the hider to use. i encourage you guys to check out that site if you havent, you have to find two sponsors to "activate" your account. one of my sponsors is OENavigator. your sponsors are also the ones who approve your hides. if i recongize you from the site ill sponsor you quickly.

sorry for the long post.

[HikerRon]

My experience with terracaching happened while i lived in Colorado. There was a brief period of activity and a flurry of new TCs placed, and then it seemed to sort of die off. I liked the idea of Quality over Quantity, but to be honest i did not see anything above the quality of the local geocaches already in place. probably because it was the same people placing them.
It was fun, and gave me something else to hunt for, but i eventually lost interest.

[OldRiverRunner]

I opened a Terracaching account a year or two ago, but I haven't found any and I rarely visit the website. I find it to be very slow and very difficult to navigate around. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time on the website to become familiar with it. OENavigators seems to be quite active hiding terracaches. Maybe Chris would like to comment on the pros & cons?

[edieo]

I 've only found one since I joined .. :lol: :D but just give me time ! :lol:

[TnT]

We've been members almost since Dec 2004.

When we joined, it was growing very fsst in the Austin / San Antonio area. TCs were being put out almost as fast as GCs. We loved the points system -- it will quickly weed out the poor caches (you know the ones I'm referring to.)

However, it's biggest drawbacks are twofold. 1 - it requires that you get sponsorship before you could even explore the site. (This isn't hard, if I see your name pop up, I'll offer sponsorship) and 2. In early 2005, the owner of the site (AngryKid) started promising improvements to the site and enhancements, etc., none of which have yet appeared. we still hold out hope that one day soon, the promises will come true.

One other thing I might mention is that the sponsorship thing is heirarchial. Your sponsor must be from higher up the food chain than you. This has caused issues in the past when a sponsor has quit, leaving his entire downline suddenly without a sponsor.

Having said all that, we still like some things about Terracaching. We have 3 active caches - 2 virtuals and 1 physical, as well as about a dozen locationless caches.

Our name isn't the same on TC as it is on GC, its the name we started caching on GC with. Anyone (other than Chris and a few others) know what it is?

[idratherbehiking]

Our name isn't the same on TC as it is on GC, its the name we started caching on GC with. Anyone (other than Chris and a few others) know what it is?

Do I get a prize or something if I get it right?
A little research leads me to believes it is TeamKozmo.

[oenavigator]

:D

[chadbishop]

thanks for sponsoring me oe, i meant to send you a thank you msg before. ive been wanting to hide a couple of terracaches, but have been trying to think of some "quality sites".

i wanted to list the pros and cons ive noticed but figured id wait on your response. ill list the cons first. however, id like for folks to keep in mind that i use alot of greasemonkey scripts for geocaching.com in order to make it "better", but at the same time, i probably spend 10% of my caching time on the sites logging and looking up caches and the other 90% actually caching so even a site like navicache.com is usable for me (theres no pros for that site).

cons
1) site doesnt work with chrome, safari, mobile ie, mobile safari and there are no iphone or winmo apps for the site. there is talk of a tc.com 2.0 that is pretty far along but hasnt been published yet, which brings me to item 2.
2) theres alot of talk about work on the site being stagnant. i havent been using it long but it seems alot of people have quit using the site because of waiting too long for updates or support and they claim the site has been abandoned by the head honcho. this might be an exaggeration.
3) gpx files dont see to put anything but the name and coords in my gps leaving me to have to use paper. i know this was something most everyone did in the past, but since im fairly new ive never had to worry about it except for puzzle caches. im sure if you started out using paper it was fun, however, going from paperless back to paper isnt fun.
4) allows you to search for nearby geocaches, navicaches, or traveler tags.
5) highly competitive. this can be both a pro and a con. i guess you dont have to engage the scores and such if you dont want to. im not too sure how the scoring system works completely but if it had weight based on how many are in your total general area and how far away from your home coords the cache are i would appreciate it more.
6) not nearly as much activity. of course theres always geocaching.com and navicache.com (though there arent many uniques on the latter).
7) the map system could be more intuitive. such as using the scroll on the mouse. it is powered by google maps which is more than i can say for navicache.

now some of the pros
1) welcoming community. this is big to some folks, but i found that everyone on geocaching.com was very welcoming as well. in fact, geocachers have been the most hospitable crowd ive seen when trying out something new. ive been very surprised at how few bad apples there are in geocaching period. when i first learned about it i figured there would be a ton of pirates. glad i missed that phase of geocaching.
2) highly competitive. puts more of the game aspect into it rather than the hobby. tough to build good scores with the lack of caches in our area but its there.
3) rating system. i use gcvote on geocaching.com. i highly recommend exploring gcvote and the other greasemonkey scripts. not sure if theres been a thread about this but ill start one.
4) confirmation codes and first finder codes for your hides. of course you could do a first finder code in a geocache hide.
5) self policing community. you approve your sponsorees caches and your sponsors approve your caches. this could be a task if youre not active.
6) cache types that are grandfathered on gc.com. oe already touched on this.

another cool thing about a site without so many hides is that if you have found a place that you really want to hide a cache, but theres too much saturation of geocaches, you can get another in there. hope this post is of help.

[chimps8mybaby]

Could I get some sponsors so I can look around Terracaching? My curiousity has gotten the best of me.

[astrodav]

Usually if you sign up you'll get an e-mail from a couple of sponsors in just a few hours. I think it still works like that anyway. I really saw nothing too exciting over there & didn't stay long. But I do remember I got sponsor e-mail's within hours.