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!

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 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?”

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!

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!

One of the comments I got on my post about finding cache #20,000 was what some of my statistics look like. I ran an “all finds” pocket query, and asked f0t0m0m to run it through his GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) program. Some of the results are fun, some are just, er… boring… but here’s what 20,000 caches looks like all taken apart.

First of all, my yearly average, which I’ll compute myself:

I started at the end of May, 2003, for 6 years, 4 months of caching is 3,158 finds per annum. This is also about 263 per month and almost 61 per week. Now that’s not TOO crazy, is it? Ha…..

OK, as most of you know, the most I’ve found in a day with a team is 413. I also found 111 solo with no lifelines and 16 DNFs a couple of years ago in Escondido in about 16 hours. That was a “I’m glad there are so many light pole caches here” kind of day!

The furthest away I’ve been caching so far is in Sweden (the one listed below is an old armchair cache). The highest up is 14,252 feet on the summit of White Mountain in the Eastern Sierras.

Here are my milestone caches and the intervals between them:

76 Diff/Terr combinations found, out of 81
2051 (10.1%) finds were rated with Diff or Terr of 3 or greater

I like the following table in particular. The only way to find so many is if LOTS and LOTS are hidden! Many thanks to these and ALL of you cache hiders!

These didn’t make it to the top:

EMC has also found caches placed by 3664 other people

More fun numbers:

I’m still missing 16 US states and about 1/3 of the Southern California Delorme challenge (GC18M1N), even though I have found a cache in every county in California. This alone means there are still more caches to find and still reasons to find them… and NOT just the numbers!

Here’s to the adventures that hide in these statistics! Where to next? Around the corner? Around the world?

Well…. I’m not sure…. not yet….

Here I am finding cache #20,000 -
MAtM13 Insane Brody Dredd

This was one of 50 caches I found that day with Team Marzipan:

That’s Albackore, BWidget, and f0t0m0m.

We tied for 3rd place in the days festivities, a puzzle-solving, swash-buckling, pirate-talking romp around Burbank and Hollywood, in pursuit of the answer to the question: “Who murdered the matey?”
Murder Among The Mateys – A Murder Mystery Event

Thanks to the event’s instigator and mastermind, a whole bunch of us had a great day of caching, and I got to celebrate my 20,000th find with friends:

and a special container that I now have at home:

Oh, and I even met up with a real pirate along the way:

So… how many is too many geocaches? I have no idea. I haven’t found enought yet. The caching just gets better with time!

There’s a lot NOT to like about Las Vegas, and I won’t list all that here. The trick to enjoying this burg, at least for me though, is to find those things that are not what the typical visitor encounters. This makes geocaching in and around Sin City irresistible. I know I’ll find something unusual somewhere at a cache, and the sheer numbers of caches all around are available for every level of ability and interest.

I’m spending the week here for three reasons: first to get to 19,999 finds so that my #20,000 is at a special Event Cache, Murder Among The Mateys – A Murder Mystery Event, this weekend, and second, to visit and dine with one of my best friends, a self-proclaimed bon vivant, Bob, and his buddy, Rex. He certainly taught me everything I know about wine, and for him to pick the restaurants for dinners is the best way to find culinary nirvana.

The third reason is to do some research and photography for what I call Season 2 of my Twitter novel, The Adventure of Helen and Daniel. I should be starting that up in a couple of weeks, and to read it, you can follow me on Twitter, or read whole chapters after they are “broadcast” – please contact me for links for that.

I’ve opted to do most of my caching out of the city, away from muggles…
Population 57

and in the scenery of the surrounding desert…

and mountains….

… where everything is about the smiley:
S18

Most caches are typical desert hides:

… but this one was worth the drive up the mountain road to find!
GRIDLOCK!

Only in Vegas can you REALLY go from the sublime to the ridiculous:

I even got both at once, when I spent a ridiculous amount of $$$ to try the most incredibly sublime Kobe beef from Japan. Wow. It’s hard to describe, but the flavor was not beefy as we know it. It was mild and…. creamy… and marvelous.

Until next week, may you enjoy ridiculously sublime caches!

It’s rather hard to top the story I posted last week, both literally and figuratively, so I guess the next best thing is some time traveling…. back to the Alaska trip of about a month ago. This final installment has been worth the wait – I guarantee it! I have three thrilling threads of subject matter for you: flora, fauna, and flu… and of course a few cache finds. I’ll start with those and work backwards.

