Geocaching

More FTF Problems

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This is exactly why FTF claims mean nothing!

Tonight I searched for something. I came across a thread. I looked through it. It was not what I was looking for. Before I clicked away, something caught my eye. One of the posts was made by S.C. & T.J. The initials stood out, but it is not how I recalled these cachers.

Many years ago there was an account named SunCrush & Traumajunkie21. I believe they were a married couple, but frankly, I have forgotten. I got to know them a little through caching. SunCrush, the female, was the more active cacher. She got Lyme’s Disease early on and disappeared for a bit. Then she came back as a very active cacher. I cached with her on several occasions. Here she and I are at ski’s Rewards cache. At the Lebanon event SC & TJ held in June 2003, Mopar, KenDawg, ski, and I hid a multi cache named Here Comes the Sun(Crush and TraumaJunkie).

At some point, SunCrush and Trauma broke up. SC moved to Florida. She took over the account and renamed it SunCrush and began caching down there. Interestingly, all the hides associated with her account were abandoned. Read through some of those and you’ll see how.

At that time (spring 2004) I had a discussion forum on this site titled Cache Aid. My hope was to clean up what I saw as our playground and get abandoned caches archived, maintain others that needed help, etc. Jen took exception and railed against the elitist attitude, etc. I recall some comment she made about how the high number cachers acted and just wanting smileys. ski pointed out I had no caches logged on GC.com. She then got Trauma involved a bit, but it wasn’t long before all these were gone. She was 1200 miles away . . . permanently.

As I said at the outset, I came across the SC & T.C. account. I hadn’t recalled this account, but I guess they used it to post. Seeing the old names sparked my interest and I called up her account to see if she was still active. She is. I then saw she had some information in her profile. Something didn’t look right; Jen claims she was FTF on Arney’s Mount.

This particular cache was archived in September 2004. There is no logbook for us to reference at this point. All we have are logs. Of course, we all know I archived my found logs at GC.com years ago. We could employ the help of Groundspeak to look up my archived log to verify the date. We won’t. Lord knows they won’t do it at my behest. All we can go on is what two folks say.

This, 29 July 2002, was my first big day of caching; Gert was away for the week. I began by dropping my SIL off at the Philly airport. I went to Fort Mifflin to log a cache that was a benchmark (remember that one?). I balked at the $6 admission. I found a couple caches in Philly before heading up to log several caches in and around Mt. Holly. Many of those were SC & TJ’s caches. The last one of the day was Arney’s Mount.

Not according to SunCrush. Her profile states it was her very first FTF. Looking at the cache page, we see that SC now claims it was her fourth FTF. I say now because she edited her 31 July 2002 log last year on 4 May 2006.

We did not cache together. As a matter of fact, we are claiming we found the cache on different days. How does FTF work in this case? Who was FTF?

You see folks, FTF is problematic. Mother Hen doesn’t buy a claim of FTF without a name in the logbook. Looking at the logbook would resolve this . . . perhaps. It is known that logbook pages have been removed. But the logbook is long gone.

So who do we believe?

I could point to my log here at eCache for the Arney’s Mount cache. Of course, that means nothing. I could have easily back-dated my log here. We are no clearer on the FTF front are we?

What good is this statistic if we can’t be certain? And that folks highlights the silliness of bragging about FTF.

One might easily construe that SC is falsely claiming a FTF well after the fact. More likely, she decided to jump on the FTF bandwagon and scoured her finds to determine which she had been FTF on. Seeing no other log before hers on the Arney’s Mount she probably assumed she had been so and then edited her log to brag reflect it. Look at all the confusion that has now caused. 😉

As I said, I cached around Mt. Holly most of the day. I recall the humidity on the hill very well as I marched up, and then down, then up, and back down, over and over trying to find that cache. That was the first time the DV camcorder acted up. While the official online cache logs are all archived, there is another log that does exist that shows I was in the area that day. That log has a timestamp on it.

Again, who was FTF?

Also blogged on this date . . .

One thought on “More FTF Problems”

  1. I hardly ever recheck online logs on caches that I’ve already visited, so who knows how many have been retroactively FTF-ed by other people?

    Reply

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