A Geocaching Trifecta, Of Sorts

As I write this, I’m riding back with f0t0m0m somewhere on the west side of the Salton Sea after a long day of caching with three goals on our list: one more high terrain cache for the Well-Rounded Cacher challenge cache,
Well Rounded Cacher (The Fizzy Challenge)
10 pages of the Delorme Map challenge cache,
California DeLorme Challenge (Southern & Central)
and a token find in Mexico. We accomplished it all!

The day began at 6am at my house in Northridge, and our first errand was a bit unusual. My 6-month-old kitten had just gone into heat for the first time, and I needed to take the little girl in to have her necessary surgery. We dropped the poor, uncomfortable little thing off, and headed for the 405 freeway southbound.

We’d hoped we were early enough to avoid traffic, but it was a bit sticky already over the Sepulveda pass. After that, it was clear and fast all the way to around Oceanside, where an earlier incident of some sort had a couple of lanes blocked.

We got to the first cache of the day by about 8am.
JENNY AND PETER AT SQUIRREL POINT

It’s one of the very few on the teeny part of Delorme p. 112 on this side of the state, and is at a view point with a broad vista, but not much remarkable actual scenery. We could see Dana Point to the north and barely make out Catalina Island to the east.

The locals would seem to be well-fed. This guy was enjoying a banana peel:

Next was p. 122 just east of San Diego:
Olde Highway 80

..followed by p.123, which included the high-terrain cache as well:
OFF-ROAD FUN : )

We encountered a locked gate, and decided to hoof it out to the cache. It turned out to be a 5 mile hike, but it was a lovely day for it, and I really needed the exercise anyway. We found 5 additional caches as we walked by them:
Bear Valley Loop- Lunch Stop
Rangers n’ Rattlers
Dooley’s Cache
Bear Valley Loop-Beware!
Bear Valley Loop-View of the Tracking Station

… and had a brief chat with a border patrol guy making his rounds.

This put us about 2 hours behind our projected schedule, but the rest of the list was all drive-ups and went pretty quickly. We just did one cache per Delorme page, working our way basically east.

Jail House Rock
Whoa Nellie!
"101-9004-B28
GO WESTMORLAND
On the corner
NOT QUITE "THE CENTER OF THE WORLD"
Journey to the Center of the World

Most of the scenery was your basic desert:

As we drove along I-8, we could see the border fence and Mexico beyond it:

The cache at the Center of the World

…has a section of stairs from the original Eiffel Tower:

At the southeast corner of California, you can park at the border and walk across to the little town of Algodones. There is a cache just 40 feet past the crossing in a little restaurant. It was supposed to be open.. but… alas.. it was not!
Pueblo Viejo

Fortunately, we had an alternate just a tenth of a mile further in to town, so we walked quickly to it. The coords bounced us around the street:

… but we finally got it!
Estacion De Policia Los Algodones

There was no control over entering Mexico,

…but we did need our passports to return about 10 minutes later (ha!). Whew!

Until next week – happy challenges!

Trail of Terror? Haunted House Event? Mad Scientists?

It must be Halloween!!

What a fun week of caching! It started out last Sunday with the 6th annual Trail of Terror at the Anza Narrows Park in Riverside. Yes, this is the sixth time that the “Late Dr. HazzMatt” has hosted the event and placed 30-odd caches along the adjacent bike trail with evil and devilish themes. I know that to most locals, this is a humdrum, paved, flat exercise course along the sandy, mostly dry riverbed, but for me… it’s the creepiest place around! I’ve only ever been along it to find these spooky caches, so all I have in mind as I walk here are the creepy cache pages and gory cache containers! I did this once the week after the event all by myself on a foggy day… now THAT was scary!

I was in good company this year: f0t0m0m, Team Perks, and the Ventura Kids. We were also surrounded by all of the other attendees, ahead, behind, on foot, on bikes, on broomsticks… well… no broomsticks.

Here’s more proof that the VKs DO (on occasion) HIKE:

We discovered where Godzilla has been spending his time lately:
Godzilla Unleashed

This cache was aptly named:
Lunatics in the Riverbed

… and there they are out there looking for the cache!

Here are some of the broomsticks… er… bikes… and biking cachers who ghosted us along the way:

The standard hanging ammo can had a rather macabre swing to it:
Aberrations

f0t0m0m did his standard cache retrieval technique for us:
Sticking your hand down a dark hole

This was one of the more creative new hides this year… ew!

