I went to Edmonton, Canada last week, and only had time to look for TWO caches, and, yes, I failed to find either of them! Maximum frustration! I spent over an hour on them… and my only lifeline was not available… AAAUGGH!!! I slipped around on the ice under one stairwell only to find out later that it’s not around the stairwell. I wandered up and down three levels of a parking lot only to discover later that I should have followed through on one of my ideas. What a dork I was not to actually PULL on the things… so I went to Canada and came back with NO finds. 2 for 2… how totally embarrassing….
OK, enough of my whining. Let’s get some dialogue going here. What’s the furthest you’ve gone only to DNF? What’s your most frustrating DNF? Let it all out in the comments. I feel your pain.
I did get some great photos of where I was caching though. I was at the West Edmonton Mall, the largest in North America (!) and the 5th largest in the world. It’s ridiculously large. The two caches were on either end, too, over a half a mile apart.
Here are some links to information about it:
Wikipedia
Mall website
This is where we had breakfast:
Part of this fancy food court:
Ahh… coffee….
Chinatown:
Europa Boulevard:
You can go bungee jumping (no thanks!):
You can go swimming…
…or hang out on the beach…
…even when it looks like this outside (it was the first day of “spring” btw):
There’s a giant pirate ship!
It’s complete with pirates!
I actually did go shopping:
The caches were not to be found:
… but it’s all about the adventure, right?
Yeah.
Right.
Until next week… happy DNFing! er… caching! 😉
Geocaching with EMC of Northridge, CA 
I and many others have hunted for one more time than our documented accounts of said searches. And STILL haven’t found the thing. I knew it was a micro. I knew I had to go 12 degrees for just a few feet from the posted coordinates. I knew it was hidden in a bamboo forest. But I had to try because of the GOOD frind’s hard hide reputation and so few finds on it.
What I didn’t know was how hard it was going to be or how deteremined it’d make me. Four trips, x’teen hours and still no find. But I haven’t given up…yet.
To date 2 1/2 years later, it had only 13 finds and 40 (documented) DNF’s. This cache is a formidable DNF challenge.
See”No Lampost?”
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=8db3d772-a33a-4684-8fba-ac9c4e0f0afd&log=y&decrypt=
Sorry for your frustrated double DNF in Cananda.
There’s a freakin’ beach… in the mall???
Oh and sorry to hear about those two DNFs. I would have been irked, too! Did you iPhone it to see if there were any others you might be able to grab, just to grab one??
My most frustrating DNF ever (I’ve only been caching since Sept 20/08) was a camouflaged waterproof match container hanging in a pine tree. I would go and look, decide it was missing, then someone would log a find. So I’d go look again, only to not find it again.
Repeat this little cycle about three times, include many emails with people giving me hints, and my husband’s laughter growing louder and louder each unsuccessful trip.
The kicker? I’m the owner of the cache! I was trying to replace the log book.
I went on a 4 mile roundtrip bike ride in Claremont Wilderness park. Was trying for a FTF but no luck. Crawled up a gully and though some old burnt brush and no luck. An ammo can can’t be that damn hard to find. I give up and go home frustrated.
Google earth the cache and something is wrong with this picture. I had manually loaded the new cache into the GPSr but transposed a couple of numbers. That was the reason I couldn’t find the cache and I didn’t have the print out with me.
Went back the next day and still got the FTF. I was only about 40 feet off the wrong direction. The cache was right at the edge of the trail.
Oh, yeah, PJ, I had a whole pocket query, but there was nothing really close enough that would have time to get before I had to catch a bus back to the hotel and rest for the evening’s performance! Love all these stories… keep ’em coming!
While on a Mexican Cruise, we stopped in Cabo. My dad (DeserTrekers) and I climbed over a towering rock formation, dodged high tide, climbed more towering rock formations, climbed 500 feet straight up a rocky mountain and…………….could not find the cache!!!
Sorry to hear that you went that far without pay dirt. My caching “playground” is only about 60 by five miles (so far).
I’m heading to the states on vacation this summer though! I noticed that you found some caches about 400 meters from my parents’ home in Cathedral City; what a small caching world it really is.
“Time to Tackle Taxco”. I probably spent about 15 visits and four hours on that one. Many times, I’d come home and find a “Easy find” by some guy with 6 finds, posted the same day. The day that I found it, I was on scene less than a minute. “Little Coin Wash” gave me my second greatest headache. Probably 10 visits for that on.
“Orson” was frustrating because I still couldn’t find it on my second visit, even though the owner (wink) gave me a specific clue, after my first failure. I think that I forced the owner (wink with the other eye) to take a hike and check on it, but it was there. It still took a half hour on my third visit.
A few weeks ago I climbed a terrain 4 rock wall for about an hour, only to find GZ a burned out bomb zone after some wildfires last fall. Nevermind that I should have brought some safety gear, the nasty bit was the last “find” logged was a complete fake. The tupperware cache burned up months before that log. I didn’t know until I got to the top.
The view, however, was so spectacular it rates as my favorite DNF ever.