Hidden weekend

Part of the game of geocaching is hiding caches. If no one were to hide any caches, how would anyone find any? As noted in this post from earlier in the month, I had several caches ready and waiting for me to get out and hide them. This weekend became that time.

About 2 miles north of my house is a large plot of land known locally as Johnson's Pasture which was purchased by the city to remain open space for the enjoyment of everyone in the city. It is adjacent to the Claremont Wilderness Park which abuts the pasture to the east. There are a series of fire roads which can be used as walking trails through both parks. Inside the wilderness park is a five mile loop trail that is quite strenuous and used quite frequently. There are side spur fire roads leading from Johnson's Pasture over to the wilderness park. There is not loop within Johnson's Pasture, but when geocaching friends come to visit, we usually end up taking two cars and creating a shuttle. We park over by the wilderness park, then drive everyone over to the Johnson's Pasture area and then hike from there over and down to the parking lot at the wilderness park. It's about a five and half mile trek that way and a nice way to find a bunch of caches.

Most of the caches up in these two parks were hidden by me. I enjoy roaming around the two areas and whenever I feel the need to hide a cache, that's usually where I end up going first. This weekend was not exception. The Tadpole and I loaded up our backpacks with four caches, took our GPSrs and hit the trail. As long as we were up there, we might as well find some of the caches that my son hadn't found yet. He found the first one as we entered into Johnson's Pasture. Then we hiked up to a mystery cache of mine to do a maintenance check on it. After the Tadpole found that one, we tried to find a spot in between these two caches that would work, but they were too close together to hide another one, so we moved on to where I wanted to hide the cache the Cheeseheads sent to me at Christmas.

There is a microwave tower that dominates this area, since it's on one of the high hills in the two parks. It serves as a benchmark for surveyors as well and I thought it would make an excellent spot for a cache hide. We hiked up there and found several spots where a nice sized cache could be hidden. Once we chose the site, we got coordinates for it and then started back down. As we had been hiking up, we'd been taking coordinate readings for a letterbox cache that I wanted to hide up here, but couldn't find a good spot. I may have to look along another trail for a spot to hide that one. But on our way down, we found a perfect spot for a small decon container and hid that one as well.

We'd also been working on a multi-cache. I had already scouted out the final location. That wasn't a problem, but we needed to check out possible sites for the first stage of the multi. Once we agreed on a good spot for the first part it was time to make our way back home. We came back the next day to take some final readings for the multi-cache as well as take some pictures that I could post on the cache pages. At post time for this entry, I'm still waiting for the paint to dry on the first stage. The wet weather we've been having this past week hasn't been helping, so I brought it inside today in the hopes that will quicken the process. I suspect that I will be making one more hike up there tomorrow after school to hide the first stage and complete that cache.

The first two, Melted Cheese and Rusted Gate have already been approved and I would expect the third, Exploring the Technology to be approved sometime this week. That will bring me up to 25 hides. The Tadpole and I also discussed how we should list these. We agreed that we should list them under my geocaching account, but we should come up with some kind of name that would let people know that it was both of us that worked out the hide. We both like what we decided as a moniker for the two of us.

Pictures were taken at or near the following caches:
Melted Cheese - by The Swamp Things
Rusted Gate - by The Swamp Things
Exploring the Technology - by The Swamp Things

There's a balance out there

I have some down time over the next couple of weeks, so I’m thinking about hiding a couple of caches. With surgery scheduled tomorrow morning (outpatient – nothing too major, just something that needs to get fixed), I won’t be doing much of anything for a couple of days, but I figure once I’m walking again, I can start working on some containers and camo. That would definitely necessitate a trip to the local big box hardware store to get some paint. I have a couple of cans of primer and texture, but I need a couple more colors to work on the camo.

I actually went to our local surplus store today to check on the prices of ammo cans. $5.97 to $7.97 isn’t bad. Now that I think about it, why didn’t I buy a couple while I was there? Oh yes, by not buying them, it means I have to go back there again and look around more. I guess there’s some method to my madness.

Once I get the camo done on the containers, it will be just a short trip out to one site anyway, a quick hike in, place and take the coordinates and then I’m out. But I will have to work on the page because this one’s going to be a mystery/puzzle cache. I have one other mystery hide, the Cobol Canyon Trail, which is a math substitution puzzle. This new one is going to be a little bit more of the “think outside of the box” type of puzzle. It’s not going to be anything elaborate, just something similar to what I’ve already seen on-line. It’ll be interesting to see how it turns out once I’m done with it.

