Evolouie asked me today if I had ever heard of Terracaching. It just so happens that I just became a registered user a few weeks ago, and I had yet had the opportunity to try to find any. Since it was just about lunch time we decided to try to find one. First off we had to find out what cache we wanted to tackle. Since there are only 4 or 5 near us we chose the nearest one Patricia. I manually loaded the coordinates into my phone and out the door we went.
The terracache was located along the Clear Creek Trail which has 10 or 15 geocaches along it already. To get to our objective we had to pass by a geocache that I had already found and Evolouie had not. Neither one of us thought to grab this cache info before we left, but I strained my memory and pretty soon we had the cache in hand, but alas no log book. We didn't let this minor set back deter us though, and we headed on down the road.
After a short walk on a glorious day, we came to the terracache area, and with a little circling though the briars, we (we meaning Evolouie) found the cache. On a side note, the Clear Creek Trail has a ton of people on it, even during the day. Don't these people have jobs? Two grown men climbing around in the bushes must look a little bizaare, but hey they should be out working and contributing to the economy and quit worrying about us! Anyway we retreived the cache, signed the log, and eased on down the road.
My first impressions of Terracaching is so-so. I love the idea of a rating system. That is something I wish Geocaching.com would impliment. I have even kicked around the idea around of starting my own 3rd party rating system for geocaches but I don't quite have the html skills to do it properly. When you log a cache on terracaching.com you must rank it, which is very interesting. But the ranking system there is pretty confusing. There are tons of numbers thrown out, but I don't have the foggiest notion of what they all mean. So I give a thumbs up to trying to rank them, and a thumbs sideways for making the rankings confusing.
Something I don't really care about on terracaching.com is trying to find caches in my area. I couldn't find anywhere to put in a zip code, or state or county or anything. Finally Evolouie figured out to click the map and zoom into our area. There aren't too many around so it shouldn't be hard finding all of the close ones.
After finding the cache, I wanted to log it. So we get back to the office, and I pull up Terracaching.com, and I can't find where to put in my log entry. After a lot of fumbling I finally found the correct place to input my log. I didn't quite realize it at the time, but I was FTF. Woohoo! My first Terracache and I'm FTF. Another interesting thing about terracaching is it takes a confirmation code found in the log book to log your find. I don't think it's like that on all the terracaches but this one it was mandatory.
One other annoyance about Terracaching.com is the registration requirements. You have to be sponsored by two other members to become a member yourself. Before that you are pretty limited as to what you can even do on the web site. I'm not sure why that is, but it's annoying. It only took about 24 hours to get registered but by then the excitement of finding a terracache had wore off.
I keep trying to think back to the very first time I logged on to geocaching.com, and if I found that whole process confusing. I'm sure I did at the time. The terracaching process certainly has room for improvement, but it's still an interesting alternative to geocaching.com.
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