Geocaching

Official Geocache Page

This was a very tough puzzle for me to crack. All of the information you are given is the title of the geocache and this:

usft ugrvgo shqwh hys ywnf uqzu uvclt
cvca mdx nsy pyl eqj bxgb eiohhicf drid

I don’t want to spoil it for anyone so I won’t tell you the solution. I will give you the hint that I got. The first word is “three” and the name of the geocache plays a very important role in solving the puzzle. I worked on this with my mother and when we finally cracked it I couldn’t wait to go out and find it so I did a late evening find on this one. I love the satisfaction I get after completing a tough puzzle.

Official Geocache Page

This cache is quite a challenge and a bit annoying. The part that I liked about this cache is that it takes you all over the Berkeley campus. I convinced my mom to go for a walk with me and we had a nice time exploring the campus together. My moms stellar math skills also came in very handy on this cache. There are four initial stages to this cache and they are fairly far apart. It is all easily walkable but you are often crisscrossing the campus. We were able to get all of the initial stages completed and then we looked at the end….. ummmmm ok?!?

We were very confused, my mom and I decided to put it on hold until we got home and it’s a good thing that we did.

Flash forward a few hours and we are home again and we sit down to try and figure this one out. Now this is what I didn’t like about this cache; You need to use the internet to solve this cache. Now I don’t have a problem with having to use the internet or other means to solve puzzles but I didn’t appreciate the fact that I had just spent over an hour doing the first four stages of this only to find out that I would need to go home to finish the cache. Oh well, it isn’t a big deal.

So my mom and I were stuck on the puzzle and not making any progress. As the name of this geocache implies this series brings you to an assortment of the many bear statues on the Cal campus. In one of the logs someone posted the following picture:

Now from that picture alone I was able to figure out where I believed the final location was using my internet skills. Yes, I am a google god

So I went to go test out my theory and viola, there was the cache!

After going through all that work I wanted to actually solve the puzzle the appropriate way. After a few emails to the cache owner I was finally able to crack it.

Official Geocache Page

I had solved this puzzle cache which was created by my brothers father in law, Charley, after a lot of hard work. After I had done it I talked to my brother and told him about it and encouraged him to give it a try. I also contacted Charley and he asked me to let him know when I was going to get it because he wanted to be there. My brother cracked the puzzle as well and then we tried to work out a time that we could go and get it together. Unfortunately, Charley couldn’t be there so it was just myself, my brother and his two kids.

My brother and I headed up towards where the cache was hidden. Kyle and Amanda, my nephew & niece, wanted to help of course so we all went hunting. We found the right area and we were poking around and then I spotted the cache. Being the awesome uncle that I am I held back the stuff hiding the cache and then let Kyle “find” the cache.

This puzzle isn’t as hard as it first appears to be. I know that when I first read it my head was spinning and I thought there was no way I’d be able to figure it out. Then one day I was hanging out with my friend and we took a look at the puzzle and decided to see if we could crack it. We didn’t crack it together but right before I left his house we figured out the key on how these things work.

As you read the cache page and the pages it links to you will learn everything you need to, the key here is that every word can be written in three different ways in morse code. I will provide you with an example of what I am talking about. I will be using the word moesrealm in my example.

This is how you write Moesrealm in morse code, the X’s are between the letters:

- - X - - - X . X … X .-. X . X .- X .-.. X - -

Here are the three ways that Moesrealm can be spelled in morse code using trigraphs.

That should be enough to get you going if you read the puzzle page thoroughly. I don’t want to give you too much info. If you do need help solving the puzzle feel free to let me know and I’ll try and give you a hand.

Official Geocache Page

This cache was a bit different from anything I had ever seen before. This was another candcfamily cache and one of the more interesting ones we did today. The name of the cache probably tells you how it works. They posted some coordinates that were with two miles of the actual cache location and then allowed readers of Geocaching.com to ask them questions to help narrow down where the cache is.

I hadn’t looked at the puzzle before we left but Charley had. From the questions that had been asked Charley was able to draw up a map of a few blocks where the cache was known to be located. We also had a hint that told us that the cache was near a large landmark that was made out of earth and rock. Armed with Charley’s map we started driving up and down the blocks, we had gone up and down a few times, looking for something that fit the hints description when I looked over and saw it. I brought it to everyone’s attention and they agreed that it definitely had potential. We parked the car and started looking, remember, we had no GPS coordinates to work off, we were flying by the seat of our pants. Surprisingly, my brother made the find not too long after we started looking. He got a bit lucky with the find but he found it.

This was one of the more rewarding caches of the day and it was a real team effort between the three of us to find it.

Official Geocache Page

This was probably the most evil cache of the day. We arrived at the location with no difficulty and confirmed with Charley (who had already found this one) that we were looking in the correct area but we had a hell of a time actually finding it. My brother and I were probably there for a good fifteen minutes and then Charley started coaching us a little bit. Telling us that we didn’t have to climb all the way in as the cache is not behind it and hints similar to that.

Finally, my brother and I just kind of sat back and were scratching our heads when Charley said to us “You have already touched it”. That was enough to get us looking again and that was when I tried something I hadn’t tried before and Voila! I found it.

If you are looking for this and not having any luck here is a little hint.

Spoiler/Hint ▼

Official Geocache Page

After Bingo! we headed over to Tracks Out Of Service. My brothers GPS at the time didn’t have street navigation which can make getting to spots a bit tricky. You can see how far away you are from the area but you can’t always tell how to get there. After a bit of driving around and watching our distance on the GPS we finally got to where we wanted to be and started the hunt.

Tracks Out of Service ended up being the most difficult cache that we found that night, not all that surprising when you notice it’s a 4 star difficulty. It also wasn’t helping us when we were reading the cache description printout for Monterey Cypress Roundabout. Once we figured that out and we were able to read the actual geocache description it really helped out. My brother was holding the GPS and the flashlight, which was giving him an advantage and he was the one who made the grab. This was a very clever hide, it was on some train tracks and it blended into the surroundings almost perfectly.