Homage to the Brothers Grimm

Met my caching friend Wetpaws and her geo-dog Maggie for a fun day out by the river today to find a multi-cache called "Homage to Brothers Grimm" (GC1JZ6H) It was a multi-stage cache, each stage with a theme from a Grimm Brothers Fairytale. Of course, I am not going to give any secrets away, but this is a must-do cache if you want to have some fun.

Seriously, the stages were so creative and fun; the creativity that went into making this cache was amazing. Made you use your head and problem-solving skills. Its caches like this that make caching so much fun. This cache was placed by the same hiders who hid the California Gold Rush cache that I found for my 1000th cache. I thought that one was my favorite, but this one is right up there in terms of favorites too. They also did the night cache I found several months ago. Wow, can't wait to see what they come up with next.

This is a picture of Nick at one of the stages called "Rapunzel" (haha) retrieving and replacing this stage was a blast!

Nick says, I don't think I look good as a blond...

This is a picture of Maggie and Nick near one of the stages...

Maggie celebrates the finding of the final stage by adorning herself with some of the decorations in the cache. :-)

And, finally, a picture of Nick with a sign that was on the cache container at the final stage that contained the logbook and was filled with lots of themed "swag" that went along with the theme of the cache....

In addition to this, we found a couple of other caches. One of them was a puzzle cache that we finally figured out after we sat down and looked at the puzzle. 

The 3rd cache was a cache I had DNF'd a long time ago with some friends. I was out here with Hope a few months ago and just started looking for it when we spotted a coyote staring at us. Not wanting to jeopardize our safety, I retreated and didn't finish looking for it. Today, third time was the charm as the saying goes. It was still a tricky find, but didn't take too long.

Some challenging caches to find today, but no DNF's and a great day! My finds are at 1070 now! WooHoo!

Just around the River Bend

The weather has turned, well for a while anyways. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to take the geo-dogs for a hike, a swim, and geocaching. On Saturday, we hit River Bend park with my newly obtained Sacramento County Parks pass. What a great and pretty place. Our cache count for the day was 13, a good day for us.

My favorite cache was a Mystery cache called Old Man Wolverine (GC121H0). Geo-dog Nick was a bit tired when we got here, he fell asleep on the Wolverine and in the second picture below, he looks like he got eaten by the Wolverine and spit out! He was literally asleep!  It took me a while to find the cache, so he took advantage of the opportunity to take a nap.

We ended up walking through lots of tall grass! I felt a little guilty dragging the dogs through the stuff but they were both good sports about it. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to do some of these caches in the summer with the grass so tall, and the snakes!

Nick and Hope try to tame the Wolverine...

Looks like Nick got eaten by the Wolverine and spit out...

Good geo-pups put up with all the tall grass!

This was really a pretty area of the river, so we went out again this morning and found more caches. This time we crossed the river and found 5 caches across the river and another 3 near where we were yesterday!

Still haven't cleared the park, but we made a valiant attempt to do so!

A few more caches

Sure is nice to live in such a "cache rich" area! I went to the Bay Area today for a meeting and got back in time with enough daylight to take the dogs for a walk along a nice bike trail near my house and picked up three caches. The area is beautiful right now, it was nice to get out if only for a little bit while there was still daylight...

Cache count = 1036

Finally...

Finally... a break in the rain.

Finally ... I get to go grab a couple of caches

Finally ... I got one that I had the coordinates for probably over a year. It was called "Hanging Around in the Park - Part 4", a Letterbox Hybrid in which I had to find three other caches first before I could find this one. Oh yah, I was able to grab 4 other ones in the same area too! :-) I always like it when I find Letterbox Hybrids, its always fun to get a new stamp in my logbook, I'm up to 20 Letterbox Hybrids now. Total finds are 1032.

Finally! :-)

Mormon Island

Sunday was a beautiful day and my plan was to take the dogs out by the river somewhere to do some hiking/geocaching. On my way home, I had a call from Wetpaws to see if I wanted to go hiking with her and her dog Maggie at Mormon Island in Folsom, only a mile or so from my house. Great timing, as soon as I got home, I loaded up my GPS, leashed up the dogs, and we were out the door.

What a great little area in the urban jungle. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it is something I love about geocaching -- it takes you to places you would never go to. This is so close to my house, but have I ever been here before? No. Geocaching gives you the excuse to go.

We found four geocaches here. The area is called a Wetlands, but it wasn't too wet, just a little muddy from recent rains. And this is definitely not an area during snake season. In fact, Wetpaws was telling me about a multi-cache (now archived) that had a stage where there was a huge swarm of ants at one stage, a rattlesnake den near another, and that she had actually stepped on a rattler as she was walking through the grass! I went and looked up the cache page for that multi and there were several pictures posted of HUGE rattlers, reports of ticks, etc. Yikes! Luckily, we saw none of that today!

Afterwards, we decided to drive down the road a bit and take the dogs swimming at the Lake. They had a lot of fun. There was a cache along the levee that I've never looked for as it was down in the rocks below the levee and I couldn't leave the dogs unsupervised at the top of the levee. Today was the day! I went down first while Wetpaws held onto the dogs and spent a bunch of time looking for the cache and just couldn't spot anything. The dogs were getting inpatient, so I came back up to stay with the dogs, and Wetpaws went down to look.  She was going to give up and on her way up, spotted the cache! Thanks to her, I had got a freebie find...this one would have bothered me since I walk the dogs here all the time. Phew...

Nick and Hope at the sign for Mormon Island...

Maggie, Hope and Nick at one of the cache locations:

A beautiful area...