Forgotten Trail?

Yesterday, Chaosmanor and I hiked a loop trail in the Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park just north of San Juan Capistrano. It's a very large park and we were there primarily to get a dashpoint that had been positioned by the GPS Games computers near the north end of a couple of trails. There were several caches in the park, so we were planning on making it a nice hike with some caching. The weather was perfect; we couldn't have asked for a more perfect day.

The trail we'd chosen to get to the dashpoint was called the Eastridge trail. It was a short hike up from what was called the Quail Run trail up to the Eastridge trail. We have views to the east of the Ortega Hwy and the valley that made up most of the park to the west of the ridge. Interestingly, there was only one geocache that we noticed along this trail. As we made our way over to this cache, we spotted a benchmark, or actually Chaosmanor spotted a reference post noting a benchmark, which was very close. The trail actually had a paint mark on the ground pointing to the benchmark.

This was one of those spontaneous finds. We hadn't really looked at the possibilities of there being benchmarks along this trail and we just happened to find this one. When I got home I was pleasantly surprised to see it in the Geocaching system. We took our requistite pictures of the dashpoint and then made our 60 foot walk down to where the geocache was supposed to be.

After about 10 minutes of searching, we consulted our PDAs and found the cache to have been DNFed back in November of 2007 and not found since before March 2007. Ground zero yielded a rather large packrat's nest, but nothing that looked like a decon container. We eventually expanded our range out thirty and forty feet, but couldn't come up with the cache. I posted a DNF last night and within minutes, the cache was archived. I think had we know the cache had some possible issues, we might have taken another route, but then we wouldn't have found that benchmark, nor the one further on down the trail. It's one of those "Roads Not Taken" type of situations.

We started making our way north along the Eastridge trail commenting about the lack of caches along the trail. Chaosmanor brought a small container that we used down the trail to hide one cache, but there could have been quite a few nice caches hidden along this trail without even getting close to the cache saturation level. It's almost as if this trail had been forgotten by the locals here. Either that, or they're still working on it. I prefer the latter approach because you could say the same thing about the Claremont Wilderness Park near my house. There are still some great areas for caches, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Eventually, as I'm sure the locals down there will do the same over time. It was just surprising to see this long trail with only one cache on it.

After Chaosmanor hid his cache and we checked (beta-tested) his coordinates, we continued along the ridge toward its northern terminus. At the junction of two trails at the north end we found another benchmark and a nice reference post pointing to the benchmark. We took our pictures of this benchmark, marveled at the nice view and noticed a game trail leading beyond the two trails, where it looked like another decent cache could be hidden.

We then made our way down to the dashpoint. We needed to be 100 meters (328 feet) or closer to the point to score. At the top of the ridge, we'd gotten to about 500 feet away, so we figured we'd get closer heading down along the second trail. Well, we got a little bit closer, but only to 400 feet along the trail, so we had to do some bushwacking to get within scoring distance. Once we got to 296 feet or so, we figured we were good. To zero out on this one, would have meant hiking down into a draw then back up the next ridge and over it, bushwacking all the way. Nah. We scored and that was good enough for this particular game.

The hike back down to the car netted us 5 well done larger caches, one very well cammoed that the Tadpole got to first. He was pretty proud of himself with that find because it was well hidden in plain site. Back at the car, the GPSr's internal odometer showed us we'd hiked 5.46 miles. It gave us a good workout as my calves will attest to this morning. Five caches found, two benchmarks logged, one dashpoint scored and a good hike with friends and family made it a very good day, one of those geocaching days that will stay with me for a long time.

Scouting

I've been rethinking my geocaching goals for the year. A couple of years ago, I wanted to average at least one cache find per day for the entire year. I did that very easily and almost averaged 2 caches per day. The next year, I slacked off a little and found 18 fewer caches than the year before. This year, probably because of the surgery, I will probably average less than that. Well, gas prices are probably helping with that as well.

I guess what I'm really coming around to is that I'm thinking about getting back to the roots and looking for better hides as opposed to just going out and caching for caching sake and having that end up being just another numbers run. I want to try and get some more hikes into my caching repertoire this year. So I'm starting to scout out some areas that I haven't been in before to look for some possible hikes with caches.

Yesterday, the Tadpole and I went out into Riverside County to look for a dashpoint, actually two dashpoints. I ran a caching PQ around the second dashpoint which was out near Menifee in Team Hick@Hearts neck of the woods. I had considered emailing him to see if he wanted to come along, but then I remembered that he was planning on hitting the Flash Mob event down in San Diego. After Saturday, we'll probably be out many more times, so another oppotunity will present itself in the near future I'm sure.

At the first dashpoint, we struck out, getting only .18 miles from the point, not nearly to the magic 100 meters needed to claim the point. The point was located in the middle of a major trucking facility and there was no way in to get close, unless we wanted to trespass and risk prosecution. Nah, I don't think so. My sense of adventure isn't that high, especially when I have the youngster with me and he's probably going to be learning some life lessons any time he's with me.

So we headed out to Menifee, where I knew the dashpoint was a drive by. I wanted to see how close we could get. It was located near a road, but on the other side of a railroad right of way. We got to 73 feet, so we scored that one. The pictures are nothing to write home about, but it was nice and quiet out there. There were a couple of nearby caches, so we got those. The second one was probably the most memorable one of the day, being the only ammo can we found. As we were walking up the short trail to the cache, the Tadpole was ahead of me and I warned him to be on the lookout for snakes.

The trail split and he went one way around a bush and I went another way. We were about at ground zero at the time, so we'd both stopped to begin our search when I hear a "Whoa!" I asked him what's up and he just nonchalantly states, "Oh nothing, just a big snake in the trail up here." For a twelve year old, seeing his first "in the wild" snake," he was really cool about the entire encounter. I told him to back up and I came around. By that time, the snake figured that two of us was probably one too many, so he slithered off into the nearby bush. He was a fast booger too. I just caught the tail end of his act, but the Tadpole saw the entire two to three foot snake in the middle of the trail.

Fortunately, it wasn't a rattler. When we got home, I researched it a little and found what I thought it looked like based upon what I'd seen and when I pulled up the photo, the Tadpole said, "Yep, that's what I saw." Looks like he got a close encounter of a California Striped Racer. I'm still impressed at how cool he was about it. When I mentioned it to him afterward, he said, "Oh, I wasn't worried about it. I didn't hear any rattles, so I figured that it wasn't a rattlesnake or anything that would really hurt me." Yeah, well son....looks like I'll still watch out for him for awhile longer. What was really funny is the snake helped us find the cache, because it went into the bush and literally slithered right over the ammo can while on its full retreat. Oh, there it is.

We drove back home, finding several other caches in the local area, none of which were anything out of the ordinary small to micro variety of caches, but we did end up finding a nice trail that looked to have some caches up on it. It was getting toward lunch time, the Tadpole was tiring quickly and I hadn't been prepared for a hike of any magnitude, so we passed on them today, but as I look at the map, there appear to be about 23 caches spread out on a couple of hills. If the weather holds, I might convince the Tadpole to come out on Memorial Day, or possibly I can convince any of my other caching friends to either go that weekend, or possibly the next weekend. It's getting late in the season to go on something like that, but if the "May Gray" or the "June Gloom" holds, it'll work. If not, I can keep that trail in the back of my mind for a fall or winter hike. I'm sure the caches will still be there, unless a fire goes through.

Anyway, the first scouting attempt turned out fairly well. It looks like a good trail, with several good caches on it, with a nice hike to boot. Reminds me of my first caching experience - 7 miles away and a half mile hike.

Pictures were taken near the following cache:
Jack's Cache - by jeepnakd