Spring Trip 2011 – Part 2 Caching and Hiking
We have been in the Bay area of California for a few days and things have been going as we had hoped. If you take Interstate 280 North from San Jose to San Francisco, you essentially have the million populations on your right, and the Santa Cruz Mountains on your left. In fact, as soon as you exit to the left, you are in rural areas and heading up into the hills. These hills are where we would like to do a lot of our caching. We were up there caching on Monday and Wednesday. We brought our SPOT with us and sent a couple of messages showing where we were those two days. We plan on sending one or two messages every day. The following link will show you our locations.
http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0NqQJKELEBtGMuGZez6Zhsq6asA46EKMM
The reason we want to go into the hills is there are a large number of open spaces and parks with hundreds of hiking trails and hundreds of caches.
On Monday we drove up the mountain on Page Mill road, which is a narrow winding road which takes you slowly up to Skyline Blvd which goes along the top of the mountain. On the drive up, we parked in a few spots to go out on the trails and grab some caches in the Los Trancos Open Spaces area and Bella Monte Open Spaces. One thing you learn caching in this hilly area is that you dont bushwack to a cache unless it is very close. If the cache is 60 meters into the woods, chances are that the trail will be going around a hill and get you right to the cache. Or there will be switchbacks winding the trail back and forth up the hill, and the cache will be on the trail. Because the trails are going around hills and winding their way up the hills, it may take you a lot longer than you expected to get to a cache. (How about 20 minutes to do 300 meters? That happened today). Monday we drove to a few areas, hiked about 6 hours and found 22 caches.
On Wednesday, we decided to hike in the Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve. Someone recommended it to us because it is in the foothills, there are 25 miles of trails and there is no need to drive up the mountain to get to it. It was a very short drive to get there and we were able to get an early start. This is a very popular park with lots of trails in the low levels which draw many families and senior citizens. The park is also popular with joggers who appreciate running on the wide trails in the woods and grasslands and the challenge of running up into the hills. I mentioned that we didnt have to drive up the mountain; however, the park is in the mountains and the trails head up into the hills and that is where we had to go to get the caches. We spent 8 hours walking up and down those hills finding 21 caches and covering about 13 miles. At one point in the mid afternoon, we were far up in the hills far from the parking lot with 3 more caches ahead of us which would take us even furthere away. The closest of the caches was about 650 meters away and other 2 were not much further. So we decided to go on. The trail hugged the edge of a valley and wound it way around the hills, taking three times the distance to get to the first cache. To make it worse, the elevation went up about 125 meters with a very steep climb at the end. There was a bench at the cache site where we were able to take a break and chat with a lady muggle as we looked for the cache. The cache was very interesting. It has been there since 2002. Originally there had been a camera in the cache for cachers to take their pictures. The owner developped the pictures and put copies in the cache. All the previsous log books were still in the cache.
Here is a picture we took
The lady muggle said we were at the top of the mountain and just above us the trail would head down the hill to the left. I thought that was strange as there seemed to be more hill to the right and we had to get caches to the right. She said there was no trail to the right. After she left, I checked the elevation which was 480 meters, and we headed to the 2 caches. We found a little used narrow footpath to the right and we started climbing. To make a long story short, it took us over one hour to hike the 400 meters to the two caches and we climbed a further elevation of 200 meters.
It may rain tomorrow so we will likely take a break and do some urban caching. There are tons of caches in town.
Sounds like you guys are having a blast. Can’t wait to hear more about it.
Hope you don’t mind, but I edited your post to embed the image you linked to so it would show directly in the post. Keep up the great writing Pa. Love hearing about your adventures.
Didi and I are jealous of you two Pa! You are certainly enjoying every minute of it! Continue to post your stories, we love em.
Would you believe it took us nearly 30 minutes to find the cache on this object. It looks like it is made of driftwood but it is actually bronze.
I tried posting the picture here but it didnt work. I guess I need instructions
FYI it is situated near one of the GOOGLE building here in Mountain view. I am hoping to get some pictures of interesting GOOGLE stuff in a few days
Keep the post and pictures coming Pa.I am jealous.
