The Last One

Every now and then, you just stumble upon something in your wanderings that you just have to share with others. I'm sure I've shared this with many people in the past, but I feel, now is a good time to show it again. While on my road trip last August, I ended up here. This is why I love geocaching so much. 

It's not the most scenic spot in the world, nor is it the most interesting spot, but it is the last of its kind. This Blockbuster is located in Bend, Oregon and is the only one still in existence anywhere. There's a virtual cache here, which is how I ended up here, so I have that going for me. Were it not for geocaching, I never would have seen this or known about it. I've been here. Have you?

As always, feel free to comment here.  I won't bite.

Day 5 - GC17

Continuing on with my story of August 2024 road trip to Oregon, I next set my sights on finding GC17 and also GC12.  GC17 was the top order of the day, having been hidden in June 2000.  Finding this cache would complete my Jasmer Challenge (finding a cache hidden in every month since geocaching had been around). GC12 was the oldest geocache hidden in the entire state of Oregon. It was hidden in May of 2000, a month that I'd already completed by finding the oldest cache in Kansas. Still it would be helpful for other challenges that I was currently working on as I continue geocaching in the coming years.

As with the other caches in this area, I had good intelligence as to where to park for quick access to this particular cache. If you asked me how I got there, I'd answer Google Maps.  I just put the coordinates in for the parking area and said pretty much, "lead the way Google." It was a Sunday morning, so traffic was fairly light, but once I got close to the area, the roads became more winding and there were lots of areas where there were plenty of cars already parked. I thought there were going to be a lot of hikers out here.  Boy, was I wrong about that.

Getting to the parking coordinates for GC17, there was only one other car there and it was more of a wide spot in the road, so I found a convenient spot to pull over and gather my stuff together for the quarter mile hike up to the cache. As soon as I got out of my car, I was met by a couple of very aggressive dogs from the other car who just happened to be coming down the trail. The guy told me it would probably be better if I got back into my car and wait until his dogs were back in their car. Seriously?  Leash your dogs up if they are that aggressive. But I digress.

Once the dogs were safely in their car, I got out and left them behind and started my hike up to the geocache. The first thing I noticed was the trail head was littered with thousands of used shotgun shells and old targets of various sizes. I could also hear gunfire in the distance, but at least there was no one here shooting, so that was a good thing. Eventually, I left the sounds of shotguns being fired behind and had the trail all to myself. It had rained the previous day and the trail was very narrow, so I was very glad I'd brought my rain jacket along with me as it kept me fairly dry as I walked up the hill. The first photo was at a wider area of the trail. There were literally times when I was brushing against the bushes on both sides of the trail as I steadily climbed the hill.

Eventually, the trail opened up and I could see from my GPS unit that I was getting close to the cache. I should have stayed on the trail, but I decided to take a more straight line approach to where the GPS unit was saying the cache was. Once I got over there, I saw that I was now standing on another trail that came down from a ridge just above, something that I would have noticed had I just stayed on the original trail and made my way up to the ridge. Geocachers are like that.  Straight line usually means bushwhacking and if you're patient, you'll usually find another trail that will take you there. Was I patient? Of course not. 

Eventually I spotted the cache and opened it up. I got the log book out and signed in, having now completed my Jasmer Challenge. I decided to leave a travel bug in the cache so that some other geocacher who came after me would pick up and move along. I took my photo at the cache then re-hid the cache and hiked up to the top of the ridge. The entire ridge was covered in fog, so I didn't really know what I was missing up there, but had the ridge been clear, I would have had spectacular views of Mt. Hood. And yes, I know the photo looks like it's starting to clear, but the entire area where Mt. Hood was, was filled with fog. At that point, I decided to take the trail back down to the car and move it over to where I would be hiking up to the oldest cache in Oregon.

