LANMonkey Down Under?

Recently, the GeoGearHead's podcast (episode GGH093 - The History of Podcasting) featured a list of active podcasts about geocaching.  This prompted me to check out some of these podcasts I'd not listened to before, and I found some real gems in that list.

I thought it would be cool to hear what cachers in Australia & New Zealand talk about, so I downloaded an episode of the GeoTalk podcast. As it turns out, it happened to be the 100th podcast for that show - that's pretty impressive to get to 100 shows. Congrats Darren on 100 episodes!

In listening to the podcast on my drive home from work, I had a huge surprise when the host, Darren Osborne, started talking about lab caches.  The first blog he referenced in his show was LANMonkey's Geocaching Adventures - you know, this one? That was so amazing and appreciated!  Darren was referencing our "Lab Caches - FYI" episode, as well as bringing in some likely more authoritative sources such as NotAboutTheNumbers and the GroundSpeak forums.

So that's about as close as we'll get to traveling to Australia or New Zealand in the next year or so, but it was awesome to get the reference. So in return, I would encourage any & all of my readers to check out Darren's podcast. It's well put together, and gives a great insight into caching activities down-under. Darren clearly has been caching for a very long time and seems to be a pretty active cacher under the handle "The Spindoctors."

I've also added GeoTalk to my list of "Recommended Reading" over there on the right-hand panel.

If you have any geocaching or outdoor technology related podcasts and/or blogs you'd recommend, please comment or email the LANMonkeys with your suggestions. (PS: remove "NOSPAM" before clicking send on your email.) We look forward to hearing from you on what you read & listen to.

Thanks for reading, and remember to cache safely, and cache often!

Geocaching Beyond Hope

I know, that joke is beyond old, but I'm having a hard time letting it go - I guess it's just too easy. Geocaching in Coquihalla Canyon Provincial Park however, wasn't too easy. The range of challenge on the terrain & difficulty of the caches in and near this park made for a great visit. From "Othello Entrance" (GC1RPBC), a quick park and grab in the parking lot you can grab caches along or near the trails and then challenge yourself to a serious inclined hike to go for "Hope Nicola Trail - Between Two Conicals" (GC150A5).


We hope you enjoyed the video, and would love to hear back from you on your experiences caching in this park, or other tunnels or railbed trails.

Thanks for joining us, and remember to cache safely, and cache often!
Team LANMonkey.

Breakfast, Caching, and Planting.

Did you think we forgot about you? Naw, we've been busy, but we've been preparing more content for you also. And last weekend, we were able to get busy with caching again. That good kind of busy!

We managed to attend a breakfast event, grab a mystery and traditional cache nearby that had eluded us previously, and then headed to a CITO event. After that, we had a crazy walk through the woods with some old & new caching friends to go collect a mystery cache that the COs had just given us six the final nudge we needed on.

But enough talk - here's the video!

August Geocaching Highlights

As everyone knows, August was Groundspeak's "31 Days of Geocaching." Love it or hate, a record number (according to Groundspeak) of cachers were out geocaching each day of August. I've read and heard many opinions about the souvenirs, which seem to be a primary focus of discussion, but we shouldn't let that debate distract from the ultimate goal - which was to get out & go geocaching.

One thing we can all agree upon, is that it appears summer is now over.  So in remembrance of a fun summer of geocaching, as we head into the crisp and/or damp autumn caching season, here are some of our highlights of geocaching in August.




BCGA Cache Blitz 2013
This was our first year to participate in the BCGA Cache Blitz, and we had an absolute blast. Obviously, summer is "cache placing" season anyhow, but with the extra incentive of Blitz recognition we got out to some great geocaches. Check out the complete list of the Blitz results and useful "short-list" of some cool caches. We even placed a couple of our own for the Blitz; and amazingly, we wound up with the over-all Blitz-winning cache - Monkey Puzzle Tree!

Event-o-rama
We've never been to so many events in one month! We even got to help host one, which was an exciting first-time event for us. Special thanks go out to Catapult Jeff & Iron Maiden and goaliegirl38 for their tireless work in coming up with ideas for events and all the work that goes on in the background for them to be successful. We also attended a fun night out at the pub hosted by a visiting geocacher (geo-gas-head) from the UK. That event opened our eyes to the idea that you can plan events for when you are visiting different countries, and meet a ton of friendly geocachers who have the low-down on all the local caching.  As a side note, it was great to get a good chat in with tjguy98, and I certainly appreciated your feedback and insight into geocaching social media!

We Went Ape!
On our Geocaching HQ Block Party 2013 road-trip, we also went to the 2013 WSGA "Going Ape" event at Hyak, in Iron Horse State Park, WA. Donner and Manta Rayz came with us, and we met up & cached for the day with walkinbyfaith and l0cus.  Here's our video of that adventure - but beware, it's not for the faint of heart! In the middle of the 2 mile long tunnel we were attacked by the Fen Dweller!

Lab Caches - FYI

There's been a lot of discussion - and frankly, a lot of confusion - around Groundspeak's (geocaching.com) introduction of Lab Cache type.  The Lab Cache type was introduced at this years Block Party (August 17th, Seattle WA) with a lot of fanfare but also a lot of confusion.

