If you’re a regular user of our website, you have surely heard of BIT Caches. They currently comprise a little over 10% of our active listings. We recently acquired the bitcaching.com domain and it’s small associated website from our founder, Jerry AKA RvRoadTrip, so we figured a blog post about BIT caching was in order. BIT is an acronym that stands for Bound ID Tag, to represent that the game piece is bound in plastic, or laminated. Although it doesn’t necessarily have to be, waterproof self-adhesive media (i.e. sticker paper) has become the norm for the smartphone GPS game Munzee, and it can easily be used for BIT caching as well. Want to learn more about BIT caching? Read on!
Category: Opencaching.us
12 more OCNA Challenge Caches released!
We have released 12 more of our site owned locationless type challenge caches, for a total of 42 at this time. You can expect more in the future as well. Several of them are named “Variety Show”, and pertain to hiding some or all of the 14 different types of caches available on our site. Tentative plans call for about 30 more, and it should be obvious Variety Show challenges that pertain to finding some or all of the the 14 different types will be among them. The 12 newly released caches also include seasonal finding challenges, and FTF challenges. They are all linked to below, along with a short explanation of their requirements.
- OCNA Challenge Cache – First To Find Hound (Level 1) – OU0935 (Be the FTF on 10 OCNA caches.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – First To Find Hound (Level 2) – OU0936 (Be the FTF on 20 OCNA caches.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Winter) – OU0937 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of December, January, and February.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Spring) – OU0938 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of March, April, and May.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Summer) – OU0939 (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of June, July and August.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Seasonal Cacher (Fall) – OU093A (Find OCNA listed caches hidden in the months of September, October and November.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Ultimate Monthly Cacher – OU093B (Find a OCNA listed cache a month for 12 months.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 1) – OU093C (Hide 4 different cache types.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 2) – OU093D (Hide 8 different cache types.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 3) – OU093E (Hide 12 different cache types.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Hider (Level 4) – OU093F (Hide all 14 different cache types.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Variety Show Extravaganza – OU0940 (Hide and find all 14 different cache types.)
Only the lonely (New OCNA challenge caches released)
On April 28th, 2015, one week to the day after the most popular Geocaching website in the world imposed a one year moratoriam on new challenge caches, we at OpenCaching North America introduced our own. As the banner above says, they are Locationless, so to speak. If you qualify, you can log it. They are owned by a special Admin account, OCNAChallenges, and are all Unknown (?) type caches. They are presented as Geo Art in the Gulf of Mexico. We released 12 on that day, April 28th, 2015, and released 8 more on May 6th, 2015. And then, nothing. We are a small, all volunteer organization, we got busy! We hosted an After GeoWoodstock event in Maryland. We planned, ran, and handed out prizes for a contest on our site. We had to get our 5th anniversary Pathtags finalized, as well as a free back anyone can use for their own Pathtags. We endured an almost month long Denial of Service attack. Yes, that one really happened, although we never publicized it. 🙂 We could go on, but won’t.
Only the lonely (Know the way I feel) was a smash hit for Roy Orbison in 1960, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard charts. If you’re a little younger than that, a totally different song titled Only the lonely by The Motels peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard chart in 1982. What does this have to do with us, or our challenge caches? Well, on Wednesday, October 21st, 2015, we released 10 more challenge caches (the letter N in The Gulf of Mexico), and they all pertain to lonely caches! Only the lonely, get it? Find caches that haven’t been found on our site in over 1 year, over 2 years, or over 3 years to be eligible to log some of these challenge caches. The 10 caches are listed below, along with a short explanation of the requirements for each. This blog post is a couple days behind, so most have been logged by some of our more observant players who have noticed these new listings. And a heads up, we plan on releasing 12 more challenge caches in the near future. We’re certainly not planning another 5 1/2 month gap between them!
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1 – OU0853 (Find a cache that has not been for at least one full year.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2 – OU0854 (Find a cache that has not been found for at least 2 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3 – OU0855 (Find a cache that has not been found for at least 3 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1.3 – OU0856 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least one full year.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 1.5 – OU0926 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least one full year.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2.3 – OU0928 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least 2 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 2.5 – OU0927 (Find 5 caches that have not been for at least 2 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3.3 – OU0929 (Find 3 caches that have not been for at least 3 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Level 3.5 – OU092A (Find 5 caches that have not been for at least 3 years.)
- OCNA Challenge Cache – Lonely Cache Combination – OU092B (Find 3 caches that have not been found in 1 year, 2 caches that have not been found in 2 years, and 1 cache that has not been found in 3 years.)
Forging Community in Rome
Forging Community in Rome is a Geocaching event listed on our site coming up on Friday, October 16th in Rome, Georgia. This is a pre-event (unofficial) for the annual Going Caching Mega Event, now in it’s 5th year, and it’s 2nd consecutive at Ridge Ferry Park in Rome. This interactive Mega has a Renaissance theme this year. You’ll notice from the Forging Community pathtag artwork here you see both Munzee and Geocaching logo’s. This is in fact a tri-listed event for Geocaching (our site), Munzee and Eventzee, which is a less than a year old photo scavenger hunt app brought to you by The team at Munzee.com. If you’re not familiar with Eventzee, you can read more about it here. So at this event, you can expect to find temporary OCNA caches, event (temporary) Munzees with a badge for the event, and an Eventzee scavenger hunt. Another integral part of this is tri-event is a food and donation drive for the Action Ministries Rome that is the local food bank for the Rome Georgia area. For every 5 food items or $5 donated you will receive one of the Forging Community pathtags. The goal is to give back to the community that is hosting their fun that weekend. We sent a few questions to obxgeek, AKA Rob, who hails from Northern Virginia, about this tri-event.
GeoGearHeads 197: Caching Solo II
OCNA Admin DudleyGrunt and his good friend NativTXN (Denise) were recently on the GeoGearHeads Podcast episode 197, talking Solo Caching. A libsyn embed of the show is at the bottom of this post. This show is not about OCNA, but we like to promote DG, whom we believe to be the most prolific guest in Geocaching Podcasting history. 🙂 You’ll notice we did not refer to NativTXN as an OCNA Admin. This is because she got way too busy in life, and stepped down from her position with us in mid August 2015. Our records (a post in our forums) indicate she was announced as a member of the OCNA Team on May 1st 2012. We thank her for her 3+ years of service!
GeoGearHeads is a near weekly feature with The Bad Cop and DarrylW4 discussing topics of interest to Geocachers, Location-based Gamers, and Technology Enthusiasts. They record the shows live through Google+ Hangout On Air Thursday nights at 9:10PM Eastern/6:10PM Pacific (The upcoming shows are listed on the Google+ GeoGearHeads page). You can subscribe to the audio version through iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher, watch the shows on YouTube, and check them out on FaceBook, Google+, and Twitter.
OCNA Free Pathtag back is live!
We have finally completed the process of getting a free Pathtag back for OCNA up and live on the Pathtags.com website! If you have an account there, and are logged in, you can view it as the first choice (scroll down please) at http://pathtags.com/design. In case you didn’t know, Pathtags have four possible back materials, known in Pathtag terms as “plating”. Only Black Nickel is displayed on that page. The others are Shiny Silver, Shiny Gold, and Shiny Copper. Shiny Silver is their standard color, and is available for no additional fee. The black nickel tag back, as displayed on the Pathtags website, is the classic “light blue” as seen on our website. We choose a totally different, much darker blue for the other plating options available, as can be seen in our final blueprint below. We thank Mike from Pathtags.com for putting up with us while we hammered this whole free pathtag back thing out, and we hope our readers will consider using it for their own personal pathtags!