DBRambling generously provided water and oranges for everyone at the midway point!

It was a lovely, if windy, day, for the event:

The residents didn’t seem to notice anything unusual today:

There was plenty to eat and drink at the potluck lunch when we all got off the trail:

Here’s Hazzmatt, mysterious as always….

…. and yes, I did buy a T-shirt!

Whew! We all survived another Trail of Terror! On to the next events… and it was a triple threat yesterday evening:
HDGC Annual Dinner #3 @ The Cajon Pass Summit Inn!
A Very Tevis Haunted House Geo SCAREfest
Welcome to the Mad Scientist Laboratory!

First, the Summit Inn on historic Route 66 for classic truck stop cuisine:

Um… I had a regular steak sandwich.

Then, to the Tevis Clan Haunted House! It was too dark to get any good photos, darn it. The Tevis family puts on an amazing experience, full of axes, body parts, ghouls jumping out at you, chain saws, evil torturers, black lights, thunder and lightning… wow. I had a blast getting the adrenaline pumping there with BWidget and Albackore!

Here are two cool photos I got at the Mad Scientist event. Esquimaux made a good subject for this lighting effect:

and here I am holding a florescent tube that’s lit up without being plugged in, but only from the ambient electricity in the air!

Have a fun and safe Halloween! Hope it’s full of caches and candy!

A Peak Geocaching Experience

A couple of days after my big birthday and the record run, I was recovered enough to summit my third 14er – that’s a mountain over 14,000 feet tall. The first was White Mountain back in ‘07, and that was a 10-hour hike after two nights of sleeping at elevation. The second was Mt. Shasta last summer, a grueling, exhilarating 14-hour day after about a week of acclimation in the Eastern Sierras and on the mountain itself. This one took, um, about an hour.

Pike’s Peak has a road to the top!

It also has a lovely cog train that ascends from Manitou Springs, just outside of Colorado Springs:

This would be the end of the line!

As you can see, the view was pretty hazy that day, but my cousin says that on a clear day, you can see – not quite forever – but the whole Rocky Mountain range.

At the top, I ate donuts, did my Christmas shopping, and found two geocaches:
Pikes Peak Summit International
Pike Never Made It!

This is the view from the first cache. That’s my cousin, Richard, over there.

He got this photo of me finding the cache:

Here’s one of the summit plaques:

I even got to play in some snow… in August!

This mountain was the inspiration for a certain familiar song, so I simply HAD to sing it up there:

My cousin and I both had trouble catching our breath and feeling a bit woozy from lack of oxygen, but I actually felt better when I was singing. Others should maybe try that… ha! On the way down we saw some interesting plants:

We ate a pretty good beef stew at the lodge halfway down:

… and found a few more caches on the way:
Inukshuk 1
Bigfoot
Christmas Cache

… and managed to avoid meeting Big Foot, although he’s apparently a road hazard:

… then returned safely to base camp:

Here’s to more caching high points and peak experiences!

A footnote for all you Marzipan fans – that’s the kitten I found back in May at a cache in Farmersville. She’s getting all big and healthy – and rides around on my shoulders. Here she is, and I’m wearing a T-shirt I got up on Pike’s Peak. It says “Got Oxygen?”

Fall Season Geocaching: In- and Outdoors

It’s raining this week here in Southern California. I have gone caching in the rain, and it can be fun, but it is largely a disincentive to get out in the traffic and mud and wet bushes. Earlier this week I did have a couple of adventures I’ll discuss in a moment, but first I’d like to share a couple of links I stumbled upon while surfing the web (sort of indoor geocaching with no smilies?) yesterday on a site called EZine Articles. This site has thousands of short pieces on every subject imaginable written by experts on their respective subjects.

Most of the articles on geocaching are about the basics or which handheld to pick, but a couple of curious ones stood out:

All I Needed to Know About Web Design I Learned From Geocaching

Treasure Hunting Geocaches in Random Trite Events

The Art of Urban Caching

I’m considering submitting a few articles myself, such as “How to Find Over 400 Caches in a Day” and “A Guide to Geocaching in Southern California” and so on. Do any of you have any suggestions? I know many of my readers are more expert than the EZine contributors – feel free to write something, too! If you don’t feel like you can write it yourself, I’m happy to co-author as well.

I celebrated a big number with GeoCraig this week: his 5000th find. We took a hike up Chumash Trail north of Simi Valley with Gummyfrog, Capdude, Capsbug, and Don J. It was a perfect coolish fall day with fog followed by sunshine.

