Meeting notes: January 12, 2002

Greetings to all.

On January 12, the Georgia Geocachers Association had their eighth meeting. On this occasion, we were hosted by Tim Black of REI. In addition to providing the meeting facilities, Tim donated some items for door prizes.

Participation was great, with 21 new attendees outnumbering the 20 who have attended at least one previous meeting.

Jim McKenna, an instructor with the Leave No Trace, Inc. (LNT) organization, gave a highly informative talk to the group. Leave No Trace is a national non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and inspiring outdoor recreation through education, research and partnerships. Leave No Trace builds awareness, appreciation and respect for our wildlands.

Jim explained the six principles of LNT: Plan Ahead and Prepare, Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces, Dispose of Waste Properly, Leave What You Find, Minimize Campfire Impacts, Respect Wildlife, and Be Considerate of Other Visitors. While Jim's talk was tailored to geocaching activity, LNT offers much more information of interest to the outdoor enthusiast. You may want to visit the LNT web site:

www.lnt.org/

Lewis Moseley (Big Doggie) next demonstrated various methods of creating and using stencils to mark geocache containers. Everyone seems to appreciate the new level of concern for possible terrorist activities, and clearly marking our geocache containers may well head off anxiety should someone see a geocacher walking around with an ammo can or other "suspicious" container. The stencil template files, instructions, and other geocaching information can be downloaded from

gageocaching.tripod.com/

Members of GGA will be present at both Atlanta-area REI stores on Monday, January 14, at 7:00 p.m. to provide a clinic on the use of GPS receivers. If you feel you could help, learn something, or both, please feel free to attend.

Before closing the meeting, we had a drawing for the door prizes donated by REI and by Lewis Moseley.

Happy geocaching! Hope to see all of you again next month.

-Brad

(NOTE: Links have been removed from this public page.)