Memories of Japan

His name is Yoshihisa Yamada. The Japanese characters that make up his name can either be pronounced Yoshihisa or Miku, so he suggested we call him Mickey or Mike and so Mike he was to us. He was a foreign exchange student who lived with me my senior year in high school back in the mid 70s. He spent almost 12 months living with my family and me. We welcomed him into our home and he learned about American culture while we learned about Japanese culture. 


His first night, he asked how to use a bed, as he had never slept in one before. Later in the summer, when we were having Tacos, he stated, quite enthusiastically that he loved Tako. He was rather disappointed when the Tako (Octopus) didn't show up on the table. He introduced us to Tako, and tempura and cooking with Sake. He became an honorary cheerleader at our high school that year, dressing in typical Japanese garb for each football game and basketball game that year. 


We introduced him to Disneyland, hamburgers and camping. That year, we camped twice at Yosemite National Park and he ran to the top of Nevada Fall along the Mist Trail. That trail is extremely slippery and tough just to hike, let alone run. On the second camping trip, he ran to the top of Yosemite Fall, just because he could. 


He and I both cried when he left the following summer in mid July, just after our country celebrated its bicentennial. We exchanged letters over the first couple of years, but then life seemed to get in the way and we lost touch. He called the morning my sister got married and we all talked with him. He'd lost a lot of his English in those last 6 years and it was difficult to understand him at times, but he still sounded like Mike. 


I have tried over the years to contact him, using all sorts of Internet search engines. His name is a rather common name in Japan and I haven't been able to reacquaint myself with him. 


His family is from Morioka, just north of Sendai where the earthquake hit this past weekend. Unfortunately, I have no idea if he still lived there or somewhere else. Needless to say, he's been on my mind a lot this past week. I hope and pray that he is safe and that his family is also safe. He would be 53 as of last December.

Meets and Greets

Back in April, I wrote about a mini high school reunion that I attended.  At the time, I thought I might have recruited a couple of new geocachers.  I'm not sure whether that panned out or not, but it sort of whet my appetite to try and go to a couple of geocaching events, something that I have not done a lot of in the past.

I attended an event celebrating the 10th anniversary of geocaching back on May 1st.  That was a very enjoyable afternoon.  We ate, we talked geocaching, then many of us went on a hike through the Devils Punchbowl, picking up some caches we hadn't found on previous outings to the area.  All in all, it was a very good day.

This past Saturday, I attended another event hosted by BigDaddyGRC and ScrabbleDogs.  BigDaddyGRC is one of the hiders of the Groundspeak series that I've written about, plus the Smiley Series.  I'd met him at the 10th anniversary event and had enjoyed his company then, so when my friend Chaosmanor pointed this event out to me, I thought it might look interesting.

Unfortunately, the Tadpole also had a cross country meet that day, so I couldn't be in two places at the same time and family comes first.  However, he hadn't been feeling well with allergies all week, due mainly to the local county fair and didn't end up running on Saturday because of it.  That freed up my day once I got the lawn mowed.

I was able to get the lawn mowed early in the morning before it started to heat up and then took off.  I found a couple of caches on the way up the hill to the event, which was held at the Grassy Hollow area near Wrightwood, CA.  This area has a very nice visitors center and has a nice group campground designed for through hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail.  I had been up here one other time back in November 2002 looking for a cache hidden right along the PCT.

The event was a potluck hamburger/hotdog barbeque and the day couldn't have been more perfect.  The people who came up were similar to me in that we were all beating the heat. The temperature at my house on Saturday was 99˚, while up in the mountains, it was probably in the low 80s - quite pleasant for a picnic and subsequent hike along the PCT.  BigDaddyGRC was a fine host, cooking the burgers to perfection and we had plenty of food for everyone.  In fact, if people went away hungry after this event, it was their own fault.

At any of these events, most of the cachers tend to know one another, either because they've met in the past, or they're familiar with them due to seeing their names in logs somewhere while out caching.  This event was no exception, but it's still nice to finally put cache names to faces.  I met three of the 4DirtyDogs that afternoon, as well as RedBaroness, Shell1Fish, NascarFamily.

We ended up talking for several hours about different things, including geocoins, old time caching back in the early days when you'd go for a hike of 2 miles and find one cache.  That was the case when I'd gone after that cache up here.  It was the only one there.  Now there's about 10 caches available to find within a two mile radius of the picnic area.  We were also treated to a nice geocoin collection by Steben6.