Watch for Bikes
Long Live Rock
Bush Island
Gonna Rock Forever
Rock & Roll Stew
Lighten Up!
Lucky the Cache Dog
Resistance is Futile This one had an unusual visitor a couple of days later!
The rock will never fall

If you haven’t subscribed to his blog yet, check it out! I do pretty good with my Canon SureShot, but Craig really takes some superlative photos. His latest entry features some of his best from his five thousand finds.

I also found a handful of caches in the Lake Balboa area with Team Perks. Well, I know I found these:
Camden County
B marks the cache

I’m not so sure about this one, though….
.

Huh? Is there a link there? YES. Click the dot. Have a laugh.
Here’s to the high entertainment value of geocaches AND geocachERs!

Geocaches Just Around the Corner

I’ll get to the caches around the world later, meanwhile, I headed out earlier this week for an afternoon of caches near my house. I’ve had a goal for a long time to clear out a 10 mile radius, but I’ve never gotten that completely done. I do manage to keep about an 8 mile circle clear, though. This baker’s dozen had sprung up fairly recently, including some nicely designed ones by a newer cacher, Minifish.

I took notes and photos as I went, to give you an idea what a “normal” caching experience is like. (ha!)

Take the Cannoli
behind a honeysuckle bush near an indoor target practice range
found in about 2 minutes, 1:30pm, 79º

Ramp
unusual and deserted place with an abandoned ramp where a loading dock used to be
found in about 3 minutes, 1:40pm, 79º

Skirting the issue.
quiet side street
found in about a minute, including one “wrong” guess, 1:50pm, 79º

Deep Freeze
teeny ammo can stashed in a sign

I met the cache owner at the next cache, as he’d noticed my logs. ( I was posting from my iPhone as I went; I love doing that, because then I have no “homework” when I get home.) He’d gotten a lot of flak about putting cache in a No Trespassing sign… (duh)… and it’s now archived… but because the sign itself disappeared! Go figure. I love these itty bitty ammo cans, though.
found in about 5 minutes, including a call to a life line to save myself the agony of the previous finders, 2:10pm, 77º

Pachinko
studied the logs and the area to find this one similar to an AgouraCharger hide, done with a simple, yet deceptive mechanism
found in about 3 minutes, but then spent a few talking to the cache owner, Minifish, who pulled up just as I discovered the secret of the hide, 2:20pm, 79º
The cache is right behind him!

Caribbean Jerk
curious installation on a quiet side street
found in about 30 seconds, as it was the first thing I touched. Sometimes I’m good at this. 2:35pm, 79º

another quick fix
this was an awkward hunt in a mini-mall parking lot, and I needed a lifeline to get me to look in the right place with the coords all over the place… not such a quick fix for me…
found in about 7 minutes, 2:55pm, 79º

pi eta – iota epsilon – theta
needed another lifeline, although I should have spotted this dang nano. Sometimes I’m not so good at this! The parking lot itself is bleak, but the sunlight dappling the mountains to the north was spectacular
found in about 7 minutes, 3:20pm, 79º (but breezy and feels cooler now)

Very Opinionated
Ahh….. quick and easy magnetic altoids in front of Vons grocery store
found it in about 5 seconds, 3:25pm, 79º

Bad Boys!! Watch gonna do??
Love the flat caches, and it was a bit of a search before I went to that idea.
found it in about 10 minutes, while I fielded a lifeline from Spoondoggie on a cache I haven’t found yet, 3:40pm, 79º
I forgot to take a photo here.

UCKY Commute – Another Dead End
Another quiet side street, and someone has llamas in their yard nearby
found it instantly, 3:45pm, 81º (still feels cooler, as it’s shady and breezy)
Looking back from this cache toward the previous cache just down the street:

UCKY Commute – By The Eucalyptus Tree
Wandered around for a long time under the trees. Eucalyptus are particularly bad for scattering the GPS signals. After finding someone’s stash of bad videos, I called for another lifeline, then found it rather handily.
this took about 20 minutes, including the short hike, 4:15pm, 77º
Urban horse trail:

A Moving Experience
A short walk up one of the canyons in Porter Ranch led me to a container with a funny pun on it, but I won’t give it away.
found instantly after a 5 minute walk, 4:30pm, 77º

time – 3 hours
mileage – 27 miles from my house and back to my house
lifelines – 4, all to Garagedude
DNFs – none, thanks to Garagedude

Have a great caching week!