Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

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eaturbyfill
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Joined:Sat Mar 15, 2014 10:53 pm
Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by eaturbyfill » Sat Mar 15, 2014 11:07 pm

I am not quite new to finding geocaches, but I am new to hiding them. I am having issues determining where I can and cannot hide caches. I have read through all of the guidelines, but I am still having a problem.

I live in east Tennessee, and I can't tell what areas are part of the Cherokee National Forest and which are not. On Google maps, for example, it show the Cherokee forest as being one contiguous giant spot on the map. On the map I have downloaded to my tablet for caching, it only shows some areas as being green. It doesn't make sense for the entire area to be blanketed as national forest because there are many residential and business areas. Is there any way to tell for sure whether or not an area is in the forest? The maps differ and I am not sure which is accurate and the reviewers follow to determine these things.

Mr.Yuck
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Re: Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by Mr.Yuck » Sun Mar 16, 2014 9:16 am

Hi, and thanks for posting. I'm an admin for the website, and there are two others. We have a file that calculates whether or not the cache is in a National Park, and it generates the National Park Graphic on the cache page, as well as a link to the park. This is totally automated, because we did in fact last summer have a guy place a cache in an Indiana State Park adjacent to a National Lakeshore (who knew there was such a thing), and we agreed with him, and the only way I could get rid of it was to delete a table entry in the database! Speaking of the database, there are exactly 30 cache listings in the "caches_npa" table, meaning they have been calculated to be in an NPA such as this virtual by our website founder.

Speaking of which, there has been some internal debate, but we do accept Virtuals and webcams in NPA's. I once discussed this with a well respected Groundspeak EarthCache only reviewer whom I know pretty well, and she advised against it, saying the Cache Owners should still have permission from the National Parks service. I didn't blow off her advice or anything, I've only been the "site owner" for a year, and almost all of those 30 caches were before my time. :mrgreen:

So I will check out the source code of this file, and see how it works. Does it use Google Maps? Probably. Does Groundspeak have something very similar? Probably. I do know a regular Groundspeak reveiwer very well, as well as the previously mentioned Earthcache only reviewer, and they might tell me what they have going on over there, but I wouldn't want to get either one of them in trouble. :lol: Maybe if you asked your own Groundspeak reveiwer, they might share a little info about how it works over there.
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Mr.Yuck
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Re: Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by Mr.Yuck » Fri Mar 21, 2014 11:58 pm

OK, I have finally found, and looked at the file. I'm not a coder, I consider myself more of an Apache Linux web server admin :D. But from what I can see, our calculations are based on Google maps. The code appears to call them up, and submit our key for the Google Maps API. I could be wrong, any php junkies reading this (which I doubt) want to take a look at it? We are open source, of course.

I think I've already answered the question though. If you have a cache submission that you do not believe is on NPA property, and can provide evidence that is near, but not on such property, we take that into account, and will delete the auto generated NPA graphics (which are ultimately a warning to us) on your cache page if we agree with you.
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tripman1
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Re: Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by tripman1 » Wed Mar 26, 2014 6:50 pm

I haven't had Natl. Park experience, but the smaller park systems (state and local) are friendly. Utah State Parks have some great caches, and in Colorado, Arapahoe county places caches in their parks. They usually are larger and have a lot of park themed swag. You may have better luck with local agencies.
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Baldr
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Re: Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by Baldr » Wed Nov 09, 2016 5:28 am

tripman1 wrote:I haven't had Natl. Park experience, but the smaller park systems (state and local) are friendly. Utah State Parks have some great caches, and in Colorado, Arapahoe county places caches in their parks. They usually are larger and have a lot of park themed swag. You may have better luck with local agencies.
Who are the local agencies?
Last edited by Baldr on Tue Feb 04, 2020 5:32 am, edited 4 times in total.

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TermiteHunter
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Re: Hiding Geocaches - Regarding National Park Areas

Post by TermiteHunter » Thu Nov 10, 2016 3:48 pm

Baldr wrote:
tripman1 wrote:I haven't had Natl. Park experience, but the smaller park systems (state and local) are friendly. Utah State Parks have some great caches, and in Colorado, Arapahoe county places caches in their parks. They usually are larger and have a lot of park themed swag. You may have better luck with local agencies.
Who are the local agencies?
That would depend entirely on where you live...they are LOCAL after all.
It would depend too on if you are looking at placing a cache in a City or County Park.
Most cities, towns and Counties have a web presence, you can search for the relevant park info online. If they have a site and Geocaching rules they are usually listed but not always easy to find.
Some local parks have rangers or other facilities on site that you could ask for direction.
If indeed it is a National Park, each park has their own staff. Search for the appropriate park online for information about their rules and/or contact person.

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