FINDS
Here are the four caches I found on my last day in our 49th state:
Beaver View
Forget Meat? Not!
Inlet View
Anchorage TB Drop

That day, I took a rental car out for a spin up the gorgeous Turnagain Arm, just south of Anchorage, and finally got in to some serious scenery:

Fields and glaciers were all over the place:

I watched a gondola ascend from the nearby hotel, taking folks up for an even better view, I’m sure:

I didn’t have much time to look around, but I did see this bit of honesty:

FLU
Ah, yes, I got to experience the dreaded, all-to-common-on-tours-and-cruises Norovirus. Don’t ever get it. Since I did get it on a tour, though, they had me go to the hospital and everything. I wouldn’t do that again, either, even though I was well cared for. There are other adventures that are more worth having. I must say, I did get some nifty jewelry:

FAUNA
The only difference between caribou and reindeer is that the former are wild and the latter are captive. These would be the latter:

The only moose I saw was this stuffed specimen:

… and I thought the only real Alaskan wildlife I would see was this guy, one of our bus drivers:

… but I was so wrong! Heading back along Turnagain Arm, I glimpsed a bear crossing the road! He was foraging in the tall foliage by a bike path, and as I pulled over to see if I could get a better camera shot, here he came! I shot this with the windows up and engine running, but he was only interested in the weeds, and his mom was nowhere to be seen:

Now THIS made my whole trip, made up for wacko schedules, illness, smoky air, ALL of it. Wow.

FLORA
To close, here are some shots of some of the really beautiful things that grow around Alaska:

Until next week, happy caching, be they few or feverish!

50 years ago (or as the card my sister gave me expressed it “A Long, Long, Long Time Ago”), on August 29, I breathed my first taste of Terran air. What better way to celebrate than with a crazy, exhausting, record-setting day of geocaching??

For those of you who have never attempted real power caching like this and wonder how on earth it can be done, here are the most essential things for achieving light speed:

1) density – there must be a LOT of caches in a concentrated area

2) ease of transition – no traffic lights or muggles, but an open country grid of roads

3) complete pre-planning – all puzzles solves and the entire route is mapped out for maximum efficiency

***I have to give Steve of the Ventura Kids great credit for handling this part!***

4) ease of finding and logging – not too many nanos, no tricky hides, no vegetation hides, no multis

5) high level of maintenance – lots of folks finding them recently, no DNFs in the history

6) excessive good humor – it’s a LONG time to be driving around… if it ain’t going to be fun, don’t bother!

7) tenacity – especially as the sun is going down again and your hourly cache count with it, you need to know you and your team will stick with it to the end

There’s your basic recipe for a wild and woolly ride through a cosmos’ worth of logbooks.

Here’s a peek into how our day went. Well, first of all, I was picked up at the airport the day before:

We found 15 caches that afternoon, then we all ate dinner and rested up for the coming marathon. At 11:15pm, we regrouped in the hotel lobby. Steve fortified himself with coffee:

We loaded up the trunk with food for the day:

and we were off! We did 5 “warmup” caches before midnight, at which time the other three sang “Happy Birthday” to me!

Here’s our first official find of the 24-hour period of August 29:
‘34 Gold Wing

Cache find 100 was around 5:30am! It was still dark.
Mondo’s Silver Bullet LV

Here’s Jim signing a log on the other side of a ditch while Steve sets his GPSr for the next one. Efficiency is the name of the game, for sure.

Many of the caches were in the late summer’s overgrowth of weeds:

and we got to experience the truly vicious variety of stickers that grow all over this place:

Speaking of stickers – we used a single group one:

I tried to reserve my energy whenever possible:

There were some interesting views at cache #200
Colorado Eastern Railroad

We could see the airport from there and pretty much everywhere all day:

and these wildflowers were all over:

They’re a smaller version of these guys:

Cache find #300 was around 4:30pm
Shadow and Sandy

Sandy of the VKs wants to call Jim “Shadow” now:

Steve observes the log signing ritual behind me. Why did he park so far from the cache??
(hahaha)

Somewhere along the way, we stopped for gas, and f0t0m0m presented me with cupcakes! They did not light the candles since we were at a gas station – whew!

The sunset looked similar to the sunrise, just in a different part of the big, broad sky:

Find #400, at just before 11pm.
Cachonomic Stimulus Plan #2

We were a little worried earlier in the evening that we might not pull this off, but now we knew we were in the clear! We found the record-breaking #407 at 11:30pm and continued to midnight to nab 413!
Douglas #12 Hungate

Oh, and here’s a short video that shows you basically what driving up to each and every cache was like:

Here are our per hour stats (listed from the beginning of each hour):
midnight = 15 
1 am = 11 
2 am = 23 
3 am = 20 
4 am = 24 
5 am = 21 
6 am = 19 
7 am = 17 
8 am = 17 
9 am = 15 
10 am = 20 
11 am = 27 
noon = 18 
1 pm = 17 
2 pm = 13 
3 pm = 14 
4 pm = 16 
5 pm = 20 
6 pm = 14 
7 pm = 16 
8 pm = 12 
9 pm = 15 
10 pm = 17 
11 pm = 11 

We also had 24 DNFs!

We don’t know how long we’ll hold this record, but we hope it will stand through the winter. Come the longer days next year, though… who will go for it??

YOU???

P.S. The Daily Reviewer has me on the list of top geocaching blogs! Here’s the *LINK*. I’m honored!

p.p.s. here’s a jpg of our route! (Steve lost his track, darn it…)