Unfortunately, when I got over to where I would be starting the second hike, there were shooters there, firing out where I would be hiking.  I decided to pass on the oldest one. I figured I'll be back there sometime in the next couple of years. I suspect that going to that one on a weekday, there'll be less of a likelihood of shooters since most of them are probably working during the week to pay for all of the ammunition that they used up on the weekends. I spent the rest of my day geocaching around the city of Portland. I would be leaving the next morning and heading south into eastern Oregon for my geocaching adventures.

The Original Stash and a Really Big Fork

This is a continuation of my entry from July 21st. It's more about geocaching, so if you're not interested, please feel free to move on. After getting the cache needed to the south of me, I hiked out and then headed up to visit the spot where Geocaching first started. Back in May 2000, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order which descrambled satellite GPS signals making handheld GPS units exceedingly more accurate. This also lead to navigation systems in the cars which are pretty ubiquitous. It also lead to the game we know as geocaching.

A man in Oregon, Dave Ulmer thought that if he hid a container in the woods and took a geographic reading, he could then publish the coordinates of that container on line and other people could go out and find it. He did and the next day someone else found his five gallon container using just his handheld GPS unit. Originally, the containers were called "stashes," but eventually it evolved into the game of Geocaching we know today.

The original stash is long gone, but parts of it still survive and are brought around to different large events all around the world. There is now a plaque placed where the original stash was placed and you can visit it if you know the coordinates. Needless to say, this is one of the places geocachers want to visit and I was no exception. I stopped at the turnout, geeked out for awhile, found the other geocache that was nearby, took photos and then went on my way back to my motel.

Later that evening, I went to a nearby area to find another virtual geocache and discovered a great spot to eat dinner. What's not to like about good taco trucks? Anyway, this was the perfect location for a giant fork.  No really, it's probably one of the largest forks I've ever seen in my life, but it was a great way to bring people into the food court area. I can honestly say I've had better, but then again, I can also say that I enjoyed myself here, so it was good.

After getting back to my motel room, I planned out the next day's adventure. Part of it would be a foray into the state of Washington to get a couple of caches for a challenge that I wanted to complete. But that would be the second goal of the day because the primary goal was to find the third oldest geocache still active in Oregon which would complete another challenge that I'd been working on for several years.

GC16 - Day 4 of last year's August road trip.

This is a continuation of a series of entries detailing my trip to Oregon from last August. First off know that this is going to be about geocaching, so if you're not interested, then please feel free to skip this. 

The main part of this road trip was to get GC16 and GC17, which are some of the oldest geocaches in Oregon, having been hidden back in June 2000 and July 2000. I wanted to find these two caches because they would fill in my Jasmer calendar. The Jasmer calendar is finding a cache that was hidden in every month since geocaching started in May 2000. Because some of these older caches are close to 25 years old, they are getting fewer and far between. In fact, there are only 4 caches left in the entire world that were hidden in August 2000 - one in Utah (which I have found), one in Michigan, one in Georgia and one in Sweden I believe. And the one in Michigan is threatened because logging increasingly gets closer to where it's hidden.

Most of these older caches usually involve hikes and this one was no exception. Google maps was a lifesaver. I had intel about where to park for GC16, so I inputted that and away I went. I literally couldn't tell you how I got there outside of Google took me right where I needed to go. Once there, I parked the car, loaded up the daypack and headed up the trail. I ended up finding a couple of other caches on the way up to GC16 and after finding those, I kept going up the trail and finally found a side trail that I was looking for that would take me to this venerable cache.

The path was narrow on both sides with ferns and they had a lot of water on them, so by the time I was done getting to the cache, my pants were pretty much soaked, but as you can see from my expression, I really didn't care, because I'd marked off another month on my Jasmer calendar and only had to find a cache hidden in July 2000 to fully complete the calendar. That would happen tomorrow. 