After the raffle of some prizes, which I think ended with everyone in attendance getting something related to geocaching, geocoins, we all headed our separate ways.  I ended up hiking with Chaosmanor and the 4DirtyDogs over to a cache.  Our group eventually ended up being 10 cachers strong and it was fun talking about stuff while hiking along the trail.  We eventually ended up over at the Grassy Hollow Cache which I'd found 8 years ago.  It was fun watching others find this old cache.

I related about how few and far between caches were back then and talked about the differences in caching between then and now.  Logging in the logbook was an art and people tended to write stories.  While the others signed the new log book, I was busily looking through the old logbook of this cache.  As I was looking, it dawned on me and I also voiced it out loud, that I was going to be pretty embarrassed if we encountered my name in the log book and there wasn't a story attached.  I breathed a sigh of relief when I found my entry and noticed that I had indeed written a short story about the experience.

The last cache the group ended up finding was a picture puzzle cache, one where cachers had to walk along a trail checking out the viewpoints until the view matched up with a set of pictures attached to the cache page.  Once the pictures lined up, supposedly you would be at the cache site.  A lot of debating went along with this one as we walked along, especially after we saw the lake down below which showed up in one of the pictures.  Eventually, we were able to get the "right" view and found the cache, a fitting end of the day cache find.

I looked on my profile page while writing this one and this was only the 10th event I've chosen to attend.  I'm averaging about 1 per year, but I know there have been several years where I haven't attended any events, while other years have a couple.  I'm already planning on attending another local event on the 10th of October.  I can't resist the numerology of 10/10/10.  I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy that one as much as I enjoyed this last event last Saturday.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:
A Day in the Angeles Forest - Grassy Hollow - by HDGC (BigD'GRC and Scrab'Dogs)
Grassy Hollow - by John, Donna and Slipper

A "Maze" ing

Long before we'd planned our summer camping trip, we knew the GPS Maze exhibit was going to be in Redding throughout this summer.  After I pointed this out to the Tadpole early in the springtime, he stated he wanted to visit it, so I started planning our vacation around Redding.  With Lassen National Park, just an hour or so to the east, it was a no brainer to figure out where we were going to camp, and at that point, things started to fall into place.

Later one, I found out that Chaosmanor was going to be up in the area sometime during the summer as well.  Their youngest daughter was getting married in late June along the coast of California, and so we plotted to see whether we could meet up at the Maze at the same time.  There was also an outside possibility that the maze could be their 4000th cache find as well, so it would be fun to share that with them.

Chaosmanor was coming from Klamath Falls, OR, and were farther away.  We didn't know exactly when they'd get there, but we planned on meeting and having lunch at the Turtle Bay Museum and either going through the maze beforehand, or afterwards depending upon arrival times of both of us.  The Tadpole and I headed out in the morning, grabbing a couple of caches along the way, including a nice benchmark virtual cache just east of Redding.

We got to the museum and paid our admission and then walked around the grounds.  The Turtle Bay Exploration Park is a science museum and much more.  It appears to be built upon an estuary of the Sacramento River.  There were walkways from the entrance/gift shop over to the main building of the museum which sat on the bank of the Sacramento River.  Surprisingly, the wetland area was relatively dry, considering how moist the winter had been.

We decided to wait on the museum, opting for the butterfly exhibit, where they had multitudes of different kinds of butterflies flying freely.  We had to watch our step so as to not crush the butterflies that might be on the path.  I've experienced one of these houses at the San Diego Zoo about 30 years ago, but this was a first for the Tadpole.  Still, I'm not sure who was more excited about this little side excursion, he or me.

After an abortive attempt on a geocache just outside the fence to the park, we decided to head over to the museum and view some of the exhibits.  The science museum is centered around the ecology of the Sacramento River, so there were many different exhibits with live fish from the river, as well as other exhibits about the Native American population that used to inhabit the area.  We spent the better part of an hour enjoying ourselves with the different exhibits offered.  There was also a photograph gallery, with some very good amateur photographs on display.

The only thing that we hadn't explored yet, was the GPS Maze.  We walked into the entrance area for the maze, looked at some of the stuff available for sale at the gift kiosk located outside the maze, then decided to walk across the river on the bridge behind the museum (more on this in a later post).  There were people out and about, enjoying the warm day with their family, friends and animals.  We walked to the far side of the bridge, then decided to find a cache on that side.  There were other caches further down, but we didn't take advantage of those, since we were both starting to get hungry and neither of us is a good cacher when we're hungry.

