Seeing Red

One of the aspects that I so love about geocaching are the surprises that pop up from time to time along the way.  This past Saturday, I went caching at Vasquez Rocks Park (which I'll expand upon in another blog) and then into Soledad Canyon.  Soledad Canyon would have been a quiet trip following railroad tracks that day except for the accident along the 14 freeway, which funneled a lot of extra traffic onto Soledad Canyon Road.  So much for a little quiet, but otherwise, it was a good trip finding caches here and there.

One of the spots along the way was a small micro cache and it wasn't so much the cache that was a surprise as it was a fairly easy find.  It's what was at the cache that made this one interesting.  We'd stumbled upon a graveyard of fire trucks from different parts of Los Angeles County.  My friend, 3blackcats, spotted a truck from the city of Pomona where she works in amongst all the other trucks that were parked there.  It looked like the county just stores the trucks out there and gets parts as needed, although it seemed like a pretty out of the way place for most of Los Angeles County to store the parts for fire trucks.

We parked near the entrance to the lot, then walked along the road back to the cache, taking pictures along the way.  With all of the signs stating "NO TRESPASSING" there was no way we were going to go in and among the trucks.  At the cache site, we'd just extracted the cache from the hiding spot, when a muggle came walking up the road toward us.  This was a very large man who was obviously one of the caretakers of this lot and he was wondering what we were doing.

Caught red handed, we had to confess we were geocachers.  He spotted the cache and said geocaching about the same time we said geocachers, so he knew about the hobby, saying one of his relatives participated in it.  He was more concerned about us possibly trespassing because he said that there had been several other people who'd spotted the trucks and wanted to get a closer look, going over the fence, by the warning signs just to get a better look at the trucks.  When we assured him we had no such desires he finally relaxed and became a little more congenial.

Since we were done, we walked back to our car together, chatted a little more and went on our way.  Perhaps we've earned another convert to the hobby, since he seemed to be genuinely interested in what we were doing and we were fairly enthusiastic about it as well.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Seeing Red? - by Yosemite John and Debbie