The Geocachers Rucksack
One of the common problems when out and about geocaching is what stuff to put in your Geocaching Rucksack. You can't take everything, so you have to make some choices on what to ditch. It might occasionally prove useful to have a 20ft extendable ladder for that treeclimb cache, but it wouldn't leave space for essentials like your snacks! And it always pays to have some spares of the essential items, in case of accidents.
Take a look at the grid below. It shows 8 essential items you may want to take in your geocaching rucksack.
- Your personal letterbox stamp for those letterbox caches
- Flashlight for those night caches
- Tweezers for the inevitable urban nano
- Wellie Boots - always keep an eye out for the wading attribute
- Spare log sheets so you can be a 'cache angel' and replace damaged or full logs in a cache
- Gloves - essential to protect against thorns, and (for the squeamish) against creepy crawlies
- Pencil - to sign the log of course
- Multi-tool, for those little unexpected events.
To help me lighten my geocaching rucksack, look at the grid below showing the many things I can choose to put in it, including several spares of the same thing. Start crossing off unecessary items by marking them:
But let's be systematic about it. Keep doing that until the following has been done:
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no row or column can have more than one occurrence of any given item
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crossed-off items cannot be horizontally or vertically adjacent, although they can be diagonal to one another.
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the remaining items must be all connected to each other, horizontally or vertically.
When you've finished, you should have a lot fewer items for me to choose from to put in the rucksack. Your reward for helping will be some coordinates to a cache hidden at: N 56° 2.ABC W 3° 45.DEF, where;
A = 2nd crossed off item on row S
B = 1st crossed off item on row T
C = 2nd crossed off item on row U
D = 1st crossed off item on row Z
E = 2nd crossed off item on row Y
F = 3rd crossed off item on row U
Count left to right to determine what is 1st, 2nd etc.
Solution Checker
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