Geocaching in Salt Lake City

July 23, 2009

Last night Team DeLorme met up with a group of geocachers for a cache run in Salt Lake City.

We started out at the Salt Lake City Travel Bug where we met the cache owner, Lefty624. He was very helpful and allowed us to hold a little meet and greet at his location. We were joined by cachers from the Utah Association of Geocachers as well as some cachers who were attending the Outdoor Retailer Show. We found five caches in all with most of them being pretty challenging micro and nano caches. Geooogle, a local cacher, showed of some exceptional geosense and helped with several of the difficult micros. Thanks to Firennice for sharing his local knowledge of Utah geocaching as well as helping to keep us out of the hot sun! Thanks also goes to Cache Advance for sharing more about using Textmarks for geocaching, check out her post for a cool way to share that you’ve found the cache. Congratulations to Cach-U-Nuts for winning the Eartha 3D geocoin!

Here are some photos from the event. Thank you to all that attended, it was a lot of fun to get out and geocache while visiting Utah!

Chip Noble
Team DeLorme

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Visit from John Huston of North Pole ’09

July 22, 2009

John Huston visited the DeLorme booth today to share stories, pictures, and waypoints from the historic trip that he and Tyler Fish completed during their Victorinox North Pole ’09expedition. The two polar explorers became the first Americans to ski unsupported to the North Pole on April 25th of 2009… and they did it with the help of their DeLorme Earthmate PN-40 GPS devices! You can check out their blog to read more about the trip. Here are two of my favorite entries… the first covers a very scary event where John fell through the ice and spent some time in arctic waters.

http://www.forwardexpeditions.com/226-day-47-an-eventful-day-4-17.html

The second is titled “The Long Road Home” and shows a photo of the PN-40 on Tyler’s journal with an entry that simply states “The North Pole. Tired, proud… smart, safe. Here… we are here now.”  

http://www.forwardexpeditions.com/263-the-long-road-home-5-21.html

John brought his PN-40 with him to the booth and we were able to download the waypoints and take a couple of pictures. Check out the DeLorme patch on John’s expedition fleece, very exciting!

John Huston

John's PN-40

The Topo USA map below doesn’t show much detail for the North Pole but John was very happy with the device, especially when they started tracking their rate of drift at the end of the trip. The current was moving the ice so quickly they ended up deciding to ski without breaks for the end of the trip just to make sure they made it to the pole in time for their return shuttle!

North Pole '09 Topo USA

We really appreciate John taking the time out of his busy schedule to stop by the DeLorme booth and share their experience with the Earthmate GPS. Check out their site for lots of great details about the trip.

Keep an eye out for the August edition of Backpacker magazine where DeLorme has a two page ad on the inside cover congratulating John and Tyler on their amazing accomplishment. I was lucky enough to get John to sign my copy. We have a few other signed magazines at the DeLorme booth at Outdoor Retailer if you stop by…

Chip Noble
Team DeLorme


Open Air Demo at Outdoor Retailer…

July 21, 2009

We had a great day at Pineview Reservoir during Outdoor Retailer’s 2009 Open Air Demo day. Lots of people stopped by to check out our new products.

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We spoke with retailers and product reviewers at the tent and I got some time to talk shop with a few of the other GPS manufacturers. I took the Geomate Jr for a test drive, nice concept and it’s always good to see new products out there. The rock in the photo is a geocache container, first time I’ve seen one of those… very creative!

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I found some time to check out all of the paddle sport products and gear manufacturers, one of my favorite parts of the Outdoor Retailer show. It’s like being a kid in a candy factory, so much gear and so little time. I’m just hoping we see some PN-40s with Navionics charts out there on those sea kayaks once they hit the retail stores!

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I had a nice conversation about the PN-Series devices with the people from Trailspace.com, check out their blog post for the writeup and other good info from the Open Air Demo. One of the guys from Geocaching.com visited with us for a while and shared some great feedback from the people at Groundspeak and from their forum. We even had a few geocachers stop by to let us know that they will be attending Wednesday’s cache run in Salt Lake City. Cache Advance stopped to visit with her dog Eve!

I’m going to dig out one of the last Eartha 3D coins to give away on Wednesday so try to make it, could be one of your last chances! Don’t worry though, everyone will get an Eartha 2D coin and I’ll have some Team DeLorme coins if you’re looking to trade. Should be a lot of fun!

See you then,
Chip Noble
DeLorme


Getting ready for Outdoor Retailer

July 20, 2009

We had a long day today… setting up the booth took quite a while but we’re excited to have a new design this year. I took a few pictures during setup to show off the new Serious Tools theme. I’ll grab more photos on Tuesday during the show but for now here’s a before and after…

When we finished the booth setup we left Salt Lake and returned to Park City for our geocaching event. Turnout was a little low but we had a great time anyway. Three of us made our way through Park City on a micro-cache run completing our goal and setting a new record for Team DeLorme with 10 caches found in one day! I know they don’t have a pin for those kind of stats but we were pretty pleased with our accomplishment. Here’s a map showing the caches and track log from our trip. We used aerial imagery the most, it really helped us navigate the paths and buildings around Park City.

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Our favorite cache was a Web Cam cache, I actually called a co-worker back in Maine to have him look at a particular cache with a website for a camera. He described what he was seeing on the website and we figured out how to get infront of the lense! It was even better when our friend was able to control the camera and follow us as we walked around the area! Thanks for all your help with the web cam cache Mike!

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A few more photos from today…

We’re off to Outdoor Retailer’s Open Air Demo now, drop by the tent if your attending the show!

Thanks,
Chip Noble
DeLorme