Prior to the event, Groundspeak let us all know that a "new cache type" was going to be introduced. Hey, they wanted to amp up the excitement and attendance for the Block Party, and that was successful. Subsequently, folks arrived, but then the confusion kicked in. Depending upon where you were when, and to whom you spoke, different messages (unofficial, of course) made their way around about what the deal was with Lab Caches.

Some more experienced 'cachers who'd attended the Block Party previously made assumptions (reasonable ones) based on their past experiences. New cachers tried to grasp the concept and got pieces of it. Other than the "keynote" at the event and a discussion forum posting, there was little official and consistent communication from Groundspeak on the topic.


For example; while at the event I recorded a LMGA episode on the Lab Caches to try and explain what I currently understood - by the time the video was in post production (1 week later) there was more information that I used to make some corrections in the video. Subsequent to that, deeper "research" into the Lab Caches has provided me enough information to write this blog entry - so the first thing to be cognizant of is that this is an evolving concept.

Here are three key things to help you understand Lab Caches.

1. This is a test - this is only a test. Lab Caches are, in essence, a real-world labratory to test out new ideas for geocache types; and the place(s) Groundspeak has decided to use for their "alpha testing" or lab work, are the Mega Events. This means that if you are jonesin' to get a Lab Caches icon in your profile, you'll need to attend a Mega that has announced it will host Lab Caches.

2. They count (sort of).  Lab Caches give you smilies, and count in your over-all cache finds, but

there's a catch, my statistically oriented friends - there are no logs on geocaching.com associated with these caches as they are intended as tests and aren't available after the events. Therefore applications like GSAK won't be able to add them from your "My Finds" pocket query, or from directly querying your account. The work around is to manually create the caches in your GSAK DB as waypoints, and set them to "found" on the date you found them/attended the Mega Event.

3. They're not my type.  Lab Caches aren't one specific type of cache; this is a category for Groundspeak to use to try out all kinds of different ideas (remember "Challenges?") for what might make a new cache type. So each event that has Lab Caches may have something completely different, and Groundspeak is really looking for your feedback on those caches. Attendees from the 2013 Block Party who tried out the "Adventures" Lab Caches were subsequently sent a link to a survey asking for our feedback on these.

As always, I'm really interested in your thoughts & opinions around Lab Caches, and geocaching topics in general, so feel free to post your comments to this blog or to the Lab Cache FYI video on our YouTube channel.

Cache safely, and cache often.

LMGA FYI - Geocaching International Film Festival 2013

On August 17th under the Aurora Bridge in the Freemont neighbourhood of Seattle, attendees of the 2013 Block Party had the opportunity to be a part of the first Geocaching International Film Festival (GIFF).

We've distilled the event down to a few key moments, and included some of our observations.

 Over-all we had a great time and were absolutely amazed at the quality of the top 16 films that were shown during this event. The films came in from geocachers around the world and featured themes from the comedic to stories of how geocaching has impacted the lives of people in significant ways.



In the end, the experience motivated us to start considering how we might come up with a submission for next year's GIFF. Who knows, maybe with some time, talent, and the support of our local geocaching community we can come up with a group effort that gets onto that giant screen next year!

Groundspeak Geocaching Block Party 2013

This past weekend was "cache your face off" with the LANMonkeys, Donner, and Manta Rayz.
We headed to Seattle to experience our very first (and certainly not our last!) Block Party event and had an amazing time.

We even managed to bump into a handful of cachers from back home including Walkinbyfaith, l0cus, katcogo, Delta Dodger, Sweet Marie, PhilatSea, and probably some others I apologise for forgetting at the moment... there was simply so much to take in we were in event over-load! But we took ample footage to try and give at least some sense of the over-all experience for those who couldn't make it this year.


We tested out the seven "lab caches" from Geocaching Labs (Groundspeak R&D), visited all the newly placed permanent caches, enjoyed the first ever "Geocaching International Film Festival", and met many, many people - including a few "geocaching celebrities."

Check out our video for just a few of the highlights from this beautiful day in the Freemont neighbourhood of Seattle.

We will be releasing two "Special Edition" videos highlighting the GIFF & the lab caches to give you some special insight into those first time events if you weren't able to make it there. Here's our Lab Cache FYI video, just uploaded! Or if you were, you can check out our perspective on those. If you'd like to see those videos, make sure you follow our YouTube channel.

The event planners spun on the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" theme for a few different angles, and did a fine job.  The event itself was smoothly run with more than enough activity and sights to keep cachers busy morning through evening.

By the time the evening came around, we headed back off to our hotel and crashed hard, completed exhausted from the fun, sun, and caching company; we needed our rest because the next morning (Sunday) we were off to the Going Ape 2013 event an hour east of Seattle.

So for our very first Block Party experience, we'd really like to thank not only the folks at GroundSpeak who made the event happen, but the cachers from home who gave us so many tips and ideas of things to see & do when we arrived.

Thanks everyone,
The LANMonkeys.

"Cache safely, and cache often!"