Fortunately, Chaosmanor called at that time saying they were outside and to expect them shortly, so we headed back across the bridge and met them in the museum foyer.  After a hearty lunch, we headed over to the GPS Maze exhibit.  The maze exhibit, is just that, a maze, with partitions and displays along almost all of the walls of the exhibit.  The purpose is to explain GPS technology and the hobby of geocaching.  While in the maze, we had to find four different geocaches, which contained clues that allowed us to enter locked rooms within the maze that held special areas.  One entire locked room was dedicated to travel bugs and geocoins.

Almost immediately, we were separated from Chaosmanor as they chose a different path in the maze.  We eventually met up with them and discovered that we'd each solved three of the locked areas and had but the same locked area to solve before we were able to get out of the maze.  We did that last section together and it took all of us a fairly long time to find that last geocache.  I think I had my fingers on it at one point, but didn't realize what I was touching.  Eventually, we worked our way through the maze and back into the main area, where we both spent, probably more money than we should have on geocaching paraphernalia.

The overall construction of the maze was probably the highlight point of the maze.  It had been made in such a way so as to not frustrate novice museum goers, who just wanted to experience the maze.  It wasn't too difficult for them, yet it wasn't easy and possibly boring for experienced geocachers.  It was truly well done.

We decided to walk the museum again with Chaosmanor, then went over to the butterfly exhibit again as well.  We also went outside the park, and found that geocache I had been unable to find earlier in the day.  One of the reasons I enjoy caching with others, is it gives one or more sets of eyes looking at the same things.  I couldn't find it earlier, yet I was the one who came up with the find when all three of us were out there.  Sometimes I think there is more pressure when you're by yourself to find the cache, and so the obvious doesn't always jump out at you.  I seem, for whatever reason, to be able to make the geosensing jumps better when caching with others.

The maze is there until Labor Day.  I'm actually hoping that as it hopscotches around the country, it makes an appearance in Southern California.  I wouldn't mind taking a tour of it again.  It was a fun day, exploring both the maze and the museum grounds.

My apologies for the poor quality pictures.  My main camera's battery died the day before, so these were all taken with my cell phone.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
GPS Adventures Maze Exhibit-Turtle Bay Park - by Groundspeak

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

Trail Meetings

The first time I met someone on the trail while geocaching was the second time I ever went geocaching.  I actually think that's pretty significant since there weren't that many geocachers out there.  But, on the other hand, there weren't that many geocaches either, so those of us who were into this hobby back then, were all out going for the same caches on good weekends.  I met Stantastic and Seldom Seen John along a trail in the Chino Hills State park south of where we live.  All of us were going after San Juan Hill.  Both are still active in Geocaching, although at different levels of activity.

This past weekend, while hiking out in the desert, Chaosmanor and I came across four other hikers doing the same Groundspeak Series.  All of these cachers were from my local area (Chaosmanor lives about 60+ miles away from me) and I hadn't met any of them face to face, but had seen their names in logs and had communicated with one of them by email and on the phone several times over the past couple of months.

When we got to the first cache we were attempting to find on the second day, I noticed right away when we opened the log book the RangerG/76, Larry the Pool Guy, Guns and Cockpits, and Maddmaxxawr were somewhere out on the trail.  I had Maddmaxxawr's number in my phone so I called him to figure out where he was.  And of course, they were on the opposite side of the G+ from where we were.  I figured that we might bump into them, since our plan for this day was to drive to some.  By the third cache, our paths crossed for the first of four times.  We discovered each other's personal bugs and coins, shot the breeze a little bit and then parted ways.  It was nice to finally put faces to the names I kept seeing in logs.

We ended up crossing paths on Saturday three or four times, with the last time when we all ended up at the mystery cache for the series.  This was pure serendipity, because the two groups had decided to do different things.  They were hiking the entire series, then planning on hiking up to the top of Lookout Mountain to get the bonus cache up there, while we were driving to many of the ones that we had left.  It should be noted that I use driving loosely, since we ended up doing short hikes into the desert at most of the caches and our last hike was several miles in length due to the worsening condition of the roads and our lack of a high clearance vehicle.  Still, it was pure luck that we ended up at the same cache later on.

