Warmer weather means road trips

We've had a lot of rain the past couple of weeks, which has really helped our local mountains and the California Sierra Nevada mountains get that snowpack up to where it's supposed to be, but it's starting to feel like Spring is upon us and with that, warmer weather and with warmer weather comes road trips. As I look back over this blog I realized that I covered my two big road trips last year with just one blog entry each, so I'm going back to last summer and posting more detailed versions of each trip.

This first post covers the first day of my trip north to Oregon last August. Most of the day was heading north to Stockton where I would spend the night. Since most of the day was driving up the Central Valley of California and if you're at all familiar with the Central Valley, you know it can get quite boring, so I don't have many photos taken on that first day. This photo is me at a virtual geocache that I visited and logged in Bakersfield that first day.

One of the highlights of the first day was a challenge cache that I found in Atwater as I worked my way toward Stockton. It was entitled the Numbers Challenge - find 50 caches with the geocaching code (GC number) all in numbers. This isn't too spectacular, but what this cache lacked as far as a real challenge, as anyone who has over 10,000 finds probably has at least 50 caches of that requirement, it more than made up for it with its D/T rating, 3.5/4/5. 

All geocaches have a rating on them, placed by the owner and it's called a D/T rating. It can range from a 1/1 (the easiest to find) all the way up to a 5/5 (the most difficult). There are 81 D/T spots to fill and filling all the spots is called filling the Fizzy grid. That particular challenge D/T rating allowed me to quadruple up on my Fizzy grid. It was just something else to get excited about on a rather dull day of driving through the Central Valley.

I'll be posting other days of this trip in the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned for more wanderings.

In the dark for a long time

Most of my geocaching friends have already seen this on several of the geocaching Facebook pages, but I thought I'd share this with the rest of you since I think you'll get a kick out of this. Then again, maybe you won't and you'll just roll your eyes and that's OK too.

A couple of weeks ago, I went geocaching with some friends in the Redlands area, east of where I live. We were looking for a newly published geocache and were kind of perplexed when we couldn't find it right away since there was only one obvious spot for it to be. Reading through the past logs of previous finders didn't help either, so we decided to expand our search radius out to see if the coordinates were a little off.

I wasn't sure this would help since not any of the other previous finders had mentioned the coordinates being off, but we decided to check out the other spots anyway. At one of the spots we checked, we found a small container, totally encrusted with spider webs. Hey, there's the cache.

Upon opening the cache, we knew that we hadn't found the cache we were looking for, but a different cache. From the photo you can see dates from 2007.  What the heck? We signed our names on the log sheet and replaced the cache.

I went home and started investigating. Yes, I'm guilty of this as much has everyone else is, but we were fortunate that we had some distinct signatures as well as dates when they found the cache. It didn't take too much sleuthing to figure out that this was an old archived cache that the owner had never picked up after archiving it. 

We later got confirmation from the owner of the newly published cache that her cache was missing, so we knew this one was the old one. We found the cache page on line and all three of us logged the old archived cache. This might seem like much, but it's pretty cool to think that the container has been sitting there for 17+ years just waiting for someone else to find it.  

Free For All!

I keep getting these notifications every month for P.J.'s Photo Blog challenge and when I took at my photos, I never seem to have anything that fit the theme. And thus I've been sitting on this blog for well over 6 months now, having not written a thing. However, the theme for this month is Free for All! Yeah, not only can I do that, I have quite a selection of photos to choose from so I may be hard pressed to get photos down to just five, but I will try my best. So here we go with my five photos falling into the category of Free for All.

1. Block Party

2025 is the 25th anniversary since Geocaching became a thing and so headquarters has come up with several ways to celebrate it, extending a rare type of cache known as a Block Party to all of the Mega Events happening this year. I've previously written about Mega Events several different times, but this post regarding the Mega Event that happens every February in Yuma, Arizona probably gives the best description of it.

This year's Yuma event was the first Block Party I've ever attended and it lived up to its billing. We drove out to Yuma on the Thursday before the event and basically for the next five days geocached. For the most part, it was a week long party with 600+ of my closest geocaching friends. I averaged finding close to 50 geocaches per day.  Needless to say, it was a lot of fun.

2. 25

Every now and then, Geocaching will introduce a limited edition Locationless Cache. These used to be quite popular when Geocaching first got started, but eventually, headquarters did away with them because they didn't feel like they fit in with the direction the hobby was headed. Now, they come back occasionally. The principle is simple; find something or do something that fits the theme of the locationless cache. In this case, this year's locationless theme is the number 25. What they want us to do is find a permanent number 25 somewhere out there, while we're geocaching and take a photo of it. Then we can log that particular cache. 