As far as the actual cache was concerned, it was a fairly easy find, but then again, most caches hidden back then were fairly easy. It was the experience of the hike, getting out in nature that were the important things. People hid a cache on "their" trail and geocaching was the way people got to explore other trails in their area that they might not be familiar with and this one was no exception. You can see by the size of the lid that it was a rather large container and it was just hidden down in a tree stump. Most people hiking on that particular trail wouldn't even give this particular stump, or that side trail the time of day because the trail didn't lead anywhere, the stump was just a stump. But to me there was something special there, something that I wanted to find.

After signing the log sheet, I replaced the cache as I had found it and then started my half mile trek back down the trail to my car where further geocaching adventures awaited me later in the day. I'll write about those in a later post.

Explore the World

Well, it's the first of the month again and once again, it's time for P.J.'s monthly photo blog. This time the theme is "Explore the World" and while I didn't leave the country or even the state, I did get around, so I have lots of shots to choose from for this month's theme. Without further ago, here's my take on the theme, Explore the World.

1. Reaching milestones

Part of the fun of geocaching are the goals that we attain as we play this silly game. I keep a number of goals in the back of my mind all the time just in case. Sometime back in February, someone told me that they were going to make one of their number milestones the Block Party in Elysian Park near Dodger Stadium. Geocaching has given any Mega Event (Events over 300 people attending) the chance to be a Block Party this year since it's Geocaching's 25th year of existence. The Block Party icon is different than the normal Mega event icon, which got me to thinking. I wonder if I could get my numbers to such a point that I could make the Block Party a major milestone?

I looked at my numbers and I was in a dilemma as I would either have to really slow my amount of geocaching down in order to make my 26,000th geocache find the Block Party which I plan on attending in late June up in San Jose, or pick up the pace of my geocaching and make my 26,000th fall at the Block Party happening at the beginning of May. Well, as you can see, I picked up the pace considerable, and made the Spring Fling Block Party my 26,000th find since I started back in March of 2001. In reality, it's just a number and I have many of my friends that have bigger numbers in less years and others who have less numbers in about the same number of years as I have been geocaching, but it's kind of cool to look at my geocaching profile and see the icon as 26,000. WARNING! If you click on that link, you'll be inundated by more maps and statistics that you probably thought were possible, but it'll give you a little bit of a glance into some of the things that interests me when I'm geocaching.

2. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Another thing that interests me is walking around in cemeteries. Yeah, that might sound kind of morbid, but usually I'm there for a purpose. In this case, I was up visiting my tiny human just before Memorial Day weekend and on one of the days when she was at pre-school, I decided to visit the town of Colma, California. Colma has the distinction of most of its land being dedicated to cemeteries and the dead in town number around 1.5 million, which outnumbers the living by about 1000 to 1. This has led to Colma being called "the City of the Silent" and has given rise to a humorous motto that was featured on the city's website in the past: "It's great to be alive in Colma." I actually visited a couple of cemeteries in Colma as there were earth caches to discover and a virtual cache as well. Sometimes people will place Adventure Labs at cemeteries to allow people to discover some of the interesting aspects of that particular cemetery. I was actually doing research at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in order to create my own Adventure for others to discover.

When I wander around cemeteries, it's also intriguing to figure out why people ended up there as opposed to somewhere else. I know that most of the San Francisco politicians end up being buried in Colma, because there isn't any land available in San Francisco proper to be buried unless you have a plot in one of the military cemeteries there. But others make you think a little bit, for example Joltin' Joe. He was born in Martinez, California, but spent most of his adult life in New York and later Florida. Why did he choose to be buried in this particular Catholic cemetery in Colma? And it's especially intriguing since none of the rest of his family are buried there.  His brother Dom is buried in Massachusetts and his other brother Vince is buried at Ft. Bragg National Cemetery in California. But after a little digging, I figured out that both of his parents are buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in the Mausoleum, so now it makes sense.

