Even though it was going to rain, I wanted to hike up in the north part of Pleasanton Ridge. At the last minute, Karen decided to go with me. It sprinkled on us on the drive over. We entered at the trailhead on Longview, and on the way up the hill, it showered heavily for about 5 minutes—enough to soak us pretty good. The first cache we came to was Augustin Bernal Park. I hadn’t read the logs and concentrated searching where the GPSr zeroed out, but we didn’t have any luck. Very frustrating. Finally, I read a log that had different coordinates, and that took us right to it.
Next up was LeChuck’s Hermits Treasure. We couldn’t find it, so I called Dan who gave us a hint. We still couldn’t find it, so I called again, but couldn’t reach him. So we passed on this one.
Just “monkeying” around was the first one we came to after we reached the top of the ridge. It’s up a tree. At first I had trouble zeroing in on the right tree, but then I climbed up a ways and spotted the cache. I didn’t feel safe trying to get it with the limbs wet and more slippery than normal. Even when dry, it might be too high for me to feel comfortable.
Just One Thing was the next one we came to. I don’t know if it was cloud cover, tree cover, or just me, but the GPSr was not satisfying today. After hunting around a few trees, and trying, probably unsuccessfully to avoid all the poison oak, I got a different, reasonable reading and found it. I poured water out of the cache, and even though the log was in a zip lock baggie, it was soaked. My pen just barely worked, and I had to carefully peel the logbook pages apart. Zip locks are not sturdy enough to keep water out.
At the gate between Augustin Bernal and Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park we found Natural Cloning easily. Since we were wet and I was a bit discouraged, we called an end to the hiking and headed back. I called Dan again for a good hint to LeChuck’s Hermits Treasure. I looked low and Karen looked high. She spotted it.
We logged just over 5 miles of hiking. This means getting to the north trail end for the last cache in the park will require an estimated 12 to 13 miles of hiking. I called Dan and asked if he wanted to meet us in Pleasanton and look for the newest caches there, while Karen went on shopping. He agreed, so we grabbed a sandwich at Erik’s on Santa Rita while waiting for him.
Park N’ Hark is in a little park, and Dan had it in hand almost immediately. It’s a magnetic micro under a bench. Cache N’ Release is in a little shopping center at the corner of Valley and Hopyard. We knew it was in a particular landscaping median, and again, Dan had it almost immediately. Harvest’ N Pinion was a little difficult for us to figure out where to park, so we walked farther than we needed to. Janet found this one. As the name suggests, it’s a micro hidden in a pine cone tied in a pine tree.
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