It was also nice to find other people in my local area who enjoy hiking.  If I plan to go on a hike, I can probably get in contact with any of them and they'd probably go along, if for nothing else, just the enjoyment of company and the hike.  My trail meetings are usually the way I meet other cachers.  I don't go to many event caches for basically unknown reasons.  Every event I've been to, I've met nice people.  I just don't go to many events.  So to meet local cachers that far a distance from home was a nice surprise.

Pictures were taken at or near the following cache:
Groundspeak Series - by HDGC

Done

Yesterday, my friend Chaosmanor and I trekked back out into the desert to complete the Groundspeak Series of caches.  Last Saturday, we'd completed the lower half of the G+, getting 19 of the 40 caches in the series.  We hiked the lower portion, putting in about 6 miles of  hiking to get the 19 caches.

Fast forwarding to this week and we heading up to finish it off, getting the other 21 caches plus the mystery cache and perhaps the bonus cache.  We were also playing GeoVexilla, the virtual "Capture the Flag" game that we both play, so we figured that since time might be short, we would try to drive to many of the caches still needed to complete the series.

We still ended up hiking about 4 miles on Saturday, giving us over 10+ miles of hiking on the route to get all of the caches.  We'd looked at the terrain maps and without a high clearance vehicle, the bonus cache was going to be too tough of a hike, especially late in the day, so we opted not to do that one.  The last 7 caches were part of a 2+ mile round trip hike over extremely rough terrain.  We were up to the challenge and it was in the very last cache that we found the last set of coordinates for the mystery cache.

We'd also run into other cachers out on the G, all of which were from my local area.  Funny how you have to drive 45 miles to meet up with people who live in your own neighborhood, but that's the way it worked. We ended up running into them on four different occasions including at the final mystery cache.  After the log had been passed around, we told some geocaching tales, enjoyed each other's company and then parted ways to head back to our respective homes.  This was a series well worth the adventure.

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.

Fragility of Life

This has been an upside down kind of week.  I had several blogs rattling around in the back of my mind, but events of the week changed those thoughts entirely.  The fragility of life intervened this week and so I feel I must write about this instead.

Several months ago, I was able to reconnect with a friend of mine from high school.  He sat behind me in my U.S. History class and I'm pretty sure I'd met him in junior high.  I hadn't seen him since our ten year reunion, the last one I attended, but when I noticed his name show up on Facebook, I didn't hesitate to add Richard as a friend of mine.

During the next two months, I found myself interacting with Richard several times.  He had become a fan of Sleeping in Tents, a blog site dedicated to tent camping.  I found the site interesting and looked over some of the entries, liked what I saw and figured that I might as well become a fan as well.  During this same time period, I discovered that he'd recently gotten married to my high school physics lab partner.  The two of them were two of the nicest people I was acquainted with in high school.

Unfortunately, this blog does not have a very happy ending.  Richard passed away this past Monday of a heart attack.  Just last week, he'd been responding to one of my posts.  Now, he's gone.  Today, I mourn for his wife and for his memory.  Although we hadn't been reconnected for very long, I know I shall miss him.  Thank you for the short time we had Richard.

Cache Partners Redux

I've almost been writing this blog now for almost two years, starting in January 2008.  Many of my caching partners have come and gone, but there are a couple who have decided to hang around me for a greater part of my caching career.  Chaosmanor has been hanging around me in geocaching the longest.  In fact, we met through Where's George? before either of us got involved in Geocaching.  It should be noted that Chaosmanor is a husband and wife team, but I usually associate Jim with the Chaosmanor handle.

Through the years, we've been on numerous geocaching adventures together.  Our first was on the western edge of Los Angeles County, where we hide a cache together near the spot where the television show The Lone Ranger, was filmed.  Since that time, we usually went out caching with each other several times a year, usually when I had time off.

There, for awhile, Memorial Day weekend we usually got together to cache, and then we started meeting during my spring break.  We are planning a trip down to San Diego over my spring break to find some caches as well as some virtual flags.  In the past year or so, we just tend to get together when the moment strikes and both of us can get away for some caching fun.

It's really interesting to note that, although we do have different belief systems about a great many things, there are still many more things that we have in common.  Many of our silly hobbies that we play, we share a common interest in, so we tend to get along very well.  I enjoy his company and consider him one of my friends.

