Karen and I spent the afternoon hiking in Las Trampas, and grabbing some caches as the trail came near one. It had to be pot luck like this, because I didn’t know which trail to take to get to specific caches. I remedied that this evening by calibrating a Las Trampas map, so the next time I go, I will know the location of the caches relative to the trails.
We started climbing steeply on the Rocky Ridge road, and then taking the Cuesta Trail. As we neared One Third Remaining, we followed a use trail down the hill a bit. This was a pill bottle micro hidden in a grove of trees. The GPSr worked pretty well, and we got to a very likely location, but recent storms had made a jumble of the area. There was a lot of fresh, big limbs that had broken off. We searched for a while fruitlessly until I just happened to look under one of the blown down limbs and the cache was just lying on the ground. Interestingly, the last couple of logs also indicated that the cache had been blown by wind or pushed by critter out of its hiding place (not that where it was wasn’t reasonable). I put it back in a more hidden place, but now realize that it probably didn’t correspond to the clue.
Then we just continued on down the hill to Elderberry trail and picked up Elderberry Ramble. Karen spotted this one as I was just about standing on top of it. Well, it was just on the other side of the log from me.
Continuing on the same trail about another 1/4 mile we came to MT Cache. This one gave me fits because of the deep tree cover. We both searched all around for a frustratingly long time. Karen was remarkably patient. For the last 10 minutes of the hunt I had set the GPSr down on a log. When I gave up, I looked at the reading as I picked of the GPSr, and it said 40 ft back up the hill. I just commented that it sure was bouncing around, but as we walked out that general direction I just happened to spot the cache.