D is for Difficulty - Meet & Greet. Event Cache

"D is for Difficulty."

The RGV Geocachers meet every Thursday morning to share Geocaching stories, tips and tricks of the game as well as provide help with solving mystery/puzzle caches. Buying breakfast is always optional, but the fun and fellowship is a given.

We're meeting at the Country Omelette, 3420 N 10th St, McAllen, TX 78501 at 9:00 am **NOTE** the newest time change. Now that we're no longer avoiding a noisy exercise class nextdoor to the restaurant, we're returning to our original start time of 9:00 am. Hope everyone can join us.

An alpha series of titles was started for our meet and greet breakfast events. Each event will highlight a term used in Geocaching. Today's event is: "D is for Difficulty."

Difficulty is defined as, "A thing that is hard to accomplish, deal with, or understand."
Near the top of the Cache page on the left side is listed the Difficulty of the cache to find. Stars and half stars are shown for the rated Difficulty. 1 is easiest, 5 is hardest.
The Difficulty is rated from 1 to 5, with half-points between the whole numbers. On your GPS it may be seen as D1.0, D2.5, or some other number up to D5.0.
A D1.0 is easy to find. The container is usually out in the open and not camouflaged to blend with its surroundings. Events are always rated D1.0 since it is easy to spot the correct building or park shelter where the Event is being held. An orange ammo can placed 20 foot up in a tree would still be rated D1.0 since it is easily spotted. Getting to it is listed as the Terrain rating of the cache.
The Difficulty rating may contain a second element; The Difficulty of accessing the log to sign your name. Sometimes there is a puzzle on the cache page that you have to solve to get the actual coordinates for the cache container. Other times there may be a field puzzle that has to be solved to get into the container. A cache may be rated D2.0 for the puzzle and D2.0 for the hide. The owner decides how he rates the combination. Rarely will he give it a combined D4.0. A Difficulty of D5.0 is reserved for those caches that require special knowledge not readily availible from the internet, or a hide that is extreamly hard to find.