Yesterday was supposed to be a hiking day for us, but with the rain, we decided that we'd probably stay dryer by hitting some of the suburban caches around my neck of the woods.   The best words to describe the two of us when we went out caching in the rain would have been, the odd couple.  There I was, wearing a hooded jacket and long pants and he's walking around in shorts and not jacket.  Later in the day, we ended up walking through a field, which was very damp.  By the time we had walked out of the field, I was wishing that I had worn shorts, as the bottom three inches of my pants were soaked.  But then again, with my hood, at least I could see, since my glasses were staying relatively dry.  Each of us has our own idiosyncrasies, but in the end, it worked for us.

We both were working with our iTouches for the first time on a longer cache run, so we got to pick each other's brains (boy, that's loaded) for ideas on how to use this new app we'd downloaded for the iTouch.  It worked well, because I think we both ended up learning some new things about the app which will help each of us as we continue to cache in 2010.

As always, I look forward to the next time I can cache with Chaosmanor.  He's enjoyable company and we have a variety of different interests that always keeps the conversation running throughout the day.  Happy New Year to everyone.  May 2010 be better than the previous year.

Pictures were taken at the following geocaches:
SwitchBACK! - by WestwardHo
Mojave Green Travel Bug Motel - by The Dananator

"The Good Ol' Days"

Last weekend, we literally stumbled into Gumby and Pokey out in the desert while doing the Smiley series of caches. About halfway around the smile, near the chin, I started noticing their signatures on logs. At first we weren't sure whether they'd driven in from the south, or were also working their way around the smiley. I consider Gumby and Pokey, like myself, old time cachers, cachers that were geocaching before the hobby had it's first birthday.

Back then when you logged onto to geocaching.com, the first page of caches nearest your house would stretch for miles and miles away from you. On my first page of caches nearest to me, there were caches in four different counties, which is quite an accomplishment considering how large the counties are in Southern California. The closest cache to ours was 7 linear miles away and a half mile hike. Geocaching was all about the hiking at that time.

When I started, the first page had a cache that was fairly near me called the Lost Cache of Lytle Creek. This one was hidden by Gumby and Pokey. It was getting on toward spring and summer and reading the logs on the cache page there were constant reports of rattlesnakes on the trail. With two small boys who would cache with me, I wasn't really keen on encountering a rattler at that time, so I waited on that cache until January. I'm glad I did, since at that time, the cache spot was covered with millions of ladybugs hibernating for the winter near their cache. It was a wonderful experience with a nice hike involved.

Back then, geocachers knew each other by the logs. Logs were signed and notes were often left in the logbook. Very few electronic logs were TNLNSL (for Took nothing, left nothing and signed the log) or TFTC (Thanks for the cache). Logs were interesting to read, because usually there was some kind of experience that people wanted to write about after finding a cache. People got a feel where others lived by where the caches were hidden and there was a certain etiquette about hides. People asked before going down into someone else's region to hide a cache.

With so few caches at that time, it was easy to run into lots of cachers back then. We all seemed to want to go out and find a couple on a weekend. I met Stantastic at my second cache find down in Orange County. That cache find was Gumby and Pokey's first cache find. Exaibachey and Satisfyd were met at another cache near my house. The elusive Erik, who hiked everywhere, yet never seemed to be on the trial when you were on the trail was another name that we saw frequently in logs back then. Interestingly, I'd never bumped into Gumby and Pokey until this past weekend.

It was really enjoyable talking about some of the old timers who were still around. We commiserated what we perceived as changes that we didn't necessarily feel were in the best interest of Geocaching. We talked about the proliferation of micro caches. It was an enjoyable chat with fellow cachers who went way back to the beginning. There was the added bonus of finally putting a face to the name that I'd seen around all these years. My only hope is that we don't have to wait another 8 years before we meet up again.

Picture courtesy of Gumby and Pokey taken at 3.14 Miles of SMILES - by RHINO, Mr.G, BigDaddyGRC, DogWillHunt

L to R in Picture - Gumby, Webfoot, Tadpole95 & Chaosmanor Behind the camera - Pokey

More Odds and Ends

Sometimes when I go geocaching, I encounter stuff that's out of the ordinary, some of it good and some of it bad and some of it just plain different. Maybe I think it's out of the ordinary because I wasn't expecting it. When I came down from Stockton at the beginning of the month, I met a friend of mine for lunch in Visalia. He used to teach at my school, but has moved on to community college where he enjoys teaching history. He was best man at my wedding over 21 years ago. It had been about three and a half years since I'd seen him last, on a return trip from Sequoia National Park with the Tadpole in tow. We had a good lunch, talked about the kids, our aches and pains, with a little political discussion thrown in there as well. We've been in touch via email, so it wasn't like we were catching up, more just continuing our conversation that we've had for the past 10 years electronically. It was good to see him and his wife again and it reminded me that good friendships are hard to come by.

