I was going back over some of my old, uncompleted challenges yesterday. Some of them remain uncompleted because they’re hard (for me… A hundred finds in each of ten states? I don’t find extra caches when I’m gathering counties!) while others remain because of my own peccadilloes (I could go find every state name from a geoart tomorrow, but I want to do it organically). One of them caught my eye because I don’t do that many EarthCaches. I have, to date, found 69 thus far which is almost three quarters of an EarthCache per month. Not exactly brimming over with numbers for that stat. The goal of the challenge is to find one of each of the 20 EC classifications. I took the opportunity to run the checker and see what I had remaining to complete it. According to it, I have found fifteen of twenty, which is nothing to sneeze at. It also notes that there are some ECs that do not have classifications listed so they might qualify in one of the five missing slots. I narrowed my eyes for a moment. I was pretty sure that I had a few of the missing ones already. Having attempted to make an EC before, I know there’s no place to choose a classification so it’s more than possible that others have not been classified properly, if at all, over the years. However, some of the ones I’ve gotten seem obvious. Coastal feature? That looks like Holly Beach Restoration in Cameron Parish to me. Fold feature? That’s Inclined to be Good that I picked up on the way to Birmingham. Fossil feature? That may be covered by LUEDERS LIMESTONE that I recently FTF’d since I had to spot fossils as part of it. I got a Metamorphic feature with Meta Rocks Earth Cache. I must admit that I have (as far as I’m aware) never been close to a Glacial feature. That leaves me one cache away from being done instead of five. However, the challenge states that there are two feature types that are rare and can be used as wild cards for the others: Impact and Geologic Time. Alas, I have not approached an impact feature yet, either. However, what the heck is Geology of the Grand Canyon in Coconino County if not about geologic time? Are you telling me that I might’ve finished this challenge long ago and the checker has been lying to me all this time! Oh, the indignity of it all!
I guess my point here (and I do have one) is that you’ve got to keep an eye on those checkers. I don’t have time to check each and every one on each and every challenge, but I’ve probably got a few more that are giving me false negatives and at least one I know is giving me a false positive.
Geocaching While Black 