This is the third newsletter the UTAG committee has created. We apologize that it’s a couple of weeks overdue, but there was a UTAG committee meeting this last Saturday and wanted to let you all know about some items we discussed.
UTAG Website
The first thing we’d like to do is thank Sir Gerald for the wonderful
job he does on the UTAG website. If any of you haven’t been out there
for a while, you’ll find an entirely redesigned site. Sir Gerald puts a
lot of work into making our pages look really good. But it’s not only a
pretty new face, he has added additional content, and features linking
to the forums and the picture gallery. We are certainly lucky that we
have someone with so much talent who will put the time and effort into
making our site one of the sharpest anywhere on the web.
Milestones
There have been numerous milestones reached both large and small, in
the last couple of months. Congratulations go out to UtahJean for finding
over 1500 caches, to DorkTeam6, Ramblin Rover, ScubaDog and JeeperDad
for each finding over 1000 caches. Also to Udink, GixxerUt, and Klien
for finding 100, 75, and 50 respectively. We were glad to see Klien
excited about his first 50 finds and posting
this thread on the forums. It’s great to
see new cachers take an active voice on the forums, and to see them
reach milestones and share them with the rest of us.
Of course whenever you start naming names, you will invariably leave out someone who has worked hard to hit their own personal milestone. Hopefully, everyone knows any omissions are purely accidental. Fortunately, there are several sites that collect statistics for our state. http://grand_high_pobah.home.comcast.net/Utah1.html has rankings for the top 140+ Utah geocachers.
One of our own members, LaRobley, also keeps statistics for various milestones reached by Utah Geocachers on his site. Last but not least, our UTAG site has a Hall of Fame page. If you find that we’ve missed someone who should be there and isn’t, please send a message to Sir Gerald via the “Webmaster” link at the bottom of that page and he’ll add them.
Events
Last month there were two successful events. Another one in Cache
valley (those guys like to get together and have a lot of fun) and also the
3rd annual Farmington Flats Snow Shoeing and Cross Country Skiing
event. This year there were over 41 geocachers heading out on the trail.
They found several caches, but were once again skunked by the elusive
“Shakin with the Beavers” cache. If you’d like to see pictures of this
great event, then go to this page:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=7f015e9f-f6bc-46b8-9094-3d82f892a621.
If you are looking to attend another event (or your first event) there are several coming up. This Saturday, February 19th, Mockba is hosting the “Happy 4th Birthday, Salt Lake Caches event. Go to this URL for information on attending this event: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=1acc52f3-a38e-4a97-b7f8-3663a11046ff.
For anyone interested in a bike trip along the Jordan River Parkway, Roadstr is planning an event for March 19th (weather permitting) that will cover two large sections of the trail through the Salt Lake Valley. You can read about the plans by going to this thread on our UTAG forums.
Spring UTAG Meeting
We would also like to put a plug in for our Spring UTAG meeting.
Currently, we are planning to host the event on May 21st. The location is
still to be secured, so look for details in the next newsletter. (Due
around the 1st of April). That newsletter will also discuss the Annual UTAG
elections and how you can be involved as a UTAG member in that process.
Speaking of being involved, there are two items we, as the committee, would like to bring before the UTAG members and all Utah geocachers. The two items are the auction and a UTAG Benchmark. We have chosen this newsletter as our delivery vehicle.
Auctions
As our organization continues to grow and expand, we learn new things.
In the past, the semi-annual meetings have followed a format that has
been successful, but we want to know if you want them to continue in the
same way. Primarily, we are talking about the auction format, timing,
and purpose. Originally, the auction started small, but in the last year
has grown larger and larger. The money from the auctions has been used
for various purposes, such as renting the pavilions for our meetings,
buying the meat and charcoal for these meeting lunches, to register us
with the Federal and State governments as an official “association” and
for the door prizes at the events. Currently, we’ve raised more money
at each auction then we’ve spent. We are not saying we are swimming in
money, but the association has a little over $1,800 between our paypal
and bank account. Some members have expressed the feeling that the
auction took too long at the Fall event and maybe the interest wasn’t as high.
To address the length issue, we’ve decided to limit the auction to 30 minutes and additionally will do a "silent Auction" for some other items. As to the purpose, we’d like to ask all of you for your opinions on how to proceed. Several ideas were raised in the committee meeting and we’ve placed a poll out on our forum. Please visit it to vote and share your ideas and opinions.
The ideas from the committee were to:
A) hold the auction just once a year.
B) Hold it twice a year but donate the money from one auction to a
designated charity or setup a UTAG Scholarship fund.
C) Don’t change anything.
The committee was largely leaning toward the charity donation, or an annual scholarship to a college bound member of a UTAG family. But since it’s the UTAG members who donate the items and who make the auction successful, we want to know what you think. http://www.utahgeocachers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1076
Benchmark
The UTAG association has been given our very own “Benchmark” produced
by the GPS-Fun company. You can see a picture of the benchmark on
their website. We’d like to follow the format
used a couple of years ago when we created our UTAG logo. We are
proposing a contest to decide where to place this benchmark. From now until
the end of the month please email suggestions for a location to
benchmark@utahgeocacher.com or go to this forum thread.
We’ll gather the suggestions and create a voting page to narrow down the sites until
we have chosen the place for our benchmark. Then we’ll hold an event to go place it.
Thanks for all you do to make Utah geocaching so much fun. As a parting note, according to www.geocaching.com we placed over 1300 caches in Utah in 2004. (This is the count as of Feb 15th 2005 for caches placed between Jan 1 and Dec 31 2004. It includes active and disabled, but not archived caches).
(JeeperDad) Jeffry J Simpson
(SirGerald) Jerry Hansen
(DeViDe) Dewayne Dean
(Scout Master) Matty Ross
(JJAC) Jody Carlson