Musings about Geocaching: Whew! I don't think I've ever hiked 12 miles before

Recently there has been a "war" going on in the huge Mission Trails Regional Park. SD Rowdies, cegrube, the local FTF hound of late, and the BradyBunchBoys, plus a few others have been placing caches nearly every .1 along the trails . . . and not along the trails.

I had not even found many of the older caches in the area, so now there were many caches to find on our SDCET day. John and Jahoadi let me ride with them from our East County location and we met up with Toby's Gang, duganrm, and fisnjack at 9:00 in the morning at one of the several trailheads. It was cloudy and overcast, but the temperature was mild, so it was a perfect day for our lengthy hikes.

Along our route, John and Jahoadi placed several caches, one of which was at this cool, gnarly oak tree.

On the far side of this section of the park, after we found "Jumping Jack Flash," duganrm noticed a bit of a Geotrail. He walked over to the object and discovered a 35mm film canister. After some quick consultation, we realized we possibly had a "Prisoner of War" -- an unactivated cache. He called home to have Rogue check to see if there was a brand new cache at the coordinates. There wasn't.

So, he walked her through the cache-submission form and she submitted it for approval. The whole scene was very funny. And, today, now that the cache has been approved and cegrube was FTF and realizes what happened, it is even funnier.

We haven't, however, heard from the other side yet . . .

After that we took a turn to the south down Shepherd Canyon where there was one section of incredible rocks.

While we were on the hike, jahoadi and john passed 1000 caches. Too bad we didn't have a little celebration and a picture-taking event at whichever cache it was.

The other hike from the trailhead on Barker Way turned out to be 2.8 miles. The last time I was on that hill with Princess Toadstool, the only cache there was a puzzle cache, called "Flagman's Cache."

Now there are ten caches on that side of the mountain . . .

The sky was clearing and the clouds were beautiful. I took this picture on our way down a narrow trail from SD Rowdies "Why I Oughta . . . ," to a cache from which we had to hike back up from . . .

I did okay climbing up the hill, but my feet hurt when walking down the steep, zig-zagging trails. I was often far behind my companions, but they were patient with me, and I sure appreciated that. I hoped the new Asolo boots I got at the R.E.I. used gear sale would be more comfortable than my other boots were after several hours of hiking . . . but they aren't.

We got down the hill after sunset and just in time for dinner. duganrm said a place called Beef 'n Bun had really good shakes, so that is where we headed. The shakes did look fantastic, but I didn't get one. I did have a great hamburger, and really enjoyed the company of these three people. In fact, I told them this is the first time in my life I have been able to play with the "cool kids."

It really does feel that way. These weekly adventures with such wonderful people are far from my experiences of the past several years since I have been so debilitated by illness.

After dinner we took duganrm to a nearby Barbados Sam cache the rest of us had already found. He found it easily, even though it is a very clever hide that a muggle would never figure out.

When I got home, even though it was after 9:00 p.m., I logged the Trackables I left and picked up. I even logged several other caches before finally giving in to fatigue and heading off to bed.

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This is what our track looked like for the big hike on the northermost "battlefield," during which we hiked 9.07 miles according to my GPSr:

And this is what the static version of my Magnalog of the first hike looks like:

This is the Magnalog of the nearly-three-mile hike up to the area where "Flagmsn's Cache" is hidden. And this is the static image of the hike and the elevation profile.