Oregon City Covered Bridge

After visiting Phantom Falls today, we turned the Jeeps toward home.  Just down the road maybe .25 of a mile is a sign saying covered bridge!  Who passes up a sign like that?  We sure don’t, so we took a right turn and about .5 down the little country road we came upon this little covered bridge!  Being crazy Jeep people that we are, we parked all 3 Jeeps for a photo op.

I checked to see if there were any Geocaches in the area, to our surprise there were none!

I siezed the opportunity and placed one here, and after doing some research I found out that this is the youngest covered bridge in the state, built 1983.

My Geocache: GC6CBV1 Covered Bridge (Traditional Cache)created by Cali~Bear.

“Oregon City Covered Bridge, built in 1984, can claim it as the newest covered bridge in California. The bridge is near the Oregon City, CA, State Historical Landmark #807.”

Oregon City Covered Bridge, Oroville, CA – Covered Bridges on Waymarking.com.

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Phantom Falls – February 28, 2016

Its all a luck of the draw to be able to visit Phantom Falls. Conditions have to be right, so we decided that this was a good time to try our luck.  Hiked just over 1.5 miles, maybe a little more because we were Geocaching too, and there it was!!  Beautiful, and the wildflowers that were blooming also added to the gorgeous terrain here.  Its a moderate hike through lava rock and a high water table resulting in some muddy areas that almost suck your shoe off, but the day we arrived was just right for a hike down to the Falls.

Link with maps and weather to Phantom Falls: Phantom Falls hike
YouTube link to a great video of the Falls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMeQqPt43f0

There are a total of 5 falls in the area, we saw 3 and picked up 7 Geocaches.

These are a few of the Caches we logged:
GC5P2KF Katy’s cache (Traditional Cache)
GC1BZ9C Table Mountain basalt (Earthcache)
GC5P4Y7 Table Mountain Wildflowers (Multi-cache)

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Sean’s New Jeep!

Had a great time today out exploring the mountains of Northern California.  Sean came up to take delivery of his new Jeep and we just had to go off roading and get some dirt on it.  He picked a 4 door Rubicon in the Baja Yellow with all kinds of options on it. The destination was Harrison Gulch Ranger Station up on Knob Peak – see the link for the posted Geocache we placed.

GC5PGXW Harrison Gulch Ranger Station at Knob Hill (Traditional Cache) in California, United States created by Cali~Bear.

Cali~Bear up on the Lookout

Sean’s New Jeepy

Do you know your Scientists?

If your asking me, I do not… 😉
but there is a Geocacher or two in our area that has the lowdown, or should I say the rundown on the Scientists and he recently published a series of caches with names as titles and gave a brief description of each one. I enjoy when a cacher puts this much time and effort into a cache or a series of caches. I usually pickup a piece of knowledge that I might not have known, or as in this case I added a few names of scientists that I never knew about. I spent yesterday with my Geocaching buddy Cantseem on the hunt for the Scientist Series.

We had rain clouds all around us, not a drop on us, that is until we finished the last cache, jumped in the GeoMobile and started heading home 😉

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The highlight of the day was when we found our way into another Lookout Tower Cache, one of my favorite type of caches to do! The views are always amazing and this one didn’t disappoint:

GC1X37W *Almost On Top* by Olcowboy-N-Eyesofice2Us.

BIG BEAR’S BIG BIRTHDAY BASH Event

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

GC3B571 BIG BEARS BIG BIRTHDAY BASH by Tru2Cntry.

BIG BEAR’s birthday is no small event, at least it isn’t anymore! I thought it would be fun to celebrate BIG BEAR’s Birthday with all of our Geocaching Family. Neither BIG BEAR or I have family close by, and we love being with our Geocaching Family and Friends so we invited everybody to celebrate his birthday with us.

We published the Event and found out that there were 7 other birthday’s all within a month of BIG BEAR’s birthday. Well Geocaching friends are such great people, that’s one of the reason’s Geocaching is fun to do. Shampoodles and Ponytails, painted some great Geocaching rocks for the Gift Bags. We had a lot of Geocaches on the raffle table thanks to: OlCowboy, Georooks, Shampoodles, Ponytails, Dakotachix, Jeeperjones and Rat&Mushroom brought their signature Ammo Cans! Whoo Hoo… the raffle table was filling up!

