This is classified as a puzzle cache but it’s not really a puzzle. You have to find Celebrating Milestones to get the coords for this cache. There was a quite a hike up to this cache. As the name implies this cache is way up at the top of one of the many hills in Briones park. We finally made it up to the top and then my brother quickly found the cache.
My brother called me up and asked if I wanted to head over to Briones to grab a cache or two. I said sure and we decided to meet over. We thought we had found parking near a trail head but that didn’t end up panning out so we had to go to the main parking lot, my brother has a parking permit though so no biggie. This cache is quite a hike, about 1 1/4 miles each way and the last 600 feet or so are up a pretty steep hill. The hill would have been a lot easier if my 2 year old niece wasn’t in a stroller still that we had to push up the hill… ugh. We did finally make it to the top though and my 4 year old nephew made it most of the way all by himself. When we followed our GPS to ground zero we were saddened to find that the cache’s camo was off so the cache was fully exposed. We did have a nice little surprise when we opened the cache though, it makes sound effects!
After signing the log we decided to head off to another cache in the area. We ended up having to abandon that hunt though, we were on the wrong side of a rather large hill and with the little ones in tow it would have been too much.
This was easily the most difficult geocache in the Bailey Walk series. I had called my brother earlier in the day about Lucky You! and he called me back as I was making my way to this cache. Turns out that he had DNF’d on this one a few times in the past. That of course made me really want to find it! My Garmin GPS brought me to a tree in the general area. I scoured over the tree and kept on coming up empty. I decided to widen my search and found a likely area. I almost found this geocache by accident. The container is a nano sized “blinky” and when I went to pull on it I wasn’t really expecting it come off in my hand, I thought it was part of the thing it was attached to. A very clever hide!
This is one of my brothers caches so I had to see if I could figure it out. This one isn’t too hard and once you figure out how to do it the pieces quickly fall into place. I was in Concord for the day and decided I was going to do some caching while I was out there. I followed some previous cachers trails to the wrong side of the hiding location and wasted a bit of time looking around. After I tried looking on the other side I quickly had the cache in hand. It was a fun little puzzle.
I had scouted this one out a while back. The first time I got to the cache area I couldn’t find where you were supposed to enter the area, I saw a spot with a rather frightening drop off but I didn’t think that would be the spot. I decided to look on my Treo to see if the cache description would shed any light on it. Well, it turned out that this was a 4.5 star difficulty terrain and that the scary drop off was how you were supposed to go and get it. I decided then that I would come back with my brother to get this one as I didn’t want to fall and break my leg and be there by myself.
So I came back with my brother and we were actually able to find an easier way to start our decent down to the cache area without having to deal with the drop off. We had to cut through someones front yard a little bit but it was minor. Once we got past that area we started the journey down steep canyon to the cache. I don’t know if this cache is worthy of a 4.5 star difficulty, maybe when it is wet it would would be that hard. That being said, it isn’t an easy hike down, it is rather steep and slippery.
We finally made it down to ground zero and I was able to locate the cache fairly quickly. Getting back up to the car was probably a little bit harder than getting down. The hill is quite steep and slippery but it is very doable.
This was a fun little multi cache out on the bulb. The first stage was pretty close to Stay on Target and walking from it to this one you get to see a really cool art piece which I have posted on the left. Unfortunately, all I had was the crappy camera on my Treo to take pictures with but it’s better than nothing.
The first stage of the cache is to find a rock that has the old Geocaching.com logo painted on it. This rock also has some digits painted on it and with the information on the cache page you can figure out where the second and final stage of the cache is. This area is really neat, there are lots paintings and stuff and it has a very carnival like feel to it. One of my favorites was the Wheel of Life which I took a picture of.
The coordinates bring you over to the other side of the bulb. I don’t know if it was just the route that I took or if you any route you take is going to be like this but I had to work my way over some pretty rough terrain, making my way across very large rocks and stuff, it was actually quite fun but this may not be a cache for little ones. The final stage is also near a prominent landmark on the Albany bulb, the Castle!
I found my way over to the final coords and was a little stumped at first trying to find the cache but then I remembered the hint and spotted it. I signed the log, sat down for a bit and enjoyed the view and then headed on over to find The Proposal
Ugh, this was one of the most frustrating caches I have had found. I had to run out to Sears to pick up a weight bench that I had ordered and I decided I would bring my GPS along with so I could do some caching on the way home. I noticed that there was this cache right in the parking lot of the mall so I drove on over and went to pick it up. At the time that I went looking for it, it was listed as a 2 star difficulty, it has since been upped to a 3 star which is a good thing because this definitely wasn’t a 2 star difficulty.
I looked and looked and just wasn’t having any luck. As the name would suggest you are looking around a staircase, so there are plenty of little nooks and crannies to look in. I scoured the area and then, as I was walking up the stairs I noticed something. Relieved that I had finally located it I take the cache and open it up… DAMMIT!! it’s a decoy cache, the first one of those I had ever found.
I had been looking for at least a half hour at this point and decided to call my brother, unfortunately he missed my call. I spent another ten minutes or so looking and then finally gave up and headed to Hey, there’s a park down here!.
When I got to Hey, there’s a park down here! I pulled out my Treo to read the details of the cache and noticed that I had my message from my brother. I called him back and he gave me another hint to find this one. I went and quickly grabbed “Hey, there’s a park down here!” and then turned around and headed back to “Up the Down Staircase”. Armed with my brothers hint I resumed my search. After about twenty minutes I was utterly frustrated. As a two star hide this shouldn’t have been so damn hard. I finally called my brother and asked him for a very blunt “hint” he pretty much told me where it was and I found the damn thing.
I was very happy to finally find it and just move on. This was frustrating.
This was a nice short little mystery cache. The posted coordinated bring your to a rather large sculpture, I wish I had brought my camera for this one because the sculpture was quite large and impressive. By looking at the sculpture you will be able to answer the question “which came first?”. My brother saw the sculpture and then quickly figured out the puzzle before I was even sure what we were looking for. With the answer in hand we pulled over quickly and worked out the final coordinates.
The final location was very close so we went on over and started looking. From what the actual final location was we figured it would be a very easy quick find but that proved to not be the case. We looked and looked, Charley who had found this one previously was waiting in the car. When he saw that we were taking a really long time finding one that should be easy to find he came out and tried to help. In the end it turned out that the cache was no longer there, it had been muggled.
When we got home that night I emailed the owner and she confirmed a couple days later that it was gone.
Yet another puzzle that I didn’t look at before we headed out, there sure were a lot of those today. This was one that my brother had solved and looking at it I think I could figure it out, it all appears to be chess based, I just haven’t bothered to do so. Near the actual cache location there was a little spot to pull the car over, I don’t think it was legal parking though. Just in case it wasn’t legal I decided to hang back in the car. Wasn’t too big of a deal, my brother walked right up to the cache and found it in practically the first place he looked.
The cache itself was pretty funny, I won’t spoil the surprise for you though.
This was a puzzle that I had just briefly looked at about week before we went out caching. There is a caching family who goes by candcfamily over at Geocaching.com who make some of the most creative puzzles around, they also make some of the most difficult ones. Anyway, I saw this one briefly as I was checking out some of their puzzles but never sat down and tried to figure it out.
My brother had figured this one out though, he noticed something a bit odd about this cache when he went to look at in GSAK and that was enough to get him started on solving it. I have since gone back and looked at the puzzle and it’s actually not too hard once you know what to look for.
So, my brother and I believe Charley had figured this one out so we headed on over to pick it up. I found out something weird about my GPSr (a Garmin Legend C) on this cache. They were giving me the corrected coordinates and I was trying to enter them into my GPS. No matter what I would do the GPS would reject them. Because this cache uses an unusual character (mu) in the name my GPS was showing it as having no name. Once I gave the cache a name in my GPSr it was able to save the corrected coords.
So we got to the final location and commenced the hunt. Man, this one was tough, we looked and looked and we just couldn’t find it. I was about ready to give up when Charley finally made the find. It was a quite the spot and I don’t know if I would have ever found it on my own.
Before we went out caching Charley had emailed my brother and I suggesting that we use this cache as a center point to make a pocket query. When I went to make the query I noticed that it was a puzzle cache and figured I would take a look at it and see if I could figure it out. When I first saw the puzzle I thought I was going to be in for a hard time. The puzzle is baseball themed and I don’t follow baseball at all. I read the puzzle though and I quickly came up with a theory on how it worked. I started doing the research and sure enough my theory was panning out. It wasn’t long before I cracked it.
Charley and my brother had both cracked the puzzle as well. What was kind of funny is that although the posted coordinates for this cache were nice and central to Alameda island the final coordinates after you solved the puzzle weren’t so this ended up being the furthest out cache that we found of the day.
This was yet another puzzle cache that I didn’t even look at before we headed out so I was mostly along for the ride. I did look at the puzzle when we got home though and was able to quickly figure it out. I don’t like taking credit for puzzle caches that I haven’t solved personally, it’s a little bit like cheating.
When we arrived at the location Charley was already waiting for us, he had already found it and signed the log. My brother and I started looking and it wasn’t long before I found it. We both signed the log and then headed back to the car.
This was probably the most challenging cache of the day! It is a four stage cache with the first three stages being virtual caches. The picture to the left is what the virtual caches are. You have to find three of these planes, from the posted puzzle page you get the location to the first plane. From there you take information off the plane itself which tells you how to get to the next plane. Once you have found all three planes there is an easy puzzle to solve (just matching up letters with numbers) which tells you how many feet you are from the final cache location, you are given the bearing.
Now all this bearing stuff was totally foreign to me but luckily Charley had a handle on it. What we didn’t know was that with our GPSr we could project a way point which would have made this cache much much easier. Anyway, Charley figured out where he thought we needed to go and we headed off to find the final cache.
We spent a very very long time looking. After probably half an hour I decided to call home and had my mother go online and read the logs hoping that we could get a hint or something from the logs, that didn’t do us any good. Charley decided to use a lifeline and called up TeamAlamo to get a hint. Unfortunately, the hint that he gave us was wrong. He had told Charley that it was down in the rocks which it is not.
After searching for about an hour we we admitted defeat and we started heading back to the car. As we were heading back to the car though my brother kept looking. We lucked out and my brother finally spotted the cache. The hint given on the cache page helped out a lot here.
I would love to go back to the final virtual and use the project way point feature of the GPS and see where it puts us. The initial area that we were looking in was off by probably about 500 feet.
After a morning of fruitful caching we decided it was time for some lunch. We decided to head over to Jupiter Two things happened on our way over to Jupiter. First of all, we saw Yau-man who was one of the contestants on Survivor, he walked right past us, it was kinda neat. The second thing that happened was we noticed that there was a cache right across the street from Jupiter so we decided to get it first.
This cache is located right next to an attraction I had seen hundreds of times in Berkeley but never had any idea what it was. The object is a giant tuning fork which is tuned to the frequency of the earth. The difficulty rating on this one due to all the muggles around so you have to be sly when trying to get to the cache. My brother came up with a good plan and was able to grab the cache without drawing too much attention to himself. We all quickly signed the logbook and then went and got ourselves some lunch.
After picking up Blue Bottles we decided to head towards the UC Berkeley campus and pick up a few there. First on the list was Pomodoro. The cache is located right near a rather large sculpture on the UC Berkeley campus designed by the artist Arnaldo Pomodoro, hence the name.
The cache itself was tiny. Technically speaking it’s classified as a “micro” but people have started calling caches this small “nanos”. The cache itself was about a half inch circular and maybe a quarter inch tall, so as you can imagine it was a bit hard to find. My brother, with the help of the hint was able to locate it though. We all signed our name on the logbook and then headed off to the next cache site.
After doing Tracks Out Of Service my brother and I headed over to the next closest cache site, there were actually two very close together but the GPS first brought us to this one. This geocache didn’t earn it’s 3-star difficulty in our minds. We parked the car, the GPS pointed us to where we needed to go, which was a tree, my brother started searching one side of the tree and I worked the other. Within 15 seconds I had the cache in hand. Maybe we just got lucky.
We pulled the cache out, signed the log and carefully replaced the cache where we had found it and then headed off to the next geocache, Jade Trade, which was only about a tenth of a mile away.
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