Today after work I headed for a new trail in Sibley Park. Well, new to me that is.
Skyline Trail
I had planned to search for two easy geocaches, and if I still had time, possibly two more difficult ones. They are rated according to the terrain that they are hidden in (flat road=easy, hills & bushwhacking=difficult).
I thought I had parked closest to the easier ones, but the GPS on the cache app let me know I was much closer to a difficult one. So I went for it.
Difficult Cache #1
Yeah, it’s a weird blob that holds the cache container in it. It doesn’t look like much, but it was hidden deep in the woods, so to speak. But it wasn’t hilly, just a flat path filled with annoying bushes and branches everywhere, but I found it.
Then my GPS let me know that I was very close to the other difficult one that was located just up the way:
Can you see it? It’s an abandoned car located down a dry creek bed off the Skyline Trail. Isn’t that crazy? How on earth did a car get here? And hidden inside it- was the second difficult cache. I didn’t take a picture of the cache because it wasn’t anything special- it was the walk to this abandoned vehicle that made it difficult. More bushwhacking- ugh! But I found it.
After that, I headed back to my car and was done for the evening.
Or so I thought.
As I was driving home, I remembered a “puzzle cache” that was nearby and although I hadn’t solved the puzzle yet, I had a good hunch I knew where the final location of the cache was because there were so many hints left by other people. So I pulled over into the residential neighborhood where I thought it would be ….and I found it. When we find puzzle caches without solving the puzzle, this is called “brute force” – in other words- we skipped some steps. But hey, “a find is a find” and maybe next time, don’t drop so many hints in addition to the puzzle.
I got home, made myself dinner and then I received a notification from the geocache app (yup, I receive notifications) – that a new cache was just hidden less than a mile from my apartment. Whenever this happens, there is a quick race to the cache to be “FTF” – (First To Find).
Okay, first of all, I never do that- especially at night, it is so not safe. But this cache was in a residential neighborhood in the affluent town of Piedmont. The safest city in Alameda County and 10 minutes from my apartment.
So I went for it.
I got back in my car, drove over to the area and had my first “FTF“. It was a very clever cache that was disguised as a lawn light. I would have taken a picture of it, but it was dark outside and also a dog was barking at me, so I quickly signed the paper log that was inside it and got the heck out of there.
As the days get shorter I won’t be able to do this after work and as the world continues to open up, I probably will forget all about this stuff. But for now, geocaching has been taking me on new trails and neighborhoods, during a pandemic- and I love that.
Wednesday, September 15, 2021:
Theresa Donahoe 