Originally, I had intended to head up in the central coast of California and get my photo with one of Hwy 25's highway markers. But I was exploring a cemetery in Quartzite, Arizona at the end of the Yuma Block Party and I came across Duane Bindewald, a sailor, born in 1925 and who probably was involved with World War II since he would have been the right age at the time. Once I saw his gravesite, I could think of no greater tribute than to memorialize him as my 25. Thank you for your service Mr. Bindewald.

3. Community Celebration Events

The third thing geocaching has brought back this year are the Community Celebration events. These are events put on by regular geocachers that bring our geocaching community together. You had to have hidden a geocache and also hosted a regular event last year and then you were qualified to host a Community Celebration event sometime over the course of this year.

I was awarded mine early on, mainly because I host events every month in our local community and I decided to host myself a birthday party, and so 67 on Route 66 was conceived. The event was held in a local Shakey's Pizza Parlor about 5 miles east of where I live and when I approached the manager back in January about reserving the place, he didn't hesitate. We blocked out the time and he asked an estimate of how many people were going to be there and at that time I had about 25 "Will Attends." Geocaching headquarters says when you're hosting an event to multiply the Will Attends by 1.6 and that will give you a fairly accurate head count. So I told the manager 40. 

Well, the will attends kept coming in and by the time of the party, I had 49 will attends, which if you're keeping up with your math skills translates out to about 75 actual bodies. And that's about how many showed up. We pretty much took over the place and Shakey's didn't even bat an eye. They were busy, but they were also getting a lot of business that they might not have gotten if I'd held the event in a nearby park instead. So it was a win/win situation all the way around.

There was lots of spirited geocaching conversations to go around and I don't believe I sat down at all as I moved from table to table. The photo is one of my geocaching friends and I. I chose this particular photo because we share the same birthday, so it seemed appropriate to have this photo of my birthday buddy.

4. The Tiny Human

While I'm having my birthday party, my daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter drove down to visit me for my birthday too. That weekend we ended up doing a lot of different things. I haven't written about this here on this blog, but I have posted things on Facebook, but my mom passed away last September and so this birthday was the first one I celebrated without her.  My daughter knows when I'm going to get "the feels" and she also knows that the best thing to get me over my big feelings is a visit from my tiny human.

We went down and visited my dad for one afternoon. We walked through the neighborhood and played on the nearby playgrounds. We picked oranges from the backyard trees and then enjoyed the fruits of our labor by drinking freshly squeezed orange juice. It was a very enjoyable visit and altogether too short, but I know I'm going to see them again later on this month, so I have that going for me. I always dismissed people who said that being a grandparent was the best. I understand thoroughly now and look forward to our nightly FaceTime videos as well as our visits north and their visits south. Being a Papa is the absolute best.

5. Spring is starting to spring

Even though it's only early March, you can start to feel spring in the air. I went for several hikes in the nearby hills this past week and the latest hike on the last day of the month I was rewarded by seeing a variety of wildlife. I saw my first two snakes of the season, both small gopher snakes and while out on a walk just in the neighborhood the day before I came across this beautiful Cooper's hawk taking a drink from the fountain in the front yard of this house.

It didn't take too kindly to me being right on the sidewalk, so it flew up to a branch of the nearby tree and just perched there. I admired it from the distance and then remembered to take a couple of photos of it, this one being one of the better ones.

And there you have it, my take on the Free for All theme for this month. Please feel free to stop by P.J.'s page and check out the other bloggers who post to this particular photo challenge. Please, also feel free to comment here. I won't bite.

On a side note, I'm hoping this will spur my interest in doing this again. I found another travel blog app that I've tried out that allows me to do travelogues in real time, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable allowing everyone on the planet seeing what I do in real time. Most of what goes on on those is a lot of geocaching and I know all of my audience here doesn't necessarily go for all the geocaching, so I'll probably continue to do that, but then synthesize those down into a feature here. I have several trips I have written about that I can post here, plus a couple of geocaching stories that I can throw into the mix as well.

Thank you for you patience during this long absence.

U.S.S. Trout

The title of this blog is Webfoot Wanderings, and while I haven't done many wanderings of late, I have discovered some interesting things in my local area. Yesterday, while out geocaching, I found myself at the World War II Submarine Memorial located in Seal Beach, California. There was a new virtual cache there that I wanted to log, so we stopped so I could gather the necessary information and take the necessary photo so I could log the find on this particular virtual.

