Ah…. the rush is over and the holiday is here! What better way to celebrate than by geocaching?

I’ll be in the Bakersfield area today, meeting my sister to exchange presents, then finding a few basic caches before returning south through the Grapevine and over the Tejon Pass. The weather is dry currently in Southern California, so it should be clear and beautiful.

‘Tis the season for snow on the mountains surrounding greater Los Angeles:

(taken on a hike with f0t0m0m last week)

‘Tis also the season to be on the lookout for decorations. I think these folks bought out the local stores for their front yard!

(taken on the recent run with OLdweeb)

I was not available to participate, but f00tm0m and the Ventura Kids joined some cachers in San Luis Obispo for the local Christmas parade, and were part of the geocaching float, which was also a geocaching event, of course!
Cachers on Parade

(video by the Ventura Kids)

I’ll be geocaching on Christmas day with a few of the locals around the Pasadena area, then heading to Monterey Park for dinner, probably Chinese food as those restaurants tend to be open on the holiday. If anyone cares to join us for all or part of the festivities, just let me know – or just show up! I’ll be logging in live on Twitter and the list will have a public bookmark. (Check GC14XB6 to find that.)

I hope you all have a wonderful, cacheful holiday!

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Luke 2:8-14
8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,
14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

First, I have some cool news: GeoCraig and I are featured in an article in this month’s issue of 805 Living, which can be found at most major supermarkets in Southern California, including Gelson’s, Vons, Ralphs, Albertsons, and Pavilions, as well as Blockbuster Video and at many high-end retail locations throughout Western Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara. 805 Living is also available through subscription. I should be able to get permission to reprint the article here soon!

OK, so I went out for a short day of caching with Ken, aka OLdweeb (On Line Dweeb). He refers to himself as the low energy cacher from outer space, akin to Quisp cereal. We basically cleaned up about 20 around the San Fernando Valley that one or the other or both of us needed. The centerpiece of the list was one honoring Bwidget’s 5000th find!
The Widger 5000

It was a glorious day, as days are here right after it rains:

Of course, Ken did his standard “my GPS is a cel phone” trick while I signed the log, if any muggle was visible within 500 feet:

See his blog for his various entertaining rants, but Ken confessed to be rantless that day. Hm. A rantless OLdweeb. I’ll bet that if he reads this post here on the WordPress website, he’ll have something to rant about. Hee hee…

C’mon, Ken… dare ya to click over!

… or better yet, maybe he’ll tell us of when – back when he was kid – he saw a baby chimp running loose on the streets of Sylmar…

The Wikipedia page does not do this road justice. I’ve driven up and down California dozens of times on the 101, 5, 33, 99, but never had cause to take this winding, rural side road until recently. As part of the Delorme challenge, f0t0m0m and I headed up almost to Santa Nella, over to Hollister, then down this stretch of striped asphalt to check off another 5 pages. We stopped for gas and sandwiches in the mini-burg of Tres Pinos across the street from this cache:

Tray’s Pinos Hotel

then headed south for a few more:

54 Miles
Don’t Blink!
Paicines Reservoir
Road End
Top of the Big Dipper
Oldtime Cowboy Movie
Are we there Yet III?
Stop Staring at Me!
A Green Valley View
Old School
Welcome to Pinnacles
What a View!
25-59-35
Trading Corrosion For Erosion
Key to San Ardo

Empty country roads are among the best places for caching. I hope more are placed along this one – I’d love a reason to come back! Enjoy the journey with me:

The day concluded with a couple of caches near Harmony, just north of Morro Bay:

You Are Here – this was an outstanding camo job
Classic California Coast

I wish you blissful caching.

Lots of caches, empty dirt roads, spectacular views, fun friends.
Yep…
North of Ojai – a jeep trail that only permits 10 vehicles per day to drive on it
Ventura Kids, the Devious Max Power, Terra Girl, f0t0m0m, me
95 finds
THIS is geocaching:

That’s pretty much what we “had” to look at all day. Those are the Channel Islands out there:

Most of the caches were really easy to find, even under these potentially daunting circumstances:

The next one is over there somewhere:

We never could figure out what this alien beacon was really for:

It might have something to do with the lovely little pond nearby:

Steve shows us how to really look for caches. He said he could see it from there, down where we were. Hm.

A Devious Hide?

Snow! We did get out and play in it… sort of…

A little video view:

I look forward to more fun days with these guys!

I’m thankful for SO many things.

Geocaching with my family:

…. and they even put up with me crawling under muddy bridges….
Dam Troll

Long hikes with good friends:

Matilija Canyon Adventure

Finding a bonus cache! I qualified for this one about a year ago, and only learned of it last week:
I-5 Interstate Highway Challenge

Beauty all around:

Plenty for everyone to eat:

Happy Thanksgiving!

