Opencaching.us – Page 8 – OpenCaching North America Geocaching Blog

More OCNA Challenge Caches released!

May 6, 2015May 6, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

Here we see one of our loyal users feverishly logging one of our new locationless type Challenge Caches. OK, not really, we had that image in our library from another post. But these site owned Challenge Caches have been getting rave reviews from some of our most active long time users, as well as on some Geocaching forums elsewhere on the internet. In the 8 days since they’ve been released, 10 different users have posted 48 find logs on them. Not only is that a lot by our standards, that’s just the people who’ve checked the website or blog in the the last 8 days. We will also announce them via a “bulletin” to all registered users of the site in the next day or two. By the way, we rarely use these bulletins, and you can opt out at sign up (or by following the instructions in the bulletin). The last time we sent one in August 2014, 15 people, mostly from Yahoo accounts, reported us as spammers! Don’t do that, we’re not spammers. 🙂

So today we release 8 more, and you can see we now have a “C” in the Gulf of Mexico, to go along with an “O”. So obviously we will be spelling “OCNA”. Will we do more than that? We can’t say, but we will tell you there won’t be any more released until a couple weeks after Geowoodstock at the earliest. The 8 released on May 6th, 2015 are:

OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Finder level 1) – OU07CF (Find OCNA caches in 3 different States or Provinces)
OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Finder level 2) – OU07D3 (Find OCNA caches in 6 different States or Provinces)
OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Finder level 3) – OU07D3 (Find OCNA caches in 10 different States or Provinces)
OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Finder level 4) – OU07D5 (Find OCNA caches in 25 different States or Provinces)
OCNA Challenge Cache – They found it! Level 1 – OU07D6 (Receive 10 found it logs on your owned caches)
OCNA Challenge Cache – They found it! Level 2 – OU07D7 (Receive 50 found it logs on your owned caches)
OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Hider level 1) – OU07D8 (Hide OCNA caches in 5 different States or Provinces)
OCNA Challenge Cache – I get around (Hider level 2) – OU07D9 (Hide OCNA caches in 10 different States or Provinces)

Introducing OCNA Challenge Caches!!

April 29, 2015April 29, 2015 OpenCaching North America 2 Comments

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 our introducing our own! As the banner 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 plan on having 40+, but we are just releasing the first 12 today, Tuesday, April 28th, 2015.

HikerJamz News

April 28, 2015April 28, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

Unfortunately, not the greatest of news. HikerJamz and CrazyCritter1966 have decided to discontinue their Geocaching Podcast in favor of their Nature Talk Podcast. James told us, “There are a few obstacles that we can’t overcome and our final decision has been to discontinue the show of geocaching. For one we have to travel so far now to find the caches now, two, it’s rattlesnake season and three, we don’t get any feed back from anyone. We put out a lot of effort to find cachers to contact us with just some short adventure stories and nothing comes back to us. Tina and I have done 23 episodes (5 months) worth of podcast’s and we feel that nobody wants to participate”.

Additionally, James went on to tell us that listenership numbers were not what they were hoping for. Fortunately, however, the numbers for Nature Talk were almost up to the levels of the Geocaching podcast after only 3 episodes! We and James have mutually agreed that the Nature Talk Podcast isn’t about Geocaching, and we will not be posting it to this blog. We wish James and CrazyCritter all the best with the Nature Talk Podcast. Be sure to check it out, Episode 4 will be released on April 29th, 2015, the day after this blog post. You can check out all the Nature Talk shows on Spreaker at Aftercache.com, as well as iTunes, soundcloud, blogspot, tumblr, and stitcher.

The Appalachian Trail in Md., South Mountain, and Geocaching

April 24, 2015April 25, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

At the approximate midpoint of the pedestrian walkway on this railroad bridge over the Potomac River is the starting point of the Appalachian Trail (hereafter referred to as the AT), in Maryland. That’s the historic town of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia across the river, which just happens to be the location of Appalachian Trail Conservancy HQ. The AT in Maryland follows a 40.9 mile route, mostly along the backbone of South Mountain. The AT Conservancy rates the Maryland section of the trail with an overall difficulty of 2 out of 10, (which is quite easy by AT standards), and the elevation ranges from 230 to 1,880 feet. We assume, that as outdoorsy types, most Geocachers are familiar The AT, especially those in the Eastern half of The U.S. and Canada. But we’ll give a quick overview of the whole trail before discussing the Maryland section. And Geocaching, of course.

OCNA Virtual Caching in Arlington, Va.

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

Above is the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial. We could consider this post part of our “Things to do near Geowoodstock XIII” series, as Arlington, Virginia (which sits directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.), is 61 miles from Boonsboro, according to Mapquest. We would expect many Geocachers to combine a trip to Washington, D.C, and the surrounding area with their trip to GW. On our website, we have have 5 virtual caches within a .9 mile radius of a point centered in Arlington National Cemetery, and they are all excellent. They are:

They are NOT, however, the only OCNA caches in Arlington; they are merely the 5 featured virtual caches within a .9 mile radius. You could spend a whole day finding OCNA caches in Arlington; we have 13 of them (the first 13 in that search), including another Virtual and a Webcam. Read on for more info on the 5 featured Virts.

coord.ch Multi Waypoint Redirects

April 3, 2015April 3, 2015 OpenCaching North America Leave a comment

Many Geocachers are familiar with coord.info redirects (or “link shorteners” or “shortcuts”), which can be used only for Geocaches, Travel Bugs and Waymarks listed on Geocaching.com and Waymarking.com respectively. But did you know there is another redirect tool out there that works for almost every other Geocaching website in the world, as well as Geocaching.com listed caches, Travel Bugs and Waymarking.com listings? And as an added bonus, it’s even two characters shorter! That service is provided by the website coord.ch, and it’s very easy to use. Some cachers might not even be familiar with Groundspeak’s coord.info service, let alone coord.ch, so we’ll start with the basics.

Category: Opencaching.us