It’s fun to follow your spot progress. Keep em comming as long as the message reads “Ma&Pa probably Geocaching, Everything’s OK”.
As you said Pa, “When it comes to life, You only get one crack at it. You have to make the best of it”. And you two make the best of it everyday.
As a horseman and fan, I love the sculpture. Tx, Pa!
I described our long hiking days in the Open Space areas. However, I didn’t mention the warning signs at the trailheads. I guess the yellow warning signs should be major concern but my problem on my previous visits has been poison oak. I think I have got it again. It is really tough to avoid as there is lots of it, especially when you go off trail to get a cache
If there is a cache in a tree you gotta go and get it.
We spent a couple of days caching in Shoreline Park and in the adjacent business district which is mostly hi-tech. A large number of the buildings belong to Google. We were caching mostly on the trails that wind through the area, and we took shrtcuts through parking lots. Look what Ma found behind one of Googles buildings.
Look what Pa found. We saw these bikes parked all over the place in the business park, and sometimes they even seemed abandonned at the side of the road. When a Google employee needs to travel to another building, he/she can just grab a bike that they will find.
Friday we head back to the Open Spaces.
Here is a closeup of the bottom part of the sign. Click to enlarge.
I love the part “if attacked fight back”. What else, ” If attacked, just let yourself be eaten alive” LOL. We certainly don’t see this type of sign on the NB trails 😉
If you do see a mountain lion, don’t try, here kitty, kitty, kitty.
Throw it some tuna and run like hell 🙂
Or at least run faster than Ma 🙂
Had another great day yesterday hiking in the Open Spaces. A nice geocacher had a cache at a little known trailhead at the far end of Rancho San Antonio preserve. This gave us access to a few caches at that end. The first cache was only 650 meters away but the odometer said it took 1.7 kilometers to get there as there was an ascent of 200 meters. The next few caches were not tough to get to as we walked on my favorite kind of trail. The trail was a wide footpath hugging the side of a hill. overlooking a deep green valley on our left. The ground was soft underfoot and there was a gentle rise in the trail. Our elevation was 340 meters. Across the valley was a much higher mountain. I noticed that there were a few caches on the slope of that hill also but I wondered if we really wanted to contour the valley to get to them. Ma seemed to think we should, so as we finished the caches on one side, we kept following the trail as it contoured the valley and kept rising as we got to the other side. There was now many switchbacks to get us to the higher levels. We finally reached the caches on this side but the odometer distances were long as the switchbacks kept us going back and forth as we rose higher and higher. We are now at the 600 meter elevation level. We were now in the Monte Bello Open Space as we continued on. We ran out of caches, but we saw another group further ahead, so we decided to keep on going. To get to these caches, there were less switch backs and more steep climbs. We eventually approached the 900 meter level where there is a mountain grassland with gently rolling hills. We saw a number of mountain bikers enjoying the descents on the many meandering paths through the open spaces up here.
Many of the caches were regular ones, but surprisingly there were many camoflaged micros and small caches. It is a little frustrating to have hiked 10 kms and gone up 800 meters to have to look for a micro in a fake rock, without even knowing it is a micro in a fake rock. There were some really nice caches and we had a great time. All in all the return hike was a total of 20 kms in 7 hours and we found 15 caches. We were pleased
We then went down into the main area of the park and found 5 more caches to get to 20 for the day. While looking for these last caches, MA received a CHIRP message on her Oregon.This was a first for us and quite a surprise. It was for a cache that we had not entered in our gps. The signal provided us with coords which we followed to the cache location.
It is now saturday morning and we are getting ready for a little trip to San Francisco with Justin. We may do a little geocaching but we want mainly to see a few of the sites and visit Tammy at her Spice Hound store.
I will place a few more pictures later
Been busy caching. Caching in a redwood park yesterday. Check out the logs on this find
http://coord.info/GC2RNN1
Sunday we went to see Justin and Tammy at the Farmers market and we did some urban caching. More details later