Halloween hunt

Dan and I went after Team Alamo’s Cash Cache, but first we had to visit The Queen and The King.

The Queen was pretty easy to get too. There was a large flock of turkeys at the trail head and they scattered up hill away from. After passing under them, we looped back up the hill and spooked them so they took off flying across the canyon to the opposite side.

The King was not easy to get too. It was a long, steep hike into Las Trampas.

After The King, we were too tired to hike out to Cash Cache, so we stopped for Fudge Shoppe (more than a mile round trip in itself).

A few easy ones

Karen felt like going out and walking a little, so we took Dan and Janet and headed to Danville. 580 was jammed for some reason, so I went the back way. Stopped at the old Finley School and Dan and Janet hunted, then noted that the last log said it was missing. Next we stopped along Sycamore Valley road for Waterfall, and had a nice walk, and then realized it was inactive. Next we stopped for them to find Nuts to all these Iron Horse Caches and It Took Long Enough.

I can’t Livery without you was next up in the Danville Livery shopping mall. It was really busy--kids doing trick or treat, and a Ferrari rally (more Ferraris in one place than I think I’ve ever seen). We were quite sure where it was, but it took a while to find the right time to retrieve it. i think Janet finally managed it at around 2:35 PM.

I remembered there was a cache reached from a trailhead on Starmont, so I used the Honda Navigation gps to auto route us there. It’s an easy trailhead to overlook. Karen stayed in the car (she was getting tired), and we charged up the hill to find Crazy Horse Cache at 3:13 PM.

Heading back towards home, we took Diablo Road and made a quick grab of Green Valley Blues at 3:33 PM.

Our final stop was at Gateway to Diablo. Looks like this was an old gate on the Mount Diablo entrance road. We looked for quite a while. I was not thinking clearly about how to search, so I didn’t find it. Dan did. Found it about 3:58 PM.

Difficulty 3

Off with Dan and Janet for an afternoon of caching. It turned out that everyone of these was at least a difficulty 3 level cache.

First we went after Pseudo-Coo. I had previously solved the Sudoku puzzle. I used a helper program to do it quickly. My solution coordinates agreed with Dan’s so we were confident that we were going to the right place. The title gave us some idea of what we were after.

Janet finally found it.

dgreno@3K is on a busy street in San Ramon and right in front of a pizza place. It’s obviously highly cammoed and probably on a large sign--but what? I finally found it after about 5 trips around the sign.

Since we were close, I suggested we try for Quit Iron Horsing Around. Each of us had been there before, unsuccessfully. We looked for a long time, especially around some bushes where both our GPSr’s were zeroing out. As we gave up and started walking away, I thought of calling SnoWake, one of the few geocachers whose phone number I have (and, he had been a recent finder). I described where we were concentrating our search as being 10 to 15 feet from a particular landmark, and his comment was that we were about 10 to 15 feet away from the cache. So, we went back, and after another 5 minutes of scouring the location, Dan found it.

Dan really wanted me to find The Three Monkeys, a cache I had just decided I didn’t want to search for (it’s right in front of an office building that’s in use 24x7). Well, I walked right up and made an immediate find. A bit of the cammo was just a little tweaked.

Maya Silver on Mission Peak

Off to Mission Peak with Dan to get new caches and some I didn’t get last spring. The hike took us to the top again.

The Maya Silver series of caches has an engaging story that fits the location for each cache. The caches are not difficult hides, but the overall hike 7 to 8 miles and significant, steep elevation change. Dan and I enjoyed them.

Maya Silver: Encounter

Inca Gold: Atahualpa

Maya Silver: Greed

Maya Silver: Betrayal

Maya Silver: Sacrifice

Maya Silver: Escape

Maya Silver: Redoubt

Maya Silver: Secrets

Horse Heaven

Maya Silver: Tears of the Moon

Jazz and Echo

A Couple of Puzzles and More

I’ve not paid much attention to fizzymagic’s puzzles for some time, but got motivated to try one last night. Linear Vuct: Rationale is a matrix division problem. I don’t remember how to do that, but a bit of web searching helped me out, and applying a tool that I found, the answer just popped out. Found it at 1:43 PM.

