G+

Out where the Smiley series of caches is located, there is a new series of caches called the Groundspeak series.  My friend Chaosmanor spotted it about 2 weeks ago and alerted me and we planned over the next week to assault this large G+ out in the desert.  We had visions of grandeur that led us to believe that we could conquer the entire series (40 caches spread out over a much larger acreage than the Smiley series) in one day.

When we first planned the trip, we figured we'd be out there sometime around 10 o'clock in the morning, plenty of time to get the entire series right?  Nope, not even close.  Plans changed.  We realized that if we started right at ten, that we'd be getting hungry partially through the circle.  Granted, we could have each taken a sack lunch along for the trek, but we didn't talk about that, so we ended up caching along a road that had a string of benchmarks and caches along it.

Once we got hungry, we ate lunch at a local establishment and then headed out to get the Groundspeak series.  This particular hike was a little bit different than the Smiley series as it's much longer.  I'll need to take a screen shot of the two locations to show the difference, but suffice to say, the Smiley circle would fit easily inside this large G+ spread out over the desert floor.  The G+ is big enough that parts of it encroach upon the foothills surrounding this particular area.  I think the G, or the circle of the G has a 2 mile diameter and each cache is approximately 2 tenths of a mile between caches.

There are roads out there which we could have used to pick off many of the caches, but we chose to walk, starting on the back side of the G and work around it, going south and counter clockwise.  We got almost over to the crosspiece of the G on the far side and realized that there was no way we could complete it in the time we had left before the sun went down, so we utilized one of the road and hiked back to where we'd parked the car.  While on that road, we picked up two more of the caches for a total of 19 cache finds in this series.

The plan is to make another trek out there this weekend and finish it off.  Spring break starts on Friday for me and we have an extra hour of daylight so I don't think we'll have too many problems getting the rest of the caches.   There is one bonus cache associated with this series and a mystery cache.  Two of the caches out there have the coordinates of the mystery cache.  After doing some research, I was able to discover that this bonus cache is one of the two that has the final coordinates.  Whether we make it to that bonus cache and thus, the mystery is something that we're researching at the moment.

The bonus cache is rated at 4.5 terrain.  Neither of us have a 4WD vehicle, and so we're not sure if we'd be able to get close enough to it, either by driving or by walking.  Based upon Topo maps it's a really steep climb, but as Chaosmanor stated in one of his emails to me recently, "There are over 1,000,000 caches on this blue marble of ours and we're not going to get them all."  I've always approached caching as a man's gotta know his limitations.  We'll see how this turns out, but either way, I'm looking forward to this weekend and some more caching with my friend.