Yesterday began my foray into the wild world of geocacheing! For those of you who haven't heard of it, geocacheing is a hobby where one places a small container in a well-hidden public place, marks the location w/ one's GPS, and posts it online for others to find. Typical 'caches' include a logbook to register one's visit, and a variety of small trinkets meant to be traded by cache visitors. You should sign the logbook, and feel free to take and leave trinkets for others to find. It's like a long-term world-wide treasure hunt!
For my geocache, I went out to More Mesa in Santa Barbara. This Mesa is a large section of coastal open space, and has breathtaking views of the oceans and mountains. I found the caches I would look for on
geocaching.com. I would highly recommended making an account there; it's free, and allows you to access all sorts of info on the various caches. You can see who has been there, and what comments they've posted about the condition of the cache, etc.
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| Our Route on More Mesa (looking N-NW) |
We started at the sourthern end of Patterson Road in Goleta, and walked down to the trailhead for More Mesa. We spent a delightful afternoon of sun and rain criss-crossing the mesa, trying to find all the geocaches we had marked out ahead of time.
I have a Garmin Oregon 450t, and I was able to load geocache information directly from geocacheing.com to my handheld device! Very cool!
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| Our Blue Tracks in the greater Santa Barbara region |
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| The Caches we set out to find! |
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| Parking info! |
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| Results: We found green pins, couldn't find red pins, and yellow are general information. |
Caches generally contained a variety of small items in a waterproof container. Most are hidden within feet of major trails, but are hidden so as to be invisible unless you know where to look.
Over, this was a very fun experiment! Next time I would like to bring my trinkets to leave in caches, and also I will bring a camera and a notebook. I need to take more comprehensive notes on cache condition and contents to post it here. Also, I learned a lot about how to property use my GPS device for geocaching. It has a lot to offer, but is very complicated!
Files to download
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