I rented the Round Table Pizza Party room for 2 hours: 7-9 pm, I arrived at 6 to decorate and found out that they didn’t have my reservation for that day and time… so we just started filling up the tables and booths out in the Pizza restauraant area. And there was a birthday party already using the Party room that wasn’t scheduled to leave for another 2 hours… good thing we are flexible. The Manager at Round Table was awesome, “Penny” took over the sitution and the group with the birthday party left and hour earlier than they had planned. Thank you for that!

Geocachers were showing up left and right, no time to decorate, or so I thought. Lets just pick up our stuff and move to the Party room. Once in the room, Shampoodles, Ponytails and so many others started helping me decorate, I think Tink1914 team was putting up Party Zone banners, Shampoodles and I were putting down the table cloths. It was starting to look like a birthday party!!

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a "Mush" stach!

While everybody ordered their pizza‘s and salads, we started things off with a Geocaching Bingo game mixer which I got here: Geocaching Online Resource Directory: Printables. For those who got a BINGO I had made custom Key Chain Lanyards with their Geocaching name on them to get as a prize, they were a hit!

After everybody had gotten their fill of Pizza I grabbed BIG BEAR and asked him to Emcee the Raffle. BIG BEAR is a natural at Emceeing! He had a great time calling out the numbers and having fun with everyone.

BIG BEAR emcees the raffleCantseem helps BIG BEAR with the raflleBIG BEAR and OlCowboy

BIG BEAR & T2C with the CakeBIG BEAR's Cake!

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

Now it’s time for the Birthday cake and Ice Cream. BIG BEAR didn’t know about the cake. Dakotachix and I were putting the candles on and lighting them while the raffle was winding down. As soon as the candles were lit we broke into the “Happy Birthday to You” song and brought the cake in. It was a Bear cake made out of Cupcakes, with a Garmin 60csx in one hand and a blue iPhone in the other hand with a T-Shirt that read: FTF on it! The cupcakes went fast, and then I forgot to bring out the ice cream. I took it home and BIG BEAR had some later, so all is good there.

Overall there were over 45 people that came, 2 hours was a little to short, I think next time I will do a 4 hour Event and I will get there 2 hours early to set up. I am not sure but it seemed like everybody got there an hour early, so if I want to decorate I need to be there way ahead of time to do it.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIG BEAR!

Cantseem & BIG BEAR running the raffle

BIG BEAR the Emcee

RAT & MUSHROOM, Mushroom has a “Mush” stach!

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

Birthday Party

BIG BEAR & T2C with the Cake

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR blowing out the candles

BIG BEAR’s Cake!

Cantseem helps BIG BEAR with the raflle

BIG BEAR emcees the raffle

BIG BEAR and OlCowboy

But what a great time we had, Thank you to all our Geocaching family for coming and honoring BIG BEAR and for contributing to the fun. We are going to make this an annual Event and have already started planning next year’s event!!

BIG BEAR at Firestone GC78

GC78 Firestone by Scott Hinds

BIG BEAR’s birthday wish was to do this cache, it was published 10/02/2000 called Firestone.  It is located near Bodega Bay, North of San Francisco. So after biking the Golden Gate park earlier in the day, we jumped in the Jeep and headed north up Hwy 1 to the cache location.  The road into the cache was winding but it was a beautiful drive.

This was rated a 1/1 but we parked at the closest point and walked over, looked down and thought no way this is a 1 terrain.  We did see a trail though and later found out if you parked at the Trail Head (which we passed on the way up to the cache) that you could have an easy hike into this cache that was a terrain of 1.    Since we were at the closest point we through caution to the wind and started our way down to the cache, our terrain was about a 4.  It was very steep, but the views were extraordinary… it was beautiful.  There was no fog and we got there just about Sunset to witness one of the prettiest views of the ocean.

