So that means I have had little time to go just geocaching and probably will limit the posts I make this year.

I have set up a separate blog about IronMan training for those that are interested, but didn’t want to assume all you geocachers want to hear the details of a swim technique and heart rate monitors!

I came up with a creative way to combine both the geocaching and IronMan training by selecting the Highway 52 bike path geocaches. I have seen these listed as I go through the Mission Trails Regional Park (MTRP) Hall of Fame geocaches bit by bit. And every time I think to myself “I’ll bring my bike and do those next time” but never have. So a great excuse to combine some bike training in with finding geocaches!

The recent rains in San Diego meant it was a little muddy on some of the paths…and I was sad to see that there were too many geocaches that are no longer active and need to be archived. I spent too much time searching for geocaches that were not there to find. But did manage to find 13 geocaches on the day and get a 10 mile bike ride.

My favorite geocache of the day was a surprise….it called us to walk to a yucca tree, and the trail was very muddy. I expected to have to look through bushes and then turned a corner and saw this very large geocache. Amazing it has survived for such a long time, but then again, who is going to come here and then carry this off on their bike?

What else is a better match for Christmas than Geocaching?

Christmas is a great time of year to get out and geocache. You often are travelling and visiting family – so you can find geocaches in new places. You can share it with family and friends and introduce them to this treasure hunting fun. And you can work off a bit of the festive food through walking, hiking, or biking to find the geocache.

Last year I saw a geocache pop up on my local area pocket query called “Christmas Card Lane” and it was only available for ~3 weeks around Christmas. By the time I got around to go and find it, it was no longer available. Darn! Santa has other work to do during the year, so I understand he can’t commit to keeping this up all year.

So I’ve been waiting all year for this geocache to pop up again. It came at the same time a neighbour told us about a local street that decorates their neighborhood and all the locals go and walk or drive through the area. I searched my geocache query and found the geocache I’d been waiting for within this neighborhood. It was meant to be!

Did you see who hid the geocache? It was Santa and His Elves! How exciting that he maintains a residence here in San Diego, California.

We drove down the street and admired the neighborhood, the locals have put a giant “Christmas Card” on each front garden with a different theme. Some have Harry Potter or Winnie the Pooh or The geocache was located in a bush in front of Wallace & Gromit….that’s me in front of Santa’s geocache.

I didn’t see Santa at the house – he was probably very busy delivering gifts to people across the world. Merry Christmas to All!

I was doing a random search of local MeetUp groups in San Diego and came across the “Geocaching San Diego” group. I watched it for a while being that voyeur of social media and then saw this event pop up for Mission Trails hiking….as I’m trying to get more of the Mission Trails geocaches, I thought I’d give it a go.

We arrived at Mission Trails and found parking and could not seem to find the geocachers thinking they would be a group at the edge of the car park somewhere. There were lots of bikers and some hikers but no geocachers….

Then we realized that the invite was in true geocaching style and we had to meet at the spot of a geocache (Picnic – GC1C5P7). We walked to the spot and true to form in the bushes was our fellow geocachers for the day…Androyd, FDEdge, and SueBox.

We had a great hike in the Spring Canyon area of the Mission Trail Park. We tackled some hills to get the heart rate going and to enjoy the geocache find even more – it feels better when you’ve earned it!

We got to do some bushwhacking (i.e. no trail existing and you just have to make your way through bushes to get the cache).

We even got to do some back-tracking when Androyd left his hiking stick at 4 geocache finds ago….we walked back to each one until we found it. Just don’t tell his wife he nearly lost it!

Here was the geocache hike map that Androyd sent out – so these are the finds he had, which matched our cache find map pretty well.

Our hike finished with a respectable 12 finds and 7 miles of hiking, so a good workout too. I felt good later when I ate pizza, salad, fruit smoothie, 4 babybels, and asparagus risotto. Yeah, I know….but I was hungry!!

Have you been on a Meetup group for geocaching before? After this one, I’ll be going again.

Whilst in Arizona, I couldn’t resist grabbing a few geocaches in the local area. So I hired a touring bike and picked up a few geocaches. Here’s the local map with a few of the geocache finds I found.

There was a few interesting geocaches here with some Math exams and some Webcam geocaches to find around the town. Apparently webcam geocaches are no longer allowed and have been grandfathered. You can still find these lovely little cache types on the Waymarking website instead.

There was one geocache that used my brain and walking skills a good test – there were 3 webcam waymarking geocaches to find – to then be able to come to the final puzzle geocache. With the lovely iPhone I went to the website and kept refreshing the page until we could see ourselves. At that point, I used the magic iPhone trick to take a screenshot of the site and “wha-la” our picture proof was done!

WebCam Geocache Photo

Can you see those little people in the photos? That’s me!

Have you been on a fun adventure with a webcam geocache?

