Archiving Caches

Yesterday, the Tadpole and I hiked into the Claremont Wilderness Park, which is located in the foothills north of our house.  Most of the caches we've hidden are in and around this park, which has a nice five mile loop trail through the heart of the park.  The fall, winter and spring are definitely the best times to explore this park and all of its side trails.  Being situated in Southern California, the vegetation is somewhat sparse and there isn't much shade on the upper elevations of the trail, so it's a very hot walk in the summertime.  It's getting pleasant right about now in the park.

Our main purpose for heading up into the park was one of my caches, Scenic Value.  I hid Scenic Value on New Year's Day 2007, so it's been around for almost three years.  I'd gotten a couple of DNFs on the cache, but that wasn't unusual as it was hidden deep in a scrub oak tree and difficult to find.  I'd even had a hard time finding it once when I went up to check on it another time.  I wasn't too concerned when the first DNF showed up mainly because it was a new cacher and I figured it just might have been overlooked.  When an experienced cacher later also DNFed the cache, it was time to check it out.

I was actually surprised when the Tadpole and I got up there and couldn't find it.  I'd brought another cache just in case, but after getting to the site, decided against replacing it.  There was a lot of evidence of erosion and the starts of a bushwhacking type of trail leading up from the canyon below.  One of the finds on the cacher had even mentioned about coming up that way.  That was not something that I really wanted to promote, so I decided to archive the cache.

Just down the trail from Scenic Value is a small spur trail that would be a nice spot to hide another cache.  There had been a cache there previously but it had been burned out and either washed away or buried during a subsequent rainstorm.  The area has recovered nicely following the fire and could have a cache placed back in that side canyon.  I'll have to check that out in the near future and decide whether another cache in that general vicinity would be a good idea.

If not, then I'll leave the area alone.  Not many other cachers hide up there, so it will probably stay cache free for the foreseeable future.  That might not be such a bad thing.  It'll end up just being a nice open area along the trail in between other caches.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches in the Claremont Wilderness Park:
Where is the parking lot? - by Mazingerzz
Scenic Value - by Webfoot