After getting the needed information, I started looking at the individual memorials to all of the submarines lost during World War II. I knew my uncle had fought in the war, but that was in North Africa, so I knew I wasn't going to find any relatives on any of these memorials, but I did find two that had a Myers on board, so that's why I chose to have my selfie taken with the U.S.S. Trout. Lt. Lewis Edwin Myers, Jr. was aboard the U.S.S. Trout on its final mission.

I discovered another connection to this particular submarine while doing my research for this blog entry. The last time the U.S.S. Trout was seen was during a refueling stop on February 16, 1944 at Midway Island. 14 years later in 1958, I was born on that date.

I've actually been to this memorial on a previous visit, but it's still a sobering experience, at least to me, when I encounter any kind of memorials like this. They tend to put wars into a human perspective. I was fortunate enough that I never had to make the decision to fight in a war. I'm sure some of the men on this submarine didn't even have that decision since the draft had been instituted, but they went into battle anyway, knowing it could be their last. All gave some and some gave all. Unfortunately, these men gave all so that we can live in freedom today.

A Look into my Life

Well, once again, it's that time of the month where P.J. has his monthly photo blogging challenge. This month's theme is "A Look into my Life." I figuredwith the amount of photos I took this past month, I should be able to come up with five photos that sort of personify me.

1. Geocaching and travel

As you all know by now if you've been paying attention, I love to geocache. I also love to travel which works out well since they go hand in hand with each other. Last month I attended two geocaching Mega Events, one in the Los Angeles area (Spring Fling) and the second one which was in Flagstaff over Memorial Day weekend (GeoWoodstockXX). Both of the events were put on by the same individuals, so there was a lot to compare and contrast but if push came to shove, I'd say the GeoWoodstock was Spring Fling on steroids. It was just bigger and better all the way around and that's to take nothing away from the Spring Fling. 

Let's just say over the course of five days in Arizona, I got to see a lot, find a lot of geocaches and just have a really good time enjoying this crazy hobby that I've been doing for over 23 years. With the two events and other geocaching excursions I did this past month, I found 430 caches, which was my second best month ever. 

I've said in the past and I'll say it again here; geocaching takes me to places that I wouldn't necessarily visit were it not for geocaching. I mean, I got to stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona while the store across the street played "Take it Easy" in a loop all day long. Unless you make it a point, a lot of these interesting tourist spots just get driven right by, but because I have an interest in travel and geocaching, I've gotten off the main highway and done some scenic byways that I might have missed otherwise. Watch the Pixar movie "Cars" and I think you'll understand perfectly.

2. Hiking

I also really enjoy hiking along all kinds of trails, but I have a big interest in longer trails, trails like the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) and the Arizona Trail (AZT) to name a few. I've hiked portions of all of these trails in my lifetime and while my age is starting to become a factor in how much backpacking I can actually do, I haven't ruled out the possibility of doing some section hikes on any of these trails. I've just become more accustomed to the finer things in life, like an actual bed to sleep in when I travel as opposed to a sleeping bag and sleeping pad on the ground.

While in Flagstaff, I was able to hike a portion of the AZT. Once again, geocaching was involved. We'd gone up to finish off a geocaching adventure up in the mountains north of Flagstaff and we'd noticed this cache just off the road at a turnout. We decided to find that cache after finishing off the Adventure stop and I am really glad we did. We pulled off at the trailhead, then took a side trail, which took us down to the AZT, which then took us up to the junction that led us out to the meadow you can see in the distance. Eventually, we found another side trail, which led us to the geocache we were looking for, one that had been hidden in July 2001. It's always cool to find caches that are 23 years old. As time goes on, these old caches are becoming rarer and rarer and so they become valuable in the game for different challenge caches out there that want you to find old caches.

3. Photography

If you're still reading along, you're probably noticing a theme for this entire entry, but you knew that was going to happen anyway, didn't you? Anyone who travels knows to bring a camera along to record their journeys and refresh their memories when they get back home and I'm no exception. 

This particular shot wasn't taken on any trip I took, but I happened to spy this ladybug right outside our community center about two blocks away from our house. I really loved the large amounts of yellow and green with that little splash of red thrown in which made for a very pleasing image in my opinion.

My photographs tend to lean heavily towards the natural side of the earth as opposed to the cultural side of things and so I have lots of landscape type photos in my galleries and photo albums. I will also tend to have lots of animal photos both large and small. Looking back on this blog entry however, I think I've actually achieved a good balance between nature and culture this time around. Sometimes that's just how it goes.

4. Food

When I'm out and about traveling, I tend to lean toward more local cuisine, especially when I'm eating at the dinner hour. This trip to Flagstaff last month was no exception. We had Mexican food, we had Neapolitan Pizza, and then we had some American comfort food in the form of this Texas burger with sweet potato fries and a stout chocolate porter. And yes, there's bacon in there too. Just looking at that photo makes my mouth water. This meal, for the most part, was the perfect ending night of that weekend.

