The ping of your next text message could be the starting bell for a geocaching adventure. Premium Members can receive email alerts for newly published geocaches, giving those geocachers racing to claim a “First to Find” a much-needed head start. Many mobile phone owners can get an additional leg up on the competition by emailing new cache notifications to their phone via email-to-SMS.
Email-to-SMS allows you to send an email to your phone, where it will show up as a text message. This means you don’t have to remain glued to your inbox to claim that “First to Find.”
Directing Instant Notifications to your mobile phone takes eight steps of know-how, which you can find in this Help Center article. Get ready for the ping of a new text message to take geocaching to the next level!
Quick disclaimer: Your phone needs to have internet access to receive Instant Notifications by text. Most mobile service providers offer this service, but it may not work on all phones. Your mobile provider’s text messaging rates may apply.
Some Geocaching.com Trackables get lucky enough to log a stop at Sea Shells – TB Stop & Go (GCNWBC). The Arizona, USA Travel Bug hotel has been checking Travel Bugs in and out for nearly seven years. It’s a huge geocache that Jeep’en Jumpers placed to add some variety to local geocaches.
Jeep’en Jumpers is the owner of 20 Travel Bugs. He wanted a safe stop for other Travel Bugs and says, “There were very few caches back in Yuma in 2005. Most of them were in the desert and I thought a friendly easy-to-get-to-cache would be nice for folks to find in the city. I had a wild idea and since I run the company that owns this property, I didn’t have any problem getting permission.”
Jeep’en Jumpers “wild idea” turned into a geocache that’s a regional favorite. Sea Shells – TB Stop & Go has racked up more than 70 Favorite Points. The cache page encourages geocachers who are on the move to visit the cache before traveling. It reads, “Going on a trip? Please check back to this page and see who needs a lift.” And people have checked back. Jeep’en Jumpers says more than 1300 Travel Bugs have passed through the hotel.
The difficulty two, terrain one geocache has even been the starting geocache for a major Travel Bug race.
But Jeep’en Jumpers admits, one of the best parts of owning a giant Travel Bug hotel, are the logs. One cacher wrote, “SEA SHELLS is a destination cache, one for the TOP OF THE LIST!… Thanks for the super-fun and all you do!”
Sea Shells - TB Stop & Go
Another geocacher who logged Sea Shells writes, “Found it with the entire extended family this morning…. what an amazing cache! And to think it even houses an ammo can…. inside it!! Kids spent almost 15 minutes exploring all the different TBs and trying to decide which would accompany us back to Alberta later this week. Thanks for the creative find!”
Jeep’en Jeepers has another creative hide. Check out his other Travel Bug hotel hiding in plain sight.
Continue to explore of some of the most engaging geocaches around the globe. Explore all the Geocaches of the Week on the Latitude 47 blog or view the Bookmark List on Geocaching.com. If you’ d like to nominate a Geocache of the Week, send an email with your name, comments, the name of the geocache, and the GC code to pr@groundspeak.com.
Why wait until February to get a weather prediction from Punxsutawney Phil when you can get one from Snohomish Slew in January? Snohomish Slew is a real frog billed as “the Meteorologist Frognosticator extraordinaire and mighty small hero to all the weather weary.” Last Saturday, he forecast what type of weather the Northwest United States might expect in the next six weeks: more winter or an early spring.
Every year the quaint little town of Snohomish, Washington (located about 30 miles northeast of Seattle) welcomes Slew for a frog-filled celebration to predict the end of winter. It’s known as GroundFrog Day.
We here at Groundspeak think that you can trust frogs over groundhogs any day, so we took our beloved mascot Signal to witness Slew’s prediction. Signal is a life-sized frog, with GPS capabilities (of course). Fellow Lackey Nicole (Louie Bliss) and I had the pleasure of escorting Signal to the event. Lots of high-fives and hugs were to be had with the kids in attendance. Kids weren’t the only one who stopped to get their picture taken with Signal – in most cases it was the parent who really wanted the photo with our own geocaching legend.
Signal watching Slew predict the forecast
The event included lots of dancing to frog remix versions of songs, hula-hooping, the GroundFrog royalty arriving via fire truck, and various booths to visit. After Slew took the stage to make his prediction, Signal was fortunate enough to shake webbed toes with the weather-casting celebrity.
What was Slew’s final prediction, you may be wondering? The final answer, as posted on the official website, was a bit vague: a Spring/Winter mix of weather is ahead.
Signal and Lackey Annie Love
“’Whether the weather be fine, Whether the weather be not, Whether the weather be cold, Whether the weather be hot, We’ll weather the weather, Whatever the weather, Whether we like it or not’ interpretation – neither 6 weeks of winter or spring, spring will come and sunny days, there’ll be a few, but still some cold days ahead, too.”
Either way, the current extended forecast for Seattle shows a lot of sunshine in our near future. We think Signal may have had a little help with that.
You’re back from a full day of heart-racing geocaching. It’s a blur of adventure, discovery and maybe a couple of bug bites. You sit down to log your geocaches and claim your well-deserved smileys. You know you looked at the geocaches before you left. But wait, which geocaches did you actually find?
The answer to that question could just be a click away. Now you’re able to log into Geocaching.com and check out, “Recently Viewed Geocaches” on your profile page. The last 50 viewed geocaches are saved in your profile for 10 days.
You can also find “Recently Viewed Geocaches” by selecting “Log a Cache” in the Play section of the top navigation. The new feature will save you time and may get you smileys faster, but it probably won’t save you any bug bites.
The ping of your next text message could be the starting bell for a geocaching adventure. Premium Members can receive email alerts for newly published geocaches, giving those geocachers racing to claim a “First to Find” a much-needed head start. Many mobile phone owners can get an additional leg up on the competition by emailing new cache notifications to their phone via email-to-SMS.