Mission Trail Regional Park (MTRP) is one of those areas in San Diego. There are 389 geocaches in a 3 miles radius shown below classified as the MTRP Hall of Fame challenge in May 2010. You can read about this challenge put together by FlagMan as 7 Halls of Fame around San Diego. There are more that that now and in a wider area….in case you need more to keep you coming back to Mission Trails.

We had completed the Black Mountain Hall of Fame in time for the June deadline – in fact we found the last one that day, emailed FlagMan, and drove to the celebration awards. The write-up of that crazy week with early morning, late night, and “just one more” adventure is here.

Tackling MTRP is not something to be done in one day…perhaps there are some crazy geocachers that can get 300+ in a day (that makes me wonder what the most is….), but I’m more of a 10-20 geocaches in a day type person. Especially when there is 2,000 elevation and lots of hiking involved.

So we took a section of the area, marked above in the red circle, packed up our hiking gear, put the geodog on his leash, and off we went hiking in this area – called Sycamore Canyon. Up and down….up and down….and more up and down….

I also used this hike as practice on reading topographic maps and not relying on the GPS. In fact the GPS does not really show the level of detail of the contours and trails that the topographic map does, so it can be better to look at trail maps rather than just that GPS device.

The map above shows the double dotted lines  which are considered ‘jeep trails’ or trails that are good tracks you can see easily with the eye. They might look like these trails in this photo.

Now geocaching would be too easy if they only put geocaches on these trails, so you often have to be brave and go off trail. One way to make it easy on yourself is to follow ‘critter trails’ which you will never see on a map but will be fairly distonguishable out there in the field. Take a chance and see where it takes you!

6 hours, 6 miles, and 2,000 elevation later – we ended our trip finding 21 geocaches on the day and 7 DNF (did not find) which was frustrating. Because it leaves these gaps in the smiley faces map. I guess it’s a good reason to come back and hike the trails again. I foresee a lot of Mission Trails geocaching in our future…

This post focuses on The Sprinkler. Yes, those little black sprinklers that you see all over lawns and parks and fields can actually be geocaches. So you have to build up that geosense to know when to go and twizzle that sprinkler and when to leave it alone.

When a sprinkler is in the middle of nowhere, like the example shown below, you might want to have you geosense get triggered. Would there even be any need for irrigation in a wildlife preserve?

As you get closer to the sprinkler, take a look and see if it has any puddles of water from leaks, or maybe a sign it has been handled by people on a regular basis liek this one.

Then go ahead and try and open up the sprinkler. The head may screw off for some geocache types or others you might need to pull up from the ground and the geocache will be on the inside. One thing you need with a sprinkler system is some way to keep the geocache dry…

If you want to read about some unusual or unique geocache hides, you might be interested in the Saguaro Cactus or the Lamp Post or the Tucson Rock.

This app will allow you to see geocaching news feeds from fellow geocachers, and full disclosure moment, this geocache blog is included. It’s a FREE app and was developed by a geocacher, which supports that this is a tool that can be used by us geocachers.

The link directly to Chico Valdez as the developer is here and to the store section is here.

As someone new to Ovi, I thought I’d investigate and was frankly impressed by some of the statistics out there:

Source: Nokia Ovi Store Forum

The Nokia Ovi Store has a Global reach of more than 190 countries, available in 30 languages and it is also adaptable to 135+ device models (not sure Apple can claim that)

And how much is it used? The statistics as at October 4th 2010 show:

• There are 2.5 million downloads a day with more 2.6 apps downloaded per visit
• Each active user is averaging 8.5 downloads per month
• Active users from more than 190 countries
• Games continue to be #1 for paid downloads and apps continue to be #1 for free downloads
• 90% of mobile consumers now have Ovi Store in their local language

Impressive stuff, and I am excited that a geocaching app is available on another platform.

What do you think? Are you aware of other geocaching apps and platforms that you’d recommend? I thought this one that was a geocache blog roll-up was a little different to the standard apps. I am happy to spotlight it here to share…

One of the classic geocache hides is in a pile of rocks. We are fortunate enough that there are many piles of rocks from little stones to large boulders out there, and if you know what a rock looks like then you are off to a good start.

The container that is used in these rock piles differ based on the size of the rock pile, the amount of swag the geocacher has to hide, and what container they actually have. A common container in larger hiding areas is the ammo box (a 0.5 Gallon metal container used by the military)

The ammo box is filled with stuff and a log book that allows people to write they found the geocache. Then it is hidden in the pile of rocks. Here is a photo of a local geocache hide GC226Q9 The Lost Element. that you will need to solve a puzzle to find….

If you are really excited and and want to hide your own ammo box hide, here is a link to buying an ammo box from Amazon.

Otay Mountain Bike Trails

EveryTrail – Find the best

Somehow I got to this page….where I could give feedback and vote on what I think is important to improve.  I liked the interface as well as the voting, so I thought I’d share it with others.

 Link to Geocaching.com Feedback Site