3. Always watch where you put your feet

Coming home from Colma, I stopped in several locations to find some geocaches and I stopped in a Park n Ride just off the freeway. I pulled into the parking lot, parked the car, then got out and walked through the lot over to where the geocache was hidden. The cache wasn't hidden very well, as I could see it as I walked up and I was focused on it as I took my first step off of the pavement into the surrounding terrain. Something in the back of my mind said, "Self, have you looked to see where your feet are going to land?" So I glanced down and then pulled my foot back as I was about to step on this nice 3 foot gopher snake. Curious, it didn't seem to be the least bit interested in me and didn't flee right away, which allowed me to get several shots off, before it decided to head down a hole which was right in front of it.

So I circled around the snake, went over and found the geocache, signed the log sheet, replaced the geocache, turned around and was surprised to see the snake in the same spot, about a third of the way down the hole.  What the heck? About the time I got close, I saw the snake jerk a little bit and then I could see its body tense up. Then I understood. It had been silently waiting for that squirrel or gopher to come out of the hole and I kind of interrupted its lunch. So it went after the rodent instead. I believe it had a hold of the rodent in the hole and was slowly tensing its body in order for the rodent to expire so it could have lunch. Lots of constrictor snakes don't need to wrap their bodies around their food, they just have to maneuver them into an area where they can press against it and basically accomplish the same thing as constricting around the animal.

At that point in time, I could hear my own lunch calling my name, so I left the snake go and walked back over to the car. As I drove out of the Park n Ride, I could see the snake still partway in the hole, so I'm pretty sure that's what it was doing.

4. Zoo and Museum with the tiny human

Friday of Memorial Day weekend was a "Day with Daddy and Papa." The tiny human didn't have pre-school that day, so we decided to go down to Palo Alto to a children's museum and zoo. Meercats, giant tortoises, flamingoes, rabbits were all on display. 

There were several areas that were designed for children to view the animals in a different way, including this very large tank of African Cichlids. Of all the photos that I took of my tiny human this weekend, I believe this is my favorite of them all. She just loved looking at the fish and we stayed there quite a while until other aspects of the zoo and museum beckoned.

5. David in pieces

On the last day of the month I went geocaching with a friend of mine down in the Fullerton area. On the campus of Cal State Fullerton was a new Adventure Lab that highlighted some of the pieces of artwork that dotted the campus. One of the places the Adventure took us to was this life size replica of the statue of David, although it was in pieces, with just the feet still in the upright position. The statue was originally installed at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Cypress, California, but fell over and was damaged beyond repair during the 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake.

Donated to the CSUF campus, it was installed in pretty much the way the statue was laying when it fell. The Adventure also went on to say that campus legend states that you will receive good luck on your finals if you rub a certain area of David. Hmmm.  I wonder what that could be?

And there you have it, my take on the theme for this month of Explore the World. Please feel free to comment. I will not bite and I read each and every comment and try to comment back on each one. Click on the link to P.J.'s page in order to see how others dealt with the same theme.

Creating some balance

The past 6 months or so, I've been doing a lot of geocaching. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot. So much so that it feels like other aspects of my life have gotten shortchanged, particularly hiking. I would go out to find some geocaches, but not get in a decent hike, even though the trails might be right there. That wasn't helping my psyche in the least, so today, I didn't go geocaching and just decided to hike the Claremont Wilderness Park loop trail.

Surprisingly, I feel pretty good afterwards although my left foot is a little sore. I made sure to take frequent water breaks and not try to overdo it by really crunching out the miles in record time. According to my Garmin inReach, I still averaged 2.4 miles per hour over the course of the 5+ mile loop that I took today, including the little side trip down a spur trail to check up on one of my geocaches. That's the little point you can see on the map at the top.

Unfortunately, it appears as if that one has gone missing, so I decided to archive it today. I'm not sure how that one could have just disappeared, but the log that it was hiding underneath wasn't there anymore, so perhaps some trail maintenance personnel found it and through it in the trash thinking it was garbage. Perhaps someone else will hike up there and place something, but in all likelihood, I'll probably take another hike up there in the near future and hide something new.

It felt really good to be back out on the trail and I just need to remind myself that I need more of that balance between different activities in my life. Now, I guess I need to find another trail to go hiking on sometime soon.