In the past, I’ve been accused of being wordy on my cache pages. Who me? Wordy? Yeah, well, I guess I am wordy, but in my opinion, cache pages that don’t tell a little story about the cache are pretty boring. Usually that means that it’s probably a lamp post or newspaper rack hide. Yep. Those are a dime a dozen, and so I’ve vowed not to hide any like that. I’m trying to take the tack, that if you can’t at least hide a geocoin in it, it’s not going to be hidden by me.

I also like to have my caches be a little bit of a walk from the parking area, so mine are not “park and grabs.” There are a lot of those out there, and I feel they don’t take a whole lot of thought or effort to place them. Slap a slip of paper in an Altoids tin and plop it under a lamp post. I heard one person in the forum call this “microspew” and I tend to agree with him. There’s very little cost involved, so there doesn’t seem to be as much ownership of the cache, because if it gets muggled, the person can always slap another one out there.

That’s one of the reasons why I don’t have as many hides as other people do. My basic strategy has been to hide one for every 100 that I find. That’s a 1% hide to find ratio, which is very low compared to others who have been caching as long as I have, and it’s also lower than many who have been caching less than I have, but that’s the ratio that I’ve decided to maintain. I can’t imagine having 100 hides. I think all I would be doing would be maintaining caches with no time to find any. Thanks but no thanks. With the ratio I’ve chosen, I get a nice balance. With 1861 hides, I have 19 finds, so I’m slightly above my average and if I hide this next one, I’ll really be above it.

With most of my cache hides, I usually post some pictures as well, so obviously, these pictures are all from my cache hides. I would say that all the pictures on the cache page help tell the story of the cache. I’ll post more about my next hide after I’ve recuperated a little and after I've hidden it.

Pictures and graphics are from the following caches:
Hotel Devore
The Cats Made Me Do It
Today, I Saw a Lizard
7 Miles Away and a Half Mile Hike

Road Trip, the Finale

Now that all the logs have been written, it’s time to do a recap on the road trip from this past weekend. All in all, I’d say it was a successful trip, one that had a couple of surprises, and some interesting caches mixed in with the standard fare that one normally finds when out caching.

I got off to an early start on Saturday morning, but it didn’t really help me much because of a major accident on I-5 right at Gorman at the start of my PQ. That caused a major slowdown as the freeway was shut down to one lane going in my direction. I’d intended on bypassing those caches near there in the hopes of getting up to the Central Valley as quickly as I could, but the delay just ate into my time, and plans started being altered as I drove.

Once I got off of I-5 south of Coalinga, I worked my way up there getting a couple of caches along the way. The area is pretty rural and thus pretty bereft of a lot of caches, but I got a few on the way. I was hoping to be in Coalinga around ten in the morning, but didn’t get there until noon. After a quick stop for lunch, I had a major decision to make: make the run into San Benito County, or skip it so I could get up and see my daughter in Stockton. San Benito beckoned and I started that way, only to turn around when I found myself behind a truck on a road where there wasn’t going to be any turnouts or passing lanes. So I came back, cut over to the Interstate and headed north to Stockton. I ended up getting 9 caches that day, because the cut off didn’t have any caches on it and I really wanted to see my daughter. The rest of the day was spent enjoying the company of college students.

Sunday, was another type of day. I got some caching done in the morning, then went over to the university to bid farewell to my daughter, then headed north to Sacramento. The goals for the trip were as follows:

Find caches in 6 new counties – I got five counties, missing San Benito.
Have fun – that was a definite.
Get at least one cache for each year I’d been alive. After getting only 9 on the first day, that one seemed a little harder to achieve since I had miles to go and caches to find to get to fifty.

Soon after getting to Sacramento, I turned east toward Gold Country and the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. As I left the Sacramento area, the first new county I encountered was Amador County, the only county in the entire state of California that I'd never traveled in before so I now have been in every county in California. I cached all the way down Highway 49 to Mariposa where I spent the night. Mariposa is one of the gateway communities leading into Yosemite National Park. The area is filled with historical markers recounting the Gold Rush era of California, plus spectacular scenery mixed in for good measure. The most memorable cache I found on that day would be the Altaville School House cache, not for the cache, but for the experience.

When I found the cache, it was buried under a rock and some leaves, so I removed the rock and brushed away the leaves. At that point I thought that the cache must be loaded with swag because the cacher before me had left one of the toys on top of the cache. So I picked up the cache with one hand and removed the rubber snake with the other hand. It was at that point that I realized that I had a freakin’ live snake in my hand, which I quickly dropped. As I watched it slowly slither away, I’m not sure what I was thinking but it probably had the “S” word involved in it attached to the word Holy. Anyway, Sunday’s total of 26 caches found, gave me reason to believe that I could make my third goal of 50 caches.

