Good Night Calavera

Allow me to begin by sharing with you the log I posted on geocaching.com for this cache.

A few months ago, I started doing some research. I was nearing find #2000, and I wanted to mark the milestone with an appropriately worthy cache. After considering and discarding a *lot* of caches, I settled upon this one – and I’m quite glad that I did.

I picked up RCSpeaker and his nephew, and we made the hour-long trek north to begin our search at 8:30 pm. Ninety minutes later, we had our hands on the cache.

Words can’t do justice to this cache; suffice it to say that it’s put together like a Swiss watch.

Geodynamic, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. It was worth every gallon of gas and every drop of sweat.

We arrived at the parking coordinates and walked a few hundred feet to the starting point of our hunt.

This cache can only be found at night, as the path is marked by reflectors placed in bushes or trees along the trail. Finding the cache requires following the markers (for 2.4 miles, as it turns out) until you reach the cache. When we arrived at the posted coordinates, we saw that there were multiple paths we could take. So we shined our lights around until, about 50 feet away, we saw two brightly glowing dots that seemed to hover in the air. We followed that trail until we reached the markers.

That’s Rick and his nephew Seth. To the left of Rick’s head, and again to his upper right, you can see the reflections of the trail markers. That’s what we were looking for as we traversed Preserve Calavera – and there were plenty to find. At every spot where two trails met, there were markers to show us the way. Sometimes we had to go a few feet up the trail to spot them, but they were there. It’s a testimony to the work done by the cache owner that not once, with the scores of choices we had to make, did we have to backtrack because we’d been allowed to choose the wrong trail.

(I’ll take this opportunity to apologize for the poor quality of the images in this post. Small digital cameras and low-light situations do not make for prize-worthy photography. To those readers who have become accustomed to the high-quality images I strive to provide on the site, please forgive me. For those of you who think that most of my pictures look like grandma’s bad Polaroids, you should see the ones I don’t post. By the way, licensing issues aside, I think Bad Polaroid would be an awesome band name. If you use it, please give me credit in your liner notes – or whatever today’s digital equivalent may be.)

But I digress.

One thing I had neglected to do was check out the topography of the area, so I was a little surprised at how steep some of the trail sections were. I was glad I’d thought to bring my hiking staff. It helped a lot with all the upping and downing.

Speaking of remembering, when we pulled into the parking area and were making our preparations to hit the trail, I asked my compatriots if they’d thought to bring water. They hadn’t, but I had a couple of extra bottles to share.

About a thousand feet up the trail, I realized I’d left my water bottle in the Jeep. Arg.

The only sounds were the crickets and the bullfrogs, the shuffling of feet, and the occasional witty remark by a member of our party – oh, and the intermittent huffing and puffing noises. See the above “steep trail” reference.

We crossed streams using rocks and rickety bridges, we scrambled over rocks and roots. Then, finally, we saw a set of markers that were placed a little differently than the others.

Instead of leading us up yet another trail, it led us to a group of boulders about 20 feet off the trail. This had to be it!

Indeed it was. After a few minutes of searching, we had found the cache.

We spent a few minutes basking in the glow of accomplishment, then were left only with the task of finding our way back to the Jeep, which, as it turned out, was no more than a quarter mile away.

I had planned for that, though, by printing an aerial photo of the preserve that included the locations of the nearby caches. We determined our approximate location by noting the direction and distance to nearby caches. We found the nearest cache that was on the trail that would lead us back to our starting point. Then we navigated to that cache (and found it, thank you very much). From that point, it was a cheerful jaunt back to the Jeep, and a pleasant drive home.

I did have to get one more picture, though. How could I have a blog post this momentous without at least one picture of my constant companion Eugene?

Now. Where shall we go for #3000?

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