This afternoon I went with Dan (geodanimal) and Janet on a nice, clear day for some cache hunting in Del Valle Regional Park.
We started with Dragon Head Cache, about a half mile up the trail from the parking lot. I’ve never been in this area of Del Valle before. This cache is actually very close to the Wente Golf Course. We spotted the most obvious hiding place from 20 yards away.
Another 0.4 miles up the trail was Chile Today, Hot Tamale. This was an uphill trek, but the reward (besides finding the cache) was the view back down the canyon toward Livermore. This was also a straightforward find. It was a Tupperware container and it had been stored upside down. During the heavy rain a week ago, the lip of the lid must have funneled water into the container. Things were pretty wet. For our return to the car we chose not the wide path we had come up on, but a narrow use trail. This turned out to get seriously steep, so I’m glad we were going down and not up.
Leaving Del Valle, we talked about walking into Sycamore Grove from Veteran’s Park, but since I’ve done most of those already, Dan and Janet will go there another time. We decided to try for Mine the Gap, a few mile drive up Mines Road. A few years ago, I used to take a weekly bike ride up Mines Road past the cache location. It’s a challenging ride—the climb is serious. We had some difficulty finding this one—it was just an Altoids tin. I was searching the right type of location, but just didn’t expand the search far enough. After quite a while, Janet found it just outside the area I had searched.
Kid’s Cache 2 has a reputation of being hard to find (certainly not easy for kids). I had gone looking once before, but didn’t spend a lot of time. Indications were it was going to take hands and knees searching. So, with all of us there, that’s what we did. I guess it might have helped us some if we’d been thinking more like a kid, but eventually Dan found it.
For our final hunt, we went to Altamont Creek Path. I think I’d been here looking three times before. All of us were still puzzled and not finding it. Dan found a place where something obviously had been, so we began to wonder if the cache had disappeared. Some time later, Janet searched the same area and found the camoflaged cache, not 6 inches away from where Dan and I were looking at the suspected hiding place. I guess we need to learn to be more thorough in our searching.
All in all, it was a good hunt. We were five for five–the best outing we’ve had.
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