April 27, 2015

Somebody has been attempting to guilt-trip me into writing another blog post. Let it be known that I am writing this because I had meant to anyway, not because the guilt-trip succeeded.

I spent the weekend caching with my geo-buddies. On Saturday we went to McLaren Park with a bunch of newbies. One of my buddies is fed up with the overwhelming 50+ demographic on the geocaching scene and is trying to get young, tech people into caching. We took a crowd of 20- and 30-somethings through the park and grabbed most of the unique hides including one that required solving a rope trick to open, one with a trick mechanism, one with multiple decoy caches, one in a pinecone and a tree climb.

I have very few pictures from Saturday, and none from Sunday because I forgot to charge my camera. Here are the Saturday ones though.

I spent all of Sunday on Treasure Island and Yerba Buena island for the Earth Day trash pick-up event. My buddies and I walked all over the entire island and picked up all of the caches except the kayak caches and two tree climbs that were just too scary. There were several tree climbs we did succeed at though! We even got the night cache since we were still there by the time it got dark.

Treasure Island is man-made, built on the shoals of natural Yerba Buena, and so it's entirely flat. The military used to use it for nuclear cleanup training and other sci-fi stuff and the entire island is still radioactive (although they've fenced off the dangerous areas). We walked along the edge of the island for a time which I enjoyed because I could see the ocean waves. The best spot for that was out at the end of a rock jetty. There was a cache there (of course) and so we hopped out over all the rocks to get it. Afterwards I just wanted to sit there for a time and watch the ocean and the wind gliders.

On the beach I saw an alive crab that was moving sideways across the sand with its industrious little crab legs. Then we spooked it and it scuttled very fast and then went back to walking. Yamjerky made a cave for it with his boot heels, which it seemed to like. Then someone else poked at it with a trash picker-upper and it snapped at the rubber with its claws and tried to climb up Yamjerky's pantleg.

We were searching for a cache in a tree and someone had duct-taped a piece of paper to the tree with the words "Baby birds - do not disturb" and an arrow pointing to a hollow in the tree. There was no noise coming from the hollow, so we said it must be abandoned. After we found the cache I took a peek inside and in the dim light I saw a yellow beak, gaping wide. Soon it shut, but I could still see the yellow line of the beak, with another one next to it. They were very quiet although the mother bird sure was making a racket.

- Antisocial Violinist