Simulacra

The game where everyone would look at the clouds and tell everyone else what they saw is popular, even today.  Imagination never stops and I happened upon something on one of my hikes out into the desert.

Simulacra, as defined by the Waymarking site,  are inanimate objects, usually stones, rock walls, old tree trunks, plants, patches of peeling paint, rust spots and so on that have uncanny resemblances to inanimate things.  I came across one of these while out hiking, took pictures of it, yet didn't have the presence of mind to take some geographic coordinates.

The first time I became away of Simulacra, was just after Waymarking became its own separate entity.  I had been looking through some of the different categories, trying to get a sense of what the entire site was about when Simulacra caught my eye.  I had one in mind right away.  I was pretty sure there had been a locationless cache for Simulacra and my boys and I had spotted a tree that had a trunk shaped in what looked like an old man with a flowing beard.  Since The Lord of the Rings movies were in theaters at this time, we fancied the old man to be Gandalf the wizard.

We never went back camping to that part of California before they shut down the locationless sites and moved them all over to Waymarking, so that was one of those that got away.  Another one that got away was one that I spotted while out walking the Groundspeak Series of geocaches that Chaosmanor and I found on the 13th and 20th of last month.  There was an old dead gnarled Joshua Tree lying in the river bed.  As I approached it, I kept looking at it and thinking where have I seen that before?

Then it hit me that it looked very similar to one of those pictures that have been posted about the Loch Ness Monster.  Up close, it wasn't so apparent, but farther away, it certainly looked like Nessie until I walked to the other side.  Then it looked like Sebulba from the movie The Phantom Menace of STAR WARS fame.  For those uninitiated, Sebulba was a champion pod racer who'd stop at nothing to win.  In other words, he cheated.  He finally met his match halfway through this movie when a young Anakin Skywalker beats him.  As he crashes and burns out in the Tatooine desert, his famous last words are "Poo Doo."

Anyway, this particular dead Joshua Tree looked like the profile of Sebulba.  I took pictures, but forgot to get coordinates for the Simulacra.  I'd have to be very lucky to find a way back out to the same spot again so I could get the coordinates and thus, waymark it in the Simulacra category.  I guess it will just have to another waymark that got away from me and I'll let you decide which way it was looking when I saw Nessie and which was it was looking when I saw Sebulba.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Groundspeak Series - Charter Member - by HDGC