Thousand Word Thursday

Picture was taken at or near the following geocache event:

Full Moon Rising - February 11 - by West End Geocachers

Thanks Dave

In the spring of 2000, President Clinton signed an executive order allowing for the removal of selective availability of GPS satellites.  The implications of this meant that hand held GPS receivers would be more accurate and navigation systems would start to become standard features in many cars.  Another result of the lifting of selective availability was the advent of several different kinds of GPS games like the Degree Confluence Project, GeoVexilla, GeoDashing, and of course, Geocaching.

On May 3, 2000 Dave Ulmer hid a black painted container in the state of Oregon and challenged an on-line community at sci.geo.satellite-nav to go and find it.  The first geocache was born, although at the time it was called the First GPS Stash.  Within days, that first stash had been found.  Contained within that five gallon bucket were a Delorme Topo USA and 2 CD Roms, a cassette recorder, a "George of the Jungle" VHS tape, a Ross Perot book, 4 $1 bills, a slingshot handle, and a can of beans.  The original cache is no longer there, but the spot can still be visited where there is a plaque placed commemorating the original stash.  The can of beans, heavily rusted but preserved, is now a travel bug.

This weekend, I traveled to the Devils Punchbowl to celebrate ten years of geocaching.  Events were held all over the world, but I found myself in a void, with the nearest event more than 30 miles away driving distance.  I decided to attend the event in the Antelope Valley mainly because it's a very scenic spot, plus there were going to be opportunities for some hiking after the event.  After all, when I started geocaching back in 2001, that's what it was all about.  The requirements for a 10 year event, as posted by Geocaching.com were that the event needed to have a picture posted showing at least 10 people at the event plus a sign indicating the coordinates of the event in the picture.  Our event picture is here.

This was my 9th event in just over 9 years since starting this silly game.  I don't know why I don't attend many events.  I could probably go to at least one event a month if I so choose, I just don't and there's not really a reason why I don't.  This event, hosted by Kit Fox, was a lot of fun.  I met one of the hiders of the Groundspeak Series and Smiley Series, Bigdaddygrc.  I had a very pleasant conversation with him about geocaching and other things.  I also spent a good deal of time with a fairly new cacher, HD-MsTree.  I got to meet mcattk again, after bumping into him out at the Groundspeak Series a couple of months ago.  Time was also spent with Yosemite John and Debbie and Tevis Clan.  Several of us got a great review of Tevis Clan's new Lowrance GPSr.  My good friend, Chaosmanor and his wife also showed up at this event and we ended up going on a nice hike in the Punchbowl after the event.

While on the hike we ended up bumping into several other cachers that had been at the event.  W_bovine was walking down the trail from a multi-cache as we were heading up to it.  That's w_bovine holding the sign in the picture.  We had a pleasant conversation and I encouraged him to head over to my neck of the woods if he wanted to do some more hiking and caching.  There aren't many hikers in my area, so my caches don't get found very often, so any new finders is a bonus in my mind.  He said he would check it out.  While on the hike, Chaosmanor and I discussed the different rock strata of the rocks in the Punchbowl, while figuring out the requirements of an earthcache along the trail.  We also watched rock climbers playing their game.  I'd tried that once when I was in college and made the mistake of looking down about halfway up a pitch.  Never again.  But then again, I would suspect that those rock climbers might think the game we were playing a little too mundane for them.  To each his own.

At the end of the day, I counted my finds.  Including the event, I found 8 - an event, a multi-cache, a mystery cache, two earthcaches and three traditional caches.  It was a very modest day numbers-wise, but a very good geocaching day.  It's not about the numbers of caches you find, but about the experiences you have as you play the game.  I think I played the game well yesterday.  Thanks Dave.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
10 Years! Antelope Valley, California - by Kit Fox
Devil's Punchbowl - by Yosemite John and Debbie

Road Trip Part II

Now that the route queries have been set, the puzzles have been solved and the reservations made for the first night’s stay in Stockton, the next step for this would be to make some travel bug and geocoin grabs. The nice thing about the area that I live in is there are two nice travel bug hotels close by. The Ontario Bug Hotel is to the east of me and close to where I work, which makes it easy to stop by and get some bugs. I just found the Kellogg Hill TB Hotel - Just up from "My Town" a week ago or so. It’s a rather audacious hide to say the least, whereas the Ontario Bug Hotel, is a more subtle hide, making it a much easier grab.

My last road trip, I took a travel bug and a geocoin from the Ontario Hotel to take north with me. I left both in the Fresno TB Convention Center, one that I’ve used several times as I travel north and south along Highway 99 through the Central Valley of California. I’ll probably use that as a last resort this time, not that it’s a bad hide or anything, but I hope to find some larger sized caches on this trip and hopefully will have dropped all of the travel bugs I have in my possession by the time I get there, although, Bright Idea might be tough to drop. I’m going to need a larger container for that one.

That’s what’s nice about geocoins. At least they’re small and compact. Most geocoins can fit into small Altoids containers, which makes them easier to drop in a cache than say something like Cindy, the Cinderblock mentioned in another post last month. After hitting a couple of caches in the last couple of days and attending an event on Sunday evening, I now have enough to keep me busy dropping off next weekend. The ones that are going traveling with me are listed below.

Bright Idea
England Needs Geocachers Geocoin – this one is a non-trackable geocoin, with a travel
bug tag attached to it.
Yellow Fish
Team Ace Personal Geocoin
"Yantongshan, China" Unite for Diabetes Travel Bug – Funny, but I had this one late last year and placed it in a cache on New Year’s Day, only to find it in another cache. I guess it’s meant to be for me to take this one north.
Robin's Wildlife Muggles Red Wacker Geocoin
frotu33's Humane Society Geocoin
RShetley's WMA Vest Geocoin - I met the owner of this coin at the event on Sunday and realized that I've known his dad for about 20 years or so, as he teaches in the school district just north of me. Small World.
Nickell Geocoin
Proximity Guideline Geocoin – I was given this geocoin by the owner to take north with me.
Photogal64's Jailbreak Geocoin

All will get some nice mileage bumps before their final placement. I also know of a couple of caches in the Coalinga area that I’ll be traveling by that have some geocoins dropped by a friend of mine. I plan on grabbing those and moving them further north to other caches.

The one drawback to taking geocoins and travel bugs on a trip like this is the possibility that they’ll get taken from a cache before I’ve had a chance to log them into the cache in the first place. Once on a camping/caching trip to Utah, I attached little notes to each travel bug that I dropped saying that if they were picked up, please wait until such and such a date so I could successfully log them once we got back from our camping trip. One person didn’t heed that advice, while two others did. The one person who didn’t follow the note, dropped the travel bug into the cache that I’d put it in anyway, so it still got the mileage credit which was my purpose for the notes in the first place.

This time, I’ll probably be taking a lap top with me, to make my logs at the end of each day and possibly post something here as well on a nightly basis. Hopefully, there will be some hot WiFi spots that I can take advantage of from my motel room, so I’ll be able to log the day’s finds. I know there’s a hot spot at my first night’s stay, but I’ll be staying in a new place on the second night and so won’t really know until I get there. I guess, I’ll just have to play that one by ear.