Monday morning broke bright and cold at 36 degrees. I drove back down out of the foothills toward Merced, once again caching along the way and then headed home through the Central Valley. I got one new county (Mariposa) on Monday, added to Sacramento, Amador, Calaveras and Tuolomne Counties on Sunday for 5 new counties added to my county map. I’m now two short of the halfway mark. The two maps show the before and after for the counties. Alpine County is no longer an island out there and there’s only that one hole of San Benito County which will be fixed on a later trip. For a more detailed look of my cache finds, you can click on this link.

As I made my way down toward home, I’d stop every half an hour or so to get a cache near the freeway. I was also on the lookout for special caches, mainly puzzles or intriguing virtuals that I wanted to do. At the end of the day, I took stock and found that I had found 16 caches on Monday, bringing the grand total found to 51, one for each year, plus one extra for good luck.

I found 35 traditional caches. 9 virtual caches and 7 mystery caches, five of which were TRAKD’s county line series of caches. The series is an interesting way to learn a little bit about the history of each county in California. They’re all on the borders of counties. I had solved six of them, but couldn’t get to one, because of the direction I was headed at the time along with the amount of traffic on the road. Perhaps, some other trip, I’ll get that one. It was a fun trip, one that I know I will do again with new twists. My only question really is now; when can I go again?

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocaches:

Plane View #2 - by tmkbk & olymbicwannabe
Argonaut and Kennedy Mines - by whitetail39&travler13

Road Trip

I graduated from college with a degree in geography, so I love maps. I’ve always loved getting out the atlas and pour over the individual state maps and see where I might want to go next on a vacation. Where was our next road trip going to take us? Should we take this road, or that one? I wonder what this town is like? Next month, I’m planning a road trip to Stockton, CA, ostensibly to listen to my daughter sing in a concert with her college choir. But we all know that the real reason for road trips is to go caching and this one is no exception.

There is a mystery cache in Southern California called Discovering & Logging California's 58 Counties. The requirements to find that cache is to first find a cache in all 58 counties in California. It’s similar to the DeLorme challenge caches that have been set up in several states across the country. As of this writing, I have a paltry 22 counties with cache finds in them. I figure if I plan this road trip correctly, I can knock a couple more counties off the list. Next summer, we’re planning a camping trip in Northern California, which will also help, so my county map will be more colorful by the end of the summer. Anyway, this series of articles is just designed the document the road trip.

This particular road trip took some advanced planning. I decided that this one was going to take the scenic route, so I’m going to be traveling on a lot of back roads this time, which is fine with me, but making the route queries for this one took a little bit longer. After searching the geocaching data base, I was only able to find this one route that fit my needs for any part of the trip. All the other routes, I had to create. In the end, I have 8 different route queries that I’m going to have to run right before I take off on my road trip. That also is going to take some planning since I can only run five per day. I need to remember to run at least three of them two days before I leave, otherwise I’m screwed.

My next step has been to go through each route and check out the mystery/puzzle caches to see if I can solve some of the puzzles and get those. Interestingly, there don’t seem to be a whole lot of puzzle caches, but I have gone through and solved 12 puzzles for the upcoming road trip. Several of them are right along county lines and involved looking up local history for each county. Right now, I’m a little bit more knowledgeable about Calaveras, Amador, Madera and Tulare Counties. Of those four, I have already found caches in two, Amador and Calaveras being the non found ones in that list. What’s even more interesting is Amador County is the only county that I have not traveled through in California during my life span on earth. I plan to change that on this trip.

There was a puzzle cache that used Pig Latin, one that used the symbols from a computer keyboard, one that had me investigating a certain government agency within Kern County and two cipher puzzles. All of these puzzles have been solved, now my next step is probably going to be to whittle down the list. I have over 500 caches right now, and since my GPSr doesn’t have a memory card slot, I need to get that down to under 500 waypoints for them to all fit in the unit. Once I load all the queries into GSAK I’ll start by eliminating the puzzles that I haven’t solved. That will probably do the trick, but if it doesn’t I’ll then probably drop the multi-caches. I like multi-caches, but they tend to take a little bit longer to find than regular caches and I do have some time constraints so it makes sense to drop them next.

Ok. Now as I look over my check list, I see that I have my routes planned and I have puzzles solved. I still need to run the queries and then reduce the size of the queries down to under 500 caches. Then I need to upload them into my GPSr and my PDA and I’m then set. If all goes well, I should add 6 new counties (San Benito, Sacramento, Amador, Calaveras, Tuolumne, and Mariposa) to my found list for the 58 county challenge. That will leave me just one county short of being halfway to the County Challenge goal. Since there are three basic legs to this trip, I’ll make separate posts on each leg. For now, it’s just a process of waiting.

Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.