More San Diego Geocaching: Part II

As promised, here is Part II of of my geocaching adventure in Mission Bay San Diego. Don't forget to read up on Part I. (Click any image to enlarge)

After class I had Duncan's coordinates and I headed back out to the edge of Mission Bay Park. Everyone else in my class was headed home after a long day of regression analysis. Not me, I'm a lunatic. I finally got my hands on the cache that had eluded me earlier in the day. I dropped a geocoin that I had picked up over the weekend. Duncan's coordinates weren't too much better so I added mine to the log to add to the fun. Then I suggested loading all three sets of coordinates, putting your GPSr on a rock and looking under everything. These large rocks line the entire edge of the bay. They can make for some pretty tough searches. The large ugly spiders and stray cats don't help either.

My next move was over to Tecolote Canyon Park. There is an earthcache in the park and I have yet to log a find on one. Way out in the outfield of one of the many ball fields there is a sign explaining the Rose Canyon Fault Zone. It was interesting to learn about this fault and the extreme difference in ages of the material on either side. I blacked out a portion of the sign containing the information needed to log a find on this earthcache.




After successfully detailing my first earthcache I headed over to the Tecolote Canyon Natural Park Trails to find some regular geocaches. Click on the trail map image to open a PDF trail map that you can print out before you visit this area.

The trails here are great. They are gravel/dirt trails that are very wide. There is plenty of room for the muggles on bikes to pass safely. As I walked along the trail I had a great view of USD (University of San Diego) up on the bluff. I found a nice cache along the trail. It was a pretzel type container covered with camouflage duct tape. The clock tower at USD rang out it's announcement of 6:30 PM. I thought, "Wow, I was geocaching 12 hours ago." More evidence that I may be certifiable.



My Garmin GPS was telling me that the next cache was 100 feet off of the trail. As you can see in the photos, the brush is thick. And as I promised in my last post, there were signs of rattlesnakes. (This may be borderline deceptive advertisement on my part because the only sign of rattlesnakes were the signs warning of rattlesnakes. Signs nonetheless!) Combining these signs with several others telling you to stay out of certain areas, I thought better of bushwhacking at this point and headed to the next geocache.

This was another pretzel type container under a cool old tree. I spotted the container from one side and circled around to retrieve it. When I got to the other side, I couldn't find it. Pushing a few branches around revealed that I was almost kneeling on the cache. That Duct tape works well! I decided that was enough for the day. I was already going to end up getting home at nearly 8:00.

As I was headed back over to the trail I noticed a baseball laying in the weeds. Not a very odd find since I had passed 10 ball fields to reach the trail head. I picked up the ball and headed back towards the car. I was tossing the ball in the air and noticed it had been signed. Upon closer examination I realized that this baseball had been signed by QDman. HA! If you don't know, QDman has an excellent photo blog called Geocaching Pics. I've been reading his blog and enjoying his pictures for a while. There is also a link in my sidebar to his site. Add it to your subscriptions, it will not disappoint. I'm not sure how the ball got in the weeds, but it's a pretty cool memento.

I got a couple of photos of a nice walkway and of the cool staircase leading into this great park. There are a bunch more geocaches in this area and the park is a must do if you are looking for quality hiking trails in San Diego.

I ended up finding 7 regular geocaches and 1 earth cache. On the way home I snapped a picture of my favorite stretch of my daily commute up the North 15. the view is actually better before you drive all the way down into the valley but I couldn't get my camera out of my Camelback in time. I had a great day. Oh yeah, I was in training for 9 hours in there. I love this game!

On a side note, My Google Reader is telling me that I have 36 blog posts to catch up on. That's all from various geocaching blogs that I subscribe to. Looks like geocaching season is heating up in the rest of the country! And it looks like I have some reading to do.