Please also understand that for lunch I'll usually eat at a place that's tested and true for fast food, mainly because I have an agenda that I like to complete. We ate at In-n-Out for lunch one of the days on this trip. It was quick and easy and I can now say I've eaten at the highest elevated In-n-Out at just around 7000 feet above sea level. In fact, it's the only in-n-Out I've eaten at where they didn't have the crossed palm trees (a corporate symbol) out in front of the restaurant. It's just too cold for the palm trees to survive. So it's fast food for lunch but breakfast and dinner are really supposed to be savored when I'm traveling.

5. Family

I really couldn't go an entire blog entry about myself without talking about my family and particularly, this little gem. I found myself getting to hang out with my favorite tiny human in the middle of the month in Paso Robles so her parents could attend a wedding there. We got to hang out all weekend together, play in the park, go to a farmer's market and then enjoy each other's company in the evening while her parents were at the wedding.

I don't know if you've ever heard the sayings about being a grandparent, but everything you've heard is definitely true. Being this tiny human's Papa is one of the best things that has ever happened to me. We're fortunate enough that we live only a half day's drive away from them, so I get to see her on a regular basis. That, plus the technology of the day where we can FaceTime at meals really allows me to see her grow up. And yet I'm still amazed when I look back at videos from six months ago and see how much she's grown. Let's just leave it at, I'm really enjoying this part of my life.

And there you have it, my take on the theme "A Look into my Life." Please feel free to comment and check out the other entries to this month over at P.J. blog.

Point of View

It's time, once again, for PJ's photo blogging challenge. The challenge for the month of April was "Point of View." Now, I think this can be interpreted in a variety of ways, so here's what I came up with for last month.

Bracket Field

I live near a large regional park and last month I took advantage of the free parking in the off season on weekdays to do several hikes in the park. The one large hike that I did last month took me around the perimeter of the park, slightly over 9 miles all told. The trail is mostly a fire road, so it's wide, but it does take us into some interesting areas. There is a small airport (Bracket Field) along the northeast corner of the park and I got to see several small private planes take off as I walked along the trail. Not much you can really do with this point of view other than to take the underside of the plane. Interestingly, it's also the only shot of the five that I've chosen that isn't predominantly brown, so I have that point of view going for me as well.

Ground level

Early in the hike, I almost stumbled upon a garden snail. I found this particular animal kind of intriguing, mainly because normally, when I see these kinds of snails, they're usually found in a fairly wet environment. Not so for this guy as he was in the middle of a pretty dry trail. Although, I will admit that the year so far has been one of the wettest we've had on record, which could be the reason this snail was so exposed. Either way, I decided to get down as close to ground level to get a good up close and personal shot of the snail as it traveled along its way, heading for the other side of the trail.

Many times, I'll try to encourage snakes to get out of the trail and I even moved a tortoise we found in the middle of a dirt road off of the road so it wouldn't become road kill later on, but for some reason I didn't do this with the snail. Not sure why outside of the fact that it is not a native species to the area. Still, from its point of view, it probably has only known that one area where it has called home. I guess I should keep that in mind for the next time as I did encounter several bicyclists on the trail and kept wondering, did they miss this guy as he made it across the road? Who knows? But at least I can help it along if I encounter other animals in the middle of the trail, especially the slow moving ones.

Animals from a different point of view

As noted above, we've had a lot of rain since the beginning of the year. For comparison sake, we average in my area about 13 inches of rain per year, which is why we're classified as a semi-desert. Last year (January to December), we received slightly over 35 inches of rain. This year, we've already received over 23 inches of rain since January 1st. Granted we are moving into the dry season in Southern California, but most people who know our climate or have lived here for awhile know that's a lot of rain for our area.

But because of this, we get a different point of view of some animals that we don't see very often. If you've been paying attention, you know that I love animal encounters and will go out of my way to photograph animals in the wild. Very rarely do I get to encounter deer in our local foothills. I didn't see the deer that made these prints, but because of all the rain, I did get a decent shot. I'm sure these prints are no longer up there on that particular trail due to other foot and bicycle traffic, but from my point of view, it will always be there.

Desert tortoise

On the last weekend of the month, a friend of mine and I went up into the desert to do some geocaching. As we were traversing down this dusty one and a half car width dirt road, we came over this rise and I saw this big California desert tortoise in the roadway. Fortunately, my friend who was driving, was able to stop in plenty of time. These tortoises are endangered species and are protected over their range, which we were obviously in at the time. One of the things that you're not supposed to do is disturb them. That being said you do have permission to move the animal off of a roadway for its own protection. You're supposed to move it to the side of the road, in the direction that it was heading.

So we got out of the car and I gently lifted the tortoise off the roadway and off over the bank into this area where it was heading. I wanted to be as gentle as possible since if they feel like they're being threatened, they will sometimes void their bladder in an act of self defense. This isn't a good thing for the tortoise since now it doesn't have its natural water reserve. Fortunately, it didn't do that and as I moved it, I also checked to see if it was a male or female. The curved underbody of the shell told me it was a male and a good sized one at that. If you look closely at the hind legs, you'll see nice long claws which are used for digging burrows in the ground. Those are about a quarter inch in length and from the front of its shell to the back, it was about 14 inches in length. This was also the first time I've ever encountered a desert tortoise in the wild, so I had that going for me as well.

Different camera

For the first time in awhile, I got my Canon DSLR camera out of its bag and took it on a hike later in the month. It had been about 2 and a half years since I last used the camera and I felt it was high time I got it out, dusted it off and use it again. I had posted about this on Facebook previously, but the reason for not using it were a variety of things. I hadn't been satisfied with the way it was dealing with different kinds of light, especially harsh midday light and on one of my road trips, I just didn't use it and relied solely on my phone for photos. I've been happy with the results of what I've been taking recently with my phone, but from my point of view, it was limited, especially when it came to taking wildlife photos.

That came to a head a couple of days before I got this shot of a gopher snake, when I spotted a couple of coyotes in a field. I got a decent video with the phone, but couldn't get a really good close up shot. After I got home, I got the camera out, put it through some paces and then took it out on a hike where I got this shot of a gopher snake "tasting" its surroundings. So I guess what I'm saying here is depending upon the point of view I want to convey will probably determine which camera I use. I'm not going to confine myself to one particular lens anymore.

And there you have it, my take on the Point of View challenge for this month. Please stop by PJ's page to see how others did this challenge. Please feel free to comment here.

Viewing the trail through a different lens

Originally, I was going to title this entry, October 7th, 2021, but people might not understand. Either way, I'm going to have to explain the significance of this date because it pertains to this blog entry. On that date, I took my last photo with my Canon EOS 80D DSLR camera. At the time it was a conscious decision because I was out on a hike in Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona. I'd noticed that I wasn't getting good quality images mainly because the lighting was harsh and so I switched to my iPhone for the remainder of the trip.

I didn't figure that it would be over 2 and a half years until I picked up that camera again, but it has. What got me thinking about picking the "Big Boy" up again was the videos I took last week of the coyotes that many of you have seen on my Instagram or Facebook feed. Although good, had I had the Canon, I would have been able to zoom in a lot closer to the coyotes than I could with the phone. I'm also not saying that I'm going to go back exclusively to the Canon as there are benefits to both of them, which I will detail below.

I have been taking photos since I was in third grade (so almost 60 years). My parents bought me a camera, probably for my birthday or Christmas that year. It took roll film, so it wasn't a Kodak Instamatic. This one had a steep learning curve to it, especially for an 8 year old, but I was up to the task. Eventually, I bought my first DSLR camera when I became a photographer for my high school yearbook. My wife bought me a better camera as a wedding gift and eventually I made the switch to digital. Needless to say, I've been a photographer for most of my life and I have a love for photography.

Which brings me back to last week when I spotted those coyotes. The iPhone is good, actually great for landscape photos in my opinion. Its zoom has gotten so much better, but you still can't get really close shots of wildlife using the phone. And so I dusted off the "Big Boy" and started looking it over to remember the ins and outs of DSLR. The batteries were dead, so that was the first order of business and then I waited for a good day when I knew I was going to go out on a hike. That ended up being this afternoon and these are three of the shots I took along the way.

With the iPhone, I wouldn't have even bothered with the bird on the trail. It would have been too far away, even with the phone's zoom and if I'd gotten closer, it would have flown away and I wouldn't have much. I would have had the same problem with the butterfly. Animals have proximity zones. You get inside their zone and they take off. With the telephoto lens on my Canon, I can get much closer to get a good shot without entering their proximity zone.

With the gopher snake, I know I wouldn't have been able to get close enough to it to get the tongue shot that I got. I kept getting closer to it and eventually I entered its proximity zone and it turned around and headed into the brush. I'd taken lots of photos of it before it turned around and hightailed it out of there, but I didn't know exactly what I had until I was able to look at the shots on the computer's big screen. I had several good ones, but this one was just fabulous.

So in the long run, I'll continue to use my iPhone for most day to day photos, but the Canon is my "Go To" for wildlife photography.