SK8 Sunken Gardens and Dead Drop 238

Livermore, CA

SK8 Sunken Gardens just recently became available again. Construction around the Livermore skate park had made it off limits. There are still lots of construction fences up, but the skate area is now open (landscaping, picnic area, and benches are still closed). Information is needed from the configuration of the park to derive 6 digits of the coordinates. Getting answers to the questions was straightforward. The derived latitude looked good, but the longitude had a hiccup. One of the supposed single digits came out to be 10. This seemed puzzling, but there was a way to interpret the results as a valid longitude. This, however, put me inside private property. I just searched along the latitude line, assuming that I only had about 100 yard strip of longitude to deal with. Given all that, there was only one place that made sense, and I found the cache quickly (but didn’t have a pen, so I had to walk back to the pickup to sign the log). I signed a completely blank log—too bad it’s not a FTF.

I emailed Marky and he acknowledged that a couple of questions were switched. The description is all fixed now, so no one else will have that problem.

In the evening I looked for Dead Drop 238, an interesting (and hard) puzzle cache. It was presented with lots of build up in the forums as a spy thriller. A large group gathered to find it on December 3, 2004, and no one has found it since.

The Geodanimals joined me as we started our search at 6:45 PM. After 20 to 30 minutes, I found stage 1. From it, we recovered the coordinates for stage 2.

It was a quick walk to the location, and even though I chose the wrong side of the creek, there was a convenient way to cross. Our GPSrs seemed to be bouncing around a bit, but after a bit of rigorous searching Geodanimal found stage 2 and recovered a tool and directions to the next stage.

At this point, we became blocked. We couldn’t make sense of the directions to the next stage, or find the way we were supposed to get there. For another 2 hours, we walked back and forth on the paths, trying to find something that would make sense (or through blind luck, find the cache). We failed.