Geocaching

Official Geocache Page

This was a very challenging puzzle for me but one that I enjoyed a lot. I had to resort to some help from some of my fellow geocachers to get pointed in the right direction. This geocache brings with it a bit of sadness, the hider of this cache, Motogrll, was killed in a motorcycle accident a while back and it always makes me think of my own mortality a bit when I find one of her caches. This is an offset cache, solving the puzzle brought you to something that gave you the final coords which were nearby. At some point the offset went missing and people had to resort to asking previous finders the final location. To help people out I created a page where you can enter the coordinates that you get when you solve the puzzle and it will give you the final location. You can find this page right here

Official Geocache Page

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.

Official Geocache Page

This puzzle was pretty easy to solve as it’s pretty straightforward as to what you need to do. Finding the cache was whole different story. I really did not like this hide. The cache container is tiny, hidden in an area that is covered with trees so you have poor GPS reception and there is no hint. My brother finally did track down the container and the hide itself was pretty uninspired and from the looks of it an animal or something had moved it. Oh well, we found it and we logged it.

Official Geocache Page

I didn’t exactly find this one. This one was hid by my brother and since I made the hike out to the cache he let me take credit for the find. It’s a very clever puzzle though so you should check it out. We were more than delighted when we got to the area and found that it was perfect for hiding a cache, the way that this puzzle works he couldn’t just choose his location so he was happy that this location worked out.

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 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.

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

This was a really fun “armchair cache”. The idea was simple, go to this site which has a bunch of webcams in the Dresden area. Watch these webcams and when you “Trabi” (a Trabant actually), which is a type of car, take a screen shot of it and post it on the cache page.

As silly as it may sound, I really enjoyed hunting around looking for my Trabi. When I first tried the sun was going down in Dresden and it was quickly too dark for me to continue the hunt. I tried again about 12 hours later when the sun was back out. There were several times where I thought I have may have caught a Trabi but I wasn’t positive and I really wanted to catch a nice clear shot. There are many pictures listed on the cache page where there is no obvious Trabi and to me, they are cheating.

I spent about a couple hours looking while I was doing other stuff on my computer (the webcams only update every 30 seconds or so) and then I finally spotted one. You can see my Trabi below! Very cool idea for a cache!

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 was the first five star difficulty geocache that I ever attempted. The difficulty on this one isn’t really finding it (which proved to be a bit of a challenge), it’s figuring out where it is. I highly suggest you click the above link and read the puzzle. I know that it gave me a headache. I read the cache page over and over trying to figure it out. I followed all the links and downloaded the stuff I needed to solve the puzzle and I got down to work.

Man, this was hard, I really couldn’t figure out what I was doing. This kind of advanced math was always a bit beyond me. I decided to read the puzzle page one more time and then I got an idea. I decided to think outside of the box. Once I made that step things slowly started to fall into place and I finally came up with an answer that I believed to be correct.

It turned out that the final location wasn’t far from my house and even though it was getting a bit late (around 10PM) I knew the area wouldn’t be crowded and I figured I wouldn’t be bothered by anyone so I decided to give it a go. When I arrived at the area in question I knew I was on the right track. There were pictures posted on the cache page and I immediately recognized one of them. I looked around for a bit, not having any luck, but then I found the area that I knew the cache was located in. After searching for a bit I finally found the very cleverly hidden cache!

I about had a heart attack as I was putting the cache back in it’s hiding place. It was late and dark and I always feel a bit sketchy being around places like this, poking around in bushes and shining my flashlight on things. Even though I know I am not doing anything wrong and I am not a criminal I also realize that people seeing me won’t think that way. Anyway, as I was placing the cache back the sprinklers turned on. The sound of the water rushing into the pipes scared the crap out of me and I may have even screamed like a little girl a bit.

This was one of the most rewarding finds I have had, I really enjoyed it and felt quite proud of myself when I found it.

Official Geocache Page

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.

Official Geocache Page

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.

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 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.

Official Geocache Page

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.

Official Geocache Page

This was yet another puzzle I hadn’t looked at before we got to the cache location. This time though no one had figured it out before we got there. The puzzle is a letter scramble where you have to unscramble the following letter “atiodruhezroesneplnyoln”, the letters spell more than one word. Neither my brother nor Charley had been able to crack it but the coordinates posted are the correct ones and the scramble just is more like a hint I guess.

Anyway, when we got up to the cache site my brother broke out his ninja caching skill and walked right up to and found it. It was a very clever cache, it’s effect was just somewhat dampened by the fact that we had seen one similar to it just a bit earlier.

Official Geocache Page

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.

Official Geocache Page

As it turned out, spotting this object from Can I Have Your Autograph? was the key to solving this puzzle. As the all the cache page does is tell you approximately where to look and then to locate this object. So since we had spotted the object we had solved the puzzle.

We pulled up to the giant metal ball and started hunting. It didn’t take long before my brother came up with the cache.

Official Geocache Page

This was another puzzle cache that I hadn’t even looked at before we went out that morning. So I was pretty much tagging along on this one. I have since looked at the puzzle and it’s not too bad.

The cache is all about Willie Stargell, an ex baseball player who grew up in the area and went to the High School in which this cache is hidden by. To even further get into the spirit of the cache there was even a game going on. When we arrived to the final coords there was a bunch of weird junk around which I was inspecting and before I knew it, my brother had found the cache.

While we were out in the area we also noticed that we could see an object in the distance that was going related to the next Geocache, Fetch!