Musings about Geocaching: 2007-03-18

Saturday, March 24, 2007

A FTF in Horsethief Canyon on a beautiful day

The bradybunchboys placed a cache the other day in Horsethief Canyon. No sooner had it gone "live" than they Disabled it because, according to Google Earth, the coordinates looked like they were off.

I had put it on my watchlist that day, so today, when it went "live" again, I put some snacks in my pack and headed out the door, making sure the coordinates were in the GPSr.

It was a beautiful day, with perfect hiking weather.

The trail turned to the north, and finally I was at the pool I remembered from a horseback ride I took in the area about six or seven years ago.

The cache was just off the trail, up in the rocks above the pool. The arrow on my GPSr was erratic and was sending me one way, then another. Finally, I changed to the satellite page and started trying to get to the numbers, a technique I read about in the Forums this past week.

Soon the couple that had been hanging out near the pool left and shortly after that I zeroed in on the numbers and found the container, well-hidden in a nook between two large boulders, and covered by a good sized, lichen-covered rock.

Inside the little lock-'n-lock container, there was a Yellow Jeep TB, a FTF token, a FTF Prize, and another Geocoin, plus a little plush animal, and an empty logbook . . . Cool! I signed the logbook, retrieved the Yellow Jeep, the first one I have ever retrieved from the "Wild," and pocketed the FTF token and FTF Prize.

After that, I stayed in the area taking a number of pictures.

Before returning to my car, I made a quick hike up to the location of "The Levitating Rock," the cache Jodi placed last Sunday, because I wanted to get a better picture.

That added another little "bump" to the Profile of my more-than-four-mile hike.

It was a really beautiful day and I was glad to finally get out, since bad weather had kept me in the house several days this week.

My thanks to the bradybunchboys for finding such a great location for their 100th cache.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

More than eight miles of hiking . . . all before noon

Late Saturday night I saw a post in the Forums about Chuy! and Jahoadi and CTYankee meeting at 6:45 in the morning to tackle the caches on Sycuan Peak. This is the mountain I see from my backyard, and the peak that has held two impossible-for-me-to-solve puzzle caches for the past several weeks. So I set my alarm and planned to meet the group at my cache, "Only Two Redeeming Qualities," that marks the parking area off that very narrow, winding road.

At my house, it was bright and sunny, but at the trailhead, a few hundred feet lower in elevation, we were shrouded in fog and it was cold. However, we soon were above the marine layer since the eroded trail climbs steeply.

CTYankee needed all the caches on the peak, Jahoadi needed a few of them, and Chuy! needed the most recent ones, so we stopped at each cache location on the way up, including the two I placed, one of which had migrated a bit from its original hiding place. It is always interesting to see what happens to your own caches on a revisit . . .

The higher we climbed, the more beautiful the views became. El Cajon Mountain looked like an island emerging above the white, cotton-candy fog.

TrailGators placed his very difficult, troublesome-for-more-than-me Puzzle cache in a cool location near some interesting outcrops of quartz, where we also saw some embeded coal . . . at least that is what CTYankee thought the hard, black substance was.

That cache location was quite a distance west of the mountain's
peak.

This is what our Sycuan tracks and profile looked like:

After the hike to the top of Sycuan Peak and down the other side, we went to Horsethief Canyon where I hiked another five plus miles, hitting a trail near the staging area I had not hiked before.

Near the beginning of our hike, we saw this "levitating rock."

Jodi planted a new cache near the beginning of our hike, and at the end of the hike, I finally did my cache maintenance, replacing a missing cache and replacing another one that burned up in the fire.

When CTYankee and I arrived at that location, I hardly recognized the oak tree and its surroundings. The cache's name is "Shady Rest," and although the tree will recover, it sure doesn't have the same "Shady Rest" feeling it had before the devastating fire.

The track and profile are backwards . . . showing what I did last first, but most of the distance I traveled is included.

I played with the tracks in Mapsource for a while . . . actually quite a while . . . but could not get them linked correctly to show what I did first first, and what I did last to show up at the end of the profile picture. I finally gave up . . .

I had a fun day and it was great to finally meet CTYankee9 and Piglet9 since I've been collecting his cool tokens ever since I found the first one a few months ago.