After I left, I found a couple of caches on the western edge of Visalia near the airport. The airport is right by the 99 freeway which I use to drive up and back from Stockton. I can't tell you how many times I've driven past this airport, yet have never noticed the large propeller planes sitting at the side of the airport alongside the freeway. These planes are actually located just south and alongside Hwy 198 which leads into Visalia, but the airport is also just east of the 99 where it crosses the 198, so I'm pretty sure you can see them from the 99 as well, yet I don't recall ever noticing them before this past visit. Once again, I have to blame geocaching for getting me off the highway and taking the side streets, which in turn allowed me to get a better look at my surroundings.

At another cache that I found last weekend, we ended up finding coconuts. The cache was an ammo can hidden in the far reaches of a bush near the side of a road. It was located at a viewing spot for a dam in the area so there's quite a bit of level land, with grasses and other types of vegetation nearby, but definitely no coconut palm trees. They probably wouldn't survive the colder nights in the winter here. Needless to say, finding the coconuts was quite a surprise. It almost appeared to me to be like a makeshift memorial that someone had created there. There were four coconuts with some red carnations lying on the ground. We actually thought we might have some problems with the cache find because the coconuts were leaking and attracting a fair amount of bees. Fortunately, the cache was far enough away that they didn't present a problem. We chose not to disturb whatever it was, mainly because we didn't want to disturb the bees, but the mystery still persists why they were there in the first place.

On the same day, we'd also found several nice caches along a trail that we'd never hiked on before. One of the final caches was hidden in the roots of a tree. I didn't pay much notice to the type of tree. Once we got there, we pretty much forgot about the tree and just marveled at the root system of the tree, which was about seven feet high or so off of the trail and running down into the ground at the base of the trail. It was like a spider web on steroids with rocks interspersed within the web pretending like they were the spider's catch for the day. I kept thinking about what this particular hillside would look like if that tree hadn't been there to hold back everything. Somewhere in that picture is a small cache container that also ended up on my top 5% list because of the placement and the hike to get to it.

Lastly, I've been somewhat remiss in placing my next cache, so much so that I actually have enough cache "ingredients" to hide about four caches. I expect to probably hide four more caches, one ammo can, one cache that was sent to me for Christmas by the Cheeseheads and two decon containers, sometime by the end of the month. Usually, when I hide caches I have names for the caches in mind way in advance. This is partially the case with these as well. I've pretty much made up my mind that the ammo can is going to be my first letterbox hybrid type of cache. The hike to the cache will pass by several forks in the main trail, so I've decided to name this cache, Yogi Berra's Fork.

For one of the decon containers, I'm working on a puzzle cache that will have cachers using their GPSrs in more than one way. I found a cache once where I had to project a waypoint a distance away and then find the cache at the new coordinates. I thought I'd like to try something like that with this one and am planning on naming it, Exploring the Technology. The last two caches don't have names yet, but the one that Cheeseheads gave me, will probably have something in the title that will link it back to them.

With these four cache hides, I'll be up to 26 hides. Not all of those are active, but that's enough hides for me at the present time. I want to make sure that I can adequately maintain all of my cache hides for some time to come. I know my own limitations and know that I couldn't hide several hundred caches and be able to maintain them very well. I've found many caches that had degraded or had full log books and several cachers in the past had already alerted the cache owner of possible problems. I went to find a cache on Friday and looked at the logs posted beforehand. The last four logs were all DNFs dating back to August. It seems to me that the cache owner isn't doing his caches justice by not responding to these logs. I don't want that to happen to my caches, so I'll continue to limit my cache hides to 1 for every 100 finds that I have. It just makes more sense to me to hide quality over quantity.

Pictures were taken at or near the following caches:
ZOOM, ZOOM - by Evil Cow Pie
View of Morris Dam - by esquimaux
UJs SILVER MOUTIAN #4 - by UNCLEJON AND NOT TOM