Surprising Results

Going to be heading down to Orange County to grab this particular Dash Point. We got lucky when the computer program for this month set that one up. It's in Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park very near a fire road trail, so it should be easily reached after about a two mile hike or so.

I ran a PQ centered around that point and got the strangest looking PQ map I've seen in awhile. This is a pretty rural area but I was still expecting to see more caches along the Ortega Hwy. The arc to the west is in urban Orange County, but the nothingness to the east of the center of the PQ was surprising until I thought about it. The area to the east is pretty rugged and mountainous. I think I was surprised that there weren't more caches hidden along the Hwy. I guess we'll find out when we get there on Saturday. It could be that it's not safe to stop along most of the road. If you're not from this area, the grey area to the south is Camp Pendelton Marine Corp Base.

The Dash Point is in the center of the map and we'll be going for the caches located there. Most of them are along the trail and so they're not micros, but good sized caches. When the Tadpole found out about that, his immediate reaction was, "Score!" I have to agree with him. I'll be sure to take the camera along to get some pictures.

Another surprise was I couldn't find a public route query for the highway either, so I had to create my own. That wasn't too much of a problem. Just opened up Google Earth and asked for directions between San Juan Capistrano and Lake Elsinore. That gave me a route that I saved to my computer which I then uploaded to Geocaching.com. I put in some parameters for the route and came up with 69 caches along the route, most of which are centered around San Juan Capistrano and up around Lake Elsinore. There really aren't that many caches along that route. I've made the route public. You can search for it using keywords, Ortega, Elsinore or Capistrano.