I fixed the input on the MyGeocachingProfile.com website and got the right output. Funny how that works.

May your Thanksgiving be full of turkey, pumpkin pie, and caches!

Well Rounded Cacher (The Fizzy Challenge)
My grid for this challenge is now, at long last, complete:

Note: this was generated by http://www.mygeocachingprofile.com, which I only just discovered today. Well, hey! It looks like I didn’t need to do this last cache after all! Ha! I’m sure glad I made this oversight, though, as it was a spectacular day on Refugio Beach, and I otherwise might never have gotten out here! Wow.

So – what I thought was the final cache for me to find was a 1.5 difficulty, 5 terrain, and the only one active near where I live is just west of Santa Barbara.
Two (If) By Sea Kayak

As the title indicates, it’s designed to do with kayaks from a put-in point near the entrance to Refugio State Beach, but it’s accessible on foot at low tide. The day f0t0m0m, BWidget, and I went, the tide was at an extra low, so we had a fabulous wide beach to walk along. The weather was spectacular to boot: cool and sunny. We saw a number of different types of animals: a hawk, a seal, various terns and gulls, mussels, sea anenomes, starfish, and pretty big crab.

Even though I live fairly close to it, I don’t get to the beach very often, so I really savored the 2-mile round trip stroll. There are campsites on this beach, so I just might have to bring my tent out here someday.

Low Tide

The cache is up there:

Got it!

Mussels exposed:

Starfish on the rocks:

Beautiful green seaweed:

A crab shows us his stuff:

Beautiful winter sun angle:

Our bonus caches of the day was
In Your Face!
See if you can figure out where to find the coords, and I’m sure you’ll become a “fan” of this cache, too!

Before I get in to the main subjects this week, here are a couple of newsy items.

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Author and technology journalist Paul Gillen and his wife Dana are avid geocachers and are about to publish a book on the how to. It’s called “Joy of Geocaching,” and I have a link to the Amazon page already on the Geocaching Stuff to Buy tab here for your convenience. I’ll let y’all know when it’s out. Meanwhile, they did a super job interviewing Steve of the Ventura Kids about our record-setting 413 cache day!

Listen to the interview

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I got a very nice note requesting that I let you all know about this event coming up in January. This is not typically what my blog is about, and there are just too many events for me to promote them, but – hey – here’s the info:

“Hello,
My name is Jeff Price and I am the Interpreter at Ocotillo Wells SVRA.  We are trying to get the word out about our first ever off-road geocaching adventure and we were wondering if you would let your blog know about it.  It will be a fun-filled weekend, from Jan. 29th-31st, with demonstrations, a few vendors and of course a geocache scavenger hunt all topped off with a CITO on Sunday with lunch provided!  For more information please go to our event cache listing on geocaching.com: GC1Y5D2.”

I’m not sure if I’ll be there or not, but have it pencilled in.

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This week, I found two more caches for the Well-Rounded Cacher challenge cache,
Well Rounded Cacher (The Fizzy Challenge)
and I only have ONE more grid space left to fill to finally complete this rather monumental challenge. The trick for some of us is to find high-terrain/high-difficulty caches we can actually DO. Fortunately, there are some out there with high ratings that don’t involve spelunking, deep-sea diving, long-distance backpacking, or cliff climbing, and I can get the grid space in spite of my claustrophobia, aquaphobia, acrophobia, and agrizoophobia.

I hiked out to a 2.5/5 start cache up in the Lake Arrowhead area with f0t0m0m. It’s easily doable with a motorcycle or off-road quad, but otherwise, it’s either a .10 bushwhack down a very steep slope or a rather pleasant one-mile hike each way on the single track for the aforementioned vehicles. We opted for the latter!

3W11 "Metate"

It was a lovely day, too:

I also got my 4.5/5 grid space with this cache:
Fort Orange

A quick slog up a cactus-filled hill in Orange County with Albackore brought us to this rocky outcropping and the goal of our quest.

On the way back, I got a wonderful bonus by accident. I could (and probably will eventually) do an entire blog on Otis Pug, one of our local pioneers in creative camos and challenging puzzle caches. A secretive and mysterious character, his little dog was the only visible evidence of his existence, and one day – suddenly and to everyone’s chagrin – he left the game, archiving all of his celebrated hides. He left the containers in place, though, so all of us around here decided to keep finding his caches and logging them nevertheless! Hey… they ARE there… I have a short list of the ones that are still findable.

Anyway, as we wandered around on the top of the hill after locating the target cache, I noticed an obvious geopile. I thought there might be a letterbox in there, but it was another geocache – lo, and behold! – an old Otis Pug!
Otis Pug Goes Airborne

Have a great week of caching surprises!

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!