It was a quick drive over to Juliana’s Cache, which was very close to where No Hints Cache used to be. It was quick find at 2:03 PM.

Random Walk In The Park is another puzzle cache that involves orienteering. With a little bit of help from the web I figured out how to use the GPSr to do this. It was time consuming (and I suspect other folks in the park wondered what I was doing wandering back and forth across the grass. I looked around for a while at my end point, but when I didn’t find the cache I used the hint. Found it almost immediately. I think I messed up one of the intermediate way points, but only in distance not direction, so I was able to find the cache area anyway. Completed this one 2:58 PM.

The next one for the day was Bart: Dublin Pleasanton Station. It was in an Oracle parking lot. I didn’t see it the first time I checked the obvious location. Finally completed this one at 3:21 PM.

The last one I did was Fuzzy Friends #1--a multi-cache at the Dublin animal shelter. I’ve been putting this one off for a long time. It was pretty easy to gather the data to generate the coords for the cache location. The cache was concealed quite well--perhaps I was lucky to find it as quickly as I did. Completed at 3:52 PM.

An after lunch run

Cognitive is a new puzzle cache. Dan got FTF just after midnight. I wasn’t very cognitive, because I didn’t see the obvious puzzle solution at first. After solving, it was a quick find at 1:24 PM. Then I drove back to Livermore to find Rosemary Maybe based on Dan’s very specific hint. In my opinion, the coords for this cache are off (Dan measured, and you can see the problem in Terraserver Viewer. The cache hint is worthless, so there is nothing to help narrow the search to a specific area of rosemary bushes in the planter. And then I received an email from the cache owner (Ezra Zest Plum) asking where I found it because it was no longer where the owner put it and they couldn’t find it. I find that humorous, because so many people have not been able to find this one. I almost said to just go search for it like everyone else has to.

Reaching 0.7K

I needed 3 caches to reach 700, and there were 3 caches just up Las Trampas Ridge from Danville, so...

I think today is the first solo caching hike I have done since mid-July and Karen’s diagnosis with breast cancer. I started by stopping in the Danville Livery shopping center for I can’t Livery without you, but it’s too busy during shopping hours, since it’s right in front of the stores.

I wasn’t sure where the trailhead was that I needed, but seemed like it would be right up Remington Loop, which runs right by the Livery. And, it was.

The hike up to Went to FL & All I got was a Lousy T- Shirt Cache was about 0.6 miles and all up hill. Found it at 1:40 PM. I went on to Leo and Sag, which I got at 1:58 PM. Finally I found Take This Job and Shove It, with a little more difficulty than the previous ones (2:14 PM). This was find #700.

After coming down from the ridge, I drove over to Osage Park to look for It took long enough again. I was nearly stumped again, even though Blue iis had given me a hint that significantly narrowed the search area. Finally found it at 3:09 PM.

After shopping at Trader Joes in Pleasanton, I ran over to get Rexy’s Book Swap at 3:55 PM. The biggest challenge was getting through the brush and down into the gully.

New Preserve, Sycamore Valley

Dan called in the afternoon and suggested a short caching trip to some new caches off of Camino Tassajara. This is the newly opened Sycamore Valley Open Space Preserve. We left around 2 PM and made a quick stop in a new business park out by Las Positas College for Act #2 - Prudence The Pretty Piglet #3. Paying no attention to the No Tresspassing signs, we made it a drive up, and Dan made an immediate find at 2:24 PM. Our timing was just right--in and out while the security guard was driving on the other side of the complex. I wonder if this one will last?

We started our hike at the north trailhead, so first up was Twinkie the Kid, which Janet spotted. We found this one at 3:13 PM. Next up the trail was LeChuck’s HellBeard Treasure, which was an easy find, but an entertaining cache description (a satirical take on a local super cacher). Found at 3:25 PM.

We found Wonder Bread at 3:35 PM. Cheetos was next at 3:53 PM. And finally, at 4:12 PM we found Cracker Jack.