[Az-Geocaching] Geocaching: Team vs. Individual Statistics...

[Dirk Harris]

Since Scotti brought up my name, I figured I would jump in on this one.

My family became involved in geocaching back in Nov of '03 timeframe.
We found this to be a great excuse to get the kids off of the XBox and
Playstation and out into the world we live in.

We went out and found caches and continued this habbit until we found
most all of the caches in the Tucson area. Before long I started to
recieve emails from other cachers about how we were only doing it for
the numbers and how we did not care about the caches or other cachers
as long as our numbers went up.

folks, I will say I am the only one I know of with a Living TB that
can never be left behind. My family has planned entire vacations
around the sport and we drove 8 states in 9 days doing geocaching. We
also spent 4 nights in the Denver area and 2 nights in Custer SD on
this same trip. So we were on the road many hours straight if you do
the math.

I am not talking little bitty NE US states. We hit NM, CO, UT, SD, NB,
NV, CA and something else but anyways I digress....

 We love geocaching and we very much love meeting other cachers. We
have gone out for full day cache runs with friends and never signed a
cache because we had already been there in the past. We have started
hiking and hitting all the peaks and trails we can. My son, now 8, has
climbed Table Top Mountain, Pikacho peak, Blacketts Ridge, Wasson
peak, tortalita Peak(twice). just to name a few.

 If it was about the numbers we would not drive 6 hours to hit a
single cache then 6 hours home. We use geocaching as a cheap tour
guide and find those caches in places we never had a reason to visit.

Do we hit the urban micros? Yes. 
Do we make numbers runs? That is a little harder to flat out yes on
because there are so darned many urban no pencil smaller then a pack
of smokes caches that it makes it very cluttered and almost impossible
to get a good download of caches without clearing many of these.

Look at our stats if you have to and you will see we have pumped out
some of the toughest puzzle caches in AZ as well as some of the harder
hikes and peaks.

I even bought a jeep after getting my truck then van stuck. 

I have met wonderful people such as Team Dodge Podge, The Cow Spots,
JScotti, Mo & Go, We C*EM, We Findum, ElmoSmelmo, AZPaul, Silney,
AJ.JR, Evilfish, Randman, AZKiteflyers, The gangs in Prescott, Del
Mar, MurphsLaw...... and the list goes on and on and on..
I think we have never met a cacher we could not find a way to get
along with and most of them are welcome into my house and home at any
time day or night...

Do we get carried away? I have seen people call in sick for 2 weeks at
a time so they could snowboard or ski. I have watched people drop
everything every week to watch football. I have seen people who cannot
walk past a TV if a basketball game is going on. Every sport has its
hangups and every sport has very 'into it teams'..

If you want to play the numbers and need seperate numbers because you
do things different then I am sorry but I do not play that way.

Lets start new stats pages for :

1) People who used a hot air balloon to log a cache.
2) People who cache only at night
3) People who cache with a dog
4) People who never offroad but always hike to cache locations.
5) People who cache without using gasoline cars. (Bicycle or walkers only)
6) People who only cache between 1700 and 2100 on Tuesdays.

I love the sport, but I can do without all the comments on cache
numbers. I have even been accused of cheating by some of the other
cachers.. You know what?

I love getting FTF's. I will go climb a mountain at 3am if I have the
chance. (Nope, no 'team' thing going on here as I do not take my
children on hikes in the dark).

Elmosmelmo, Cow Spots, AZPaul, Team Dodge Podge, Mule Ears,
TucsonThompson, We C*EM, AZGeckoGirl, AZCachemeister, Team A.I. and my
family have had some amazing outtings together and I pray that these
will continue and become more frequent. My children have so many
adopted parents I feel like crying sometimes. I would never have
expected to make this many friends by hunting silly tupperware and
ammo cans but by god this has been the best year for our family in a
long time.

If you do not care about stats or you can get beyond the fact we have
a lot of finds, look one of us up for an outting. I am sure you will
also have a wonderful time with our families and would be welcome to
come down to Tucson any time.

Oh god, did I just write all that? Sorry about the soap box if you
took it that way, it is meant more from the heart to explain why we
cache as we do, not to condem anyones way of playing the game.

Now, lets worry about how to get Brian back down to AZ.!!!!