It's a Beautiful Day! (tm)

It really is a pretty day. In fact its been a pretty weekend all together.

Yesterday Skyefoil and I went to Beach Lake to walk the dogs. We found the Beach Lake geocache which was 30 or so percent around the lake than where we parked, we walked over the lake for most of it. Sam was of course a good doggie the entire time. Shila, sigh, read all about that here.

The clouds of Saturday were erased from the sky to let the sun shine