Into Oregon - Day 3 of my August road trip

Once again, this is a continuation of my August road trip from last summer up into Oregon and Washington. I started the day in Redding, California. My first stop was the Turtle Bay Museum area in Redding, along the Sacramento River. I've been here in the past, but there were some new geocaches and so I felt it appropriate to stop and do a little sightseeing and of course, geocaching. This particular bridge is a very interesting one as it's a suspension bridge, but it's also a sundial, rather unique in my opinion. There was a virtual cache located here, so I ended up taking a selfie with the bridge/sundial in the background so I could get credit for that particular virtual cache. Then it was back on the road and into Oregon.

As most of you know, challenge caches are what really drive my geocaching now. Yes, I enjoy geocaching, but the challenge caches give me goals to strive for and this particular day was devoted to working on, or finishing off several challenges that I wanted to complete on this trip. The first stop, once I made it into Oregon was at an off ramp where there were two caches, one located on each side of Interstate 5. The I-5 Interstate Highway Challenge was what I was working on at this point.  The goal was to find a geocache on each side of the interstate, in all three states, California, Oregon and Washington. The catch was that the caches had to be within 10 miles of each other in the three states. I've had this particular challenge one third of the way complete ever since I signed that challenge, but still needed the two caches in Oregon and also in Washington. This particular offramp, with its two caches on each side of the freeway helped me get a little bit closer to completing that challenge. About the time I grabbed the second cache, it started to rain and I was driving through rain through the rest of the day all the say to Salem where I was going to be spending the night.

Another challenge that I worked on during this day was getting caches in every county that I traveled through.  That's more of a personal goal, but over the course of time, it has become more of a geocaching goal which I will explain in a future blog post. I ended up stopping here and there along the way as I passed through new counties and kept my eye on a particular geocache that was located along the side of the interstate. 

Again, I try to find a variety of cache types in each state, because of challenges that I'm working on and so any time there is a unique or rare type of cache, I'm going to try and find it. There was a webcam cache along the side of the road, so I wanted to get my photo taken there, so I could claim that cache. It was located on the south bound side of the freeway, so I had to drive by it, get off on the next off ramp and then head back to the cache and pull off behind a guardrail. Then it was just a matter of accessing the correct Oregon transportation camera, see myself on the screen and then take a screenshot to post later.  Needless to say, the weather did not cooperate and it was raining and the quality of the image is quite poor. But that netted me a new cache type in Oregon, my 6th (the goal is at least 8 in each state). In retrospect, I should have moved closer to the highway sign in the foreground, but because it was raining and because it was rather apparent that someone had taken out the front of that particular guardrail, I didn't want to waste any additional time trying to get a better shot. 

Eventually, I made it to Salem where I would be spending the night. There happened to be an event happening in the town just south of there, so I decided to head down there after dinner and meet some of the locals. That was probably one of the best decisions I made during this entire trip. Because I was attempting to find the three oldest caches in Oregon, I mentioned it at the event and I had several cachers give me all sorts of intel on where to park, etc., for each of these caches. I wouldn't be attempting them that day as it was already getting dark, but one of them was on the agenda for me for the next day. I wrote down information including where to park, what roads to take etc. Several of them gave me excellent coordinates for the parking areas and I just routed Google Maps the next day and it took me right to where I needed to be.

After the event ended, I headed back to my motel for some needed rest, but also to find some other caches.  I ended up finding three different types of caches that I hadn't found previously in Oregon. Those, plus the event that I attended gave me 10 different cache types in Oregon, my third such state behind California and Arizona with 14 each. There are several other states where I have 8 different cache types including Nevada and Utah, plus a couple of others where I'm really close to 8, Colorado and New Mexico with 7 each. Eventually, I'll get back to those two states and others and increase the cache types in each state. It's all about the challenges at this point.

I will be back with another installment of this trip in a couple of days or so, but don't hold me to that.