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.

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. 

Geocaching Goals for 2021

This post will once again, be about geocaching, so if you're not interested, you can stop. Trust me when I say I won't be offended if you leave.

Last week, I reviewed my geocaching accomplishments from the previous year. In this post, I'm going to write about goals that I'm going to set for myself for the upcoming 2021 geocaching year. Nothing really exciting or eye opening, but I want to put them down in writing so to give me something to shoot for. 

1. Have fun - I always put this as my first goal. I'm a firm believer that things that you do in life should be fun, challenging possibly, hard possibly, but they should also be fun. If they're not fun, why do them?

2. Average 100 cache finds per month - Last year, my goal was to find at least 100 per month, and average 125 per month overall. I didn't reach either of those goals, mainly due to the pandemic. I'm not sure how long before I can get in line for a vaccine, which will allow me to take some longer trips again, so I'm committing to just an average of 100 per month. That will put me above last year when I found slightly over 1000 geocaches in the entire year. Granted, the first 500 were found in the first two months, so I was off to a roaring start, but as noted above, the pandemic hit and everything shut down.

3. Hide good quality caches, including more non-traditional caches - This is a continuation of two of my goals from last year. I hid only 5 traditional cache hides last year, but I also hosted 5 events, and hid 6 Multi-caches, 4 Wherigo caches, 8 Mystery caches, and 2 Letterbox Hybrid caches. So I want to continue with this, probably less Mystery caches and more of the other types listed above. Once events are allowed again, I'll start back up hosting them as well, but I suspect that that won't happen until most of us are vaccinated, so perhaps in the fall?

4. Color the grid - If you look at the grid, you'll notice the bottom half of the calendar has all of the dates in a darker shade of green than the top half. There are several challenge caches out there that challenge geocachers to find a certain number of caches on each calendar date, the obvious first one is to find one on every day of the year. The geocaching grid, changes colors at the following number intervals, 1, 11, 26, 100, and I believe 500, but I'm not sure on the last one. Anyway, after the pandemic set in and a lot of outdoor activity was curtailed originally, most of my goals went out the window, so I set up new goals in my mind, one being to get all of the numbers up to at least 26 find per date, since I'd already accomplished 11 per date several years ago. As you can see, I started working on this in earnest sometime in late July. The next date to color is this Friday and Saturday, the 22nd, and 23rd.

This is, in my mind, a challenging goal since there aren't a whole lot of unfound caches close to my house anymore, so I have to travel farther to find caches, either up to the high desert, or east to Redlands, or south into Orange County. I don't mind that, but when there are 4 or 5 days in a row, where I'm going to need to find caches if I want to accomplish this goal, then the logistics of finding areas where there are enough caches to find comes into play. The end of this month, or the months of April and May will be more challenging if I'm going to complete this goal. It's a game though and if I don't complete this goal, it's not the end of the world, but I'd like to complete it on July 28th, which would be the last date I need to color. There are at least two challenge caches south of me that want 20 or 26 finds per date for all calendar dates. I'm close to that, so it would be cool to finish that goal this year, then plan a trip down to San Diego County to get those two caches.

4. Find some caches in new counties - As you can see on the map, I've found at least one cache in every county in California, Arizona, and Nevada, so this will involve some travel, which I'm OK with, once I've gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. One of the goals I had last year was to complete my Jasmer Challenge (finding a cache hidden every month since geocaching started), and to accomplish this, I'll have to travel to Oregon. So I figured, I might be able to accomplish last year's goal and this year's in a similar trip. This is all contingent on getting the vaccine in the near future, but I'm confidant this will happen sooner as opposed to later.

5. Complete at least 2 challenge caches I've already signed - The beauty of challenge caches is you don't have to wait to sign the log until you've accomplished that particular challenge. You sign the logsheet, post a note on the cache page and then work toward that particular goal. Up in Kern County, there is a series of challenge caches, of which at this time, I've only not signed on of them, but I haven't qualified for all of them (got that?), so I can work on any one of those. The easiest to accomplish would be to go up to Kern County and find 17 more caches there. One of the challenges I've signed is to find 500 caches in Kern County. I'm at 483 right now, so once I can travel a little bit more freely, that one should be easy to complete. Then I need to start working on some of the others that I don't qualify for yet.

6. Have fun - As noted last year, and above, I've already posted this, but I just want to reiterate that if it's not fun, then I shouldn't be doing this.

So there you have it, my geocaching goals for this year. Comments on this page are, as always, welcome. Thanks go to my friend Monica, who took the first photo of me finding a cache this summer.

Reviewing accomplishments

This post is all about geocaching, so if you're not interested in geocaching, you can leave.  No, really, I won't be offended.

Last year at this time, I posted my goals that I wanted to accomplish with regards to geocaching in 2020. Just looking back on them, I didn't hit many of the goals, but then again, we all know what hit last year and I'm sure most people who made geocaching goals had the same out come over the course of the year. Still, I wanted to go back and review them to see how close I came and what I want to do in this upcoming year. Obviously, goals are works in progress, so as I reach goals, I'll probably add more goals to the list in the future. I didn't do that last year, mainly because last year was just a plain, weird year.

Goals for last year were:

1. Have fun

2. Find at least 100 caches a month, average 125 a month

3. Hide good quality caches

4. Hide more non-traditional caches

5. Host 12 to 15 geocaching events

6. Attend as many Community Celebration Events as possible

7. Complete the Jasmer Challenge

8. Have fun

So, let's look and see what happened. As you can see, my goals were bookended by the two words, Have Fun. If I'm going to do this, I want it to be fun. And, when I went out it was fun, but it was also different. I've always enjoyed caching with other individuals and outside of the first two months of the year, geocaching was pretty much a solitary event this past year, as it should have been expected.

The second goal was to find 100 caches a month and average 125 per month. Well, you can look at the graph on the right and see that didn't happen. I would be willing to bet that most people's geocaching habits went out the window once the pandemic hit and we went into shelter in place mode, but once we got more information as to how this particular disease works, it became apparent that it was fairly safe to go out and geocache by yourself. I'm not going to keep this goal in place as I have other goals that I want to accomplish that might get in the way of this particular goal. So I guess I'll be playing this one by ear.

Lumping the next three goals together, I partially accomplished that one. Last year, I hid 30 caches, of which only 5 were traditional cache hides. I hosted 5 events before the pandemic hit, so I would have reached that goal easily, and technically, I really did hit that goal, although it won't show on the stat sheet since I've been hosting virtual geocaching coffee events every two weeks since the middle of June.

I also hid 6 multi-caches, 4 Wherigo caches, 8 mystery caches, 2 letterbox hybrids and 2 Adventure Labs. As far as quality, I'll have to leave that up to the finders, but I seem to have seen an uptick in the number of favorite points my caches have been receiving, so I guess that's a good thing.

There literally was only 1 Community Celebration event that I could have attended before everything got shut down (event-wise) at geocaching, and I wasn't comfortable attending at that time, so that goal went by the wayside. I'm sure, eventually, we'll be able to attend events again, once vaccinations take hold and things start to open up again, but I would willing to bet that it probably won't happen until this summer. I'm taking the "Let's be patient" attitude towards events, but once it's safe, I'm hoping that we can have events again. It's fun to get together with other geocachers and just talk about geocaching without having people give you that glazed eye look.

The last goal was to complete my Jasmer Challenge. I feel this one would have been accomplished this year, were it not for the pandemic. For those of you who are still reading along and are not geocachers, the Jasmer Challenge is to find at least one geocache that has been hidden in every month that geocaching has been around, meaning I need to find a geocaching that was hidden in May 2000, June 2000, etc., etc., ad nauseam all the way to the present day. As of this time, the only two months that are still eluding me are June and July 2000. The graph hasn't totally updated as I have already found a cache hidden in January of this year. The plan last year was for a road trip to Oregon. There are caches that were hidden in both those months as well as a cache hidden in May 2000 which I planned to get this past summer. Once again, the pandemic did a number on this goal, but eventually, that goal will fall too, if not this year, then it will become a priority in 2022.

So there you have it. It was fun, some goals were accomplished, while others weren't. In retrospect, I think that because I didn't go out and cache as much, I was able to concentrate more on some of my hides and that, in itself, might have contributed to higher quality caches. I'll need to remember that in the future. I think I'll create a new goal post in the next couple of days. I think if I did it here, the entry would become too large, so it will be better to break it up into two different parts.