Hayward Hills

I took some time to head back to the east Hayward hills today. Parked at the Five Canyons Recreation Center trailhead and just kept hiking to the next nearest cache after I found one. Grabbed six that way, and visited LogSplitter again, with still no luck.

At 1106 I found squints patch cache by probing with my boot—thunk! Oh, there it is. It’s an ammo can full of patches. It’s under clumps of long, pampas type grass.

I headed south a little bit to get CandleScents at 1128, which is a smelly-themed (good smells) cache. Didn’t take too long to find it, although the GPSr wasn’t very accurate with all the tree cover.

From here, I backtracked and stopped at LogSplitter, but still think I’d have to get the boots very wet and move berry vines to get it (it it’s still there after high water from the recent storms).

From LogSplitter I continued on up the canyon to Open Spaces. That’s an interesting name, because the way I came there was continuous tree cover in the canyon. But, the coordinates were pretty good, and I found it fairly quickly at 1220. It was uphill from the trail hidden behind a rock.

Creepy Crawler was just a short ways further up the canyon, and I found it quickly at 1233. It was fairly obvious beside a log.

From here I started to climb out of the canyon and in about 0.25 miles came to Shady Grove. This was an easy find at 1251.

Now there was more climbing up to the ridge top separating Hayward from Palomares Canyon, and onto Bayview. This was a micro-cache, but it was pretty obvious where it was—found at 1317. It’s under an “Enjoy Life” labeled ‘rock.’ Unfortunately, today was not a bay-view day. It was overcast and hazy and the bay just wasn’t visible.

From Bayview I walked down to the nearest subdivision trail head, out to Five Canyons Drive, and back to the Rec Center. One thing that was very interesting today was the solitude on the trails. I saw no one until I was coming down from Bayview and reached a paved road.