Sunset at Firestone

the view from Firestone

the view from Firestone

Watching the Sunset from Bodega Bay

going through the tunnel

Sunset

BIG BEAR and Tru2Cntry at Firestone

Heading up to Bodega Bay – the tunnel

BIG BEAR on his way to Firestone

BIG BEAR and Tru2Cntry watching the Sunset from Bodega Bay

There aren’t too many of these old caches left and this one filled in a spot, or rather a date on our “Finds by Placed Month” calendar.  The caches with the older years for 2000 and 2001 are few and far between.  They were published when Geocaching was just beginning and now are very sought after caches.  On Firestone at the time there are only 260 finds for the cache.  For being published 11 years ago you would think there would be a lot more finds.  I hope this cache stays active, the owner has stated on his cache page that he has moved and it is difficult for him to maintain it, the Geocaching family is pretty good however at helping to maintain caches if they know that the owner can’t do it himself.  Trying to fill in the Jasmer Challenge Calendar: GC1GBC1 The Jasmer Challenge (Northern California Edition) by jasmerb

This cache for me will be remembered for not only the numbers it fills in for me but the memory of one of the most beautiful spots I have ever been to, and we ended the day by watching the sun go down. Perfect ending to a perfect caching day and it was a great way to honor my best friend’s birthday!

Happy Birthday BIG BEAR!

New Year – New Caching Adventure!

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New Years day typically starts off with getting together with friends and family and watching football,  or just relaxing after a hectic Christmas season.  This year we fired up the Jeeps, called our Geocaching Friends and said the weather is perfect lets go off road and grab some 5 star terrain Geocaches!  5 Star Terrain ususally means you need a high clearance 4 wheel drive vehicle which is why we all have Jeeps!!  What a blast this was, 7 Jeeps, 12 Geocachers: BIG BEAR, Lookout4 and Anna, Teco_mac, Cantseem, Playcache 1&2, JeeperJones 1&2, Crowshoot & Floflower… oh and Tru2Cntry,  2 non Geocachers (hey they have a Jeep, they qualify!) Lets all meet at 12:00 at the OHV4 Staging Area.

Ok, we are all here… let the fun begin!

Playcache

Teco_mac & Cantseem in my Jeep

Don & Liz

Crowshoot & Floflower

Now that we all made it up the gnarley part of the road, lets get to the Geocaches!!

GC2T00Z dakotas wreck site by cheater rick.

GCQEDE Route 4 – Most Difficult by dzdiver

GC2QADG T2C Hits 3000 by BIG BEAR.

GC396G7 WELCOME TO 5000 TRU2CNTRY by BIG BEAR.

GC396G1 HANG GLIDING by BIG BEAR.

The off roading continued up to the Hang Gliding Cache where we all broke out the food and had a picnic, the view from here was incredible and we were blessed with a beautiful day, great weather and the chance to share it with great friends!

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The road back…

Larry’s trying to find another way out…

Image via Wikipedia

Rescuing Snow White

BIG BEAR has a series here locally that is know as his “Snow White Series.”  You have to “rescue” Snow White from the 7 Dwarfs which are 7 caches in the series that contain the pieces of the coordinates that once you put them together in the right sequence get you to the location of cache location called Snow White.  I failed to find Snow White, it seems I was about 200 feet off.  One of the Dwarf caches got muggled and so it is missing its numbers and I guessed, but I guessed wrong and I was losing daylight.

I started at 10:30 am and went until 4:30 and still had to make it back to the Jeep.  The terrain wasn’t hard but you did have to manuver through a couple of canyons and the wind was gusting up to what felt like 40 mph at times, so I didn’t want to be finding my way back in the dark.  It was a nice hike though and my finds for the day totaled 20 Caches for the day, with some really nice views of the snow capped mountains of Mt Shasta, Mt Lassen and the Trinity Alps.

The Caches in the Series (Not in order):

GC1NP3V THE EVIL BIG BEAR.
GC1NP25 CANTSEEM
GC1NKT9 GRAMPS POSSE
GC1NP4Y SNOW WHITE
GC1NKV5 NR. TEACHER
GC1NKW1 Teco Mac
GC1NP2E MR. Dice
GC1NP3F DAIRYVILLE
GC1NP2V SHASTA SAM

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Tru2Cntry doing the Snow White Series

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San Francisco Virtuals, Webcams & Earthcaches

BIG BEAR & T2C at The Golden Gate Bridge

Nov 27, 2011 – We had a blast on our continued hunt for all the Virtuals in San Francisco. Starting out on Thanksgiving Day on the East Side of San Francisco and continuing our hunt today

IGOR – GCDE – A very old Cache!

GCDE Igor

Nov 27, 2011 – BIG BEAR and I got up early this morning to make our way to this cache site… its got a very old GC#. This cache fills a spot in our “found for that year and date chart” that we both needed, and that’s why we seek these older caches out.

The terrain/difficulty rating was a 1/1.5… but that was the hardest 1.5 terrain I have ever done,