Almaden Quicksilver

Escooby asked on theGBA forums if anyone wanted to accompany him on a hike in Almaden Quicksilver (south San Jose). I was the only one to take him up on it. I hadn’t done any serious caching since the end of July and since Karen was feeling quite good, it was nice to get out. I had never met escooby, but I enjoyed our time together and would cache/hike with him again at the drop of a hat (circumstances permitting).

I was a few minutes late getting to the Woods Road trail head. Escooby was patiently waiting, but it didn’t take long to start on the trail, where inititally we were finding a cache about every 0.1 miles. We started hiking around 8:15 AM and were back in the parking lot around 4:00 PM. In between we covered 10.7 miles and found 22 caches and the first stage of The Hobbit multi-cache. Since I didn’t take time to log any details, and my memory is fuzzy of each individual cache, I’ll just list them here in order of finding them.

• Encouragement; 8:22 AM
• You Can Cache!; 8:29 AM
• 500,000 Words; 8:39 AM
• Army ReTIRED; 8:44 AM
• No N.U.T.S. Here!; 8:52 AM
• BTC; 9:00 AM
• Assume Nothing #3; 9:09 AM
• Tick House; 9:18 AM
• Treasure Rock; 9:27 AM
• Miner’s Junk; 9:35 AM
• Not Cinnabar; 9:45 AM
• Shady Vista; 10:01 AM
• We Dig Cemeteries; 10:29 AM
• It’s a Gas; 10:56 AM
• SILVER CACHE; 11:27 AM
• San Cristobal Mine Cache Redux; 12:01 PM
• Victoria Shaft; 12:25 PM
• April Mine Trestle; 12:37 PM
• English Camp; 1:03 PM
• Rocky Start; 1:43 PM
• Cemetery Trees; 2:33 PM
• High Ridge; 3:14 PM
• Secret Trailhead #16--Wood Rd; 4:10 PM

Leos?

For all us Leos’ was the closest cache to home. I’ve not been paying attention, so I missed when this one went active. Didn’t take too long to find. The GPSr only had a couple minutes of battery power, but it was enough.

Surprise

Dan and Janet asked me along as they went back to You’re In For A Surprise. They had found it yesterday, but hadn’t found or signed the log book. We parked in a lot at the San Ramon hospital, and I took their GPSr and found the cache. I felt a little rusty. Then I found the log book, which is where Dan suspected it would be.