OCNA’s longest tenured Admin, DudleyGrunt, is an official fill in host on The Geocaching Podcast, and fulfilled those duties for the first time on Wednesday, May 6th, 2015 on episode 401. In addition to discussing our site’s new Challenge caches with host HeadHardHat and fellow co-host Taz427, they also discuss two Terracaching.com Cyber caches which support very worthy causes. Those being DG’s own 2015 Walk to Defeat ALS Cyber Cache (which supports defeating ALS, and more specifically, the team Ben’s Buddies in honor of DG’s Father) and St. Baldrick’s 2015 Cyber Cache (which supports childhood Cancer research, and more specifically, Team OConnellz). You can listen to (and watch) the video version of the whole show below. There is the usual pre-show banter, but the actual show starts at the 6:40 mark.
More OCNA Challenge Caches released!
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!!
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
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
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.
HikerJamz After-Cache: Week ending 4/15/15
No regular blog post this week. But we have not one, not two, but three (relatively) new HikerJamz shows for you! As you may have heard, HikerJamz and CrazyCritter1966 started a 2nd podcast, Nature Talk. The original HikerJamz After-Cache show has been renamed PhotoCaching. However, HikerJamz’s channel on Spreaker.com is still called After-Cache. So the plan here at the OCNA blog is to embed both shows into a post on Wednesdays or Thursdays. HikerJamz and CrazyCritter plan on releasing PhotoCaching shows on Sunday, and Nature Talk shows on Wednesdays. Of course that’s not set in stone, Podcasters get busy and miss their target deadlines on occasion.
So we have Nature Talk episode 1 (released 4/9/15), Nature Talk episode 2 (released 4/15/15), and PhotoCaching episode 40 (released 4/12/15) embedded below for your listening pleasure. On Episode 2 of Nature Talk, they have Nature Girl on the show, who is a former Veterinary Technician with 23 years of service. Next week hopefully they will have author Greg Ganos, his first published book called “Greg’s Backyard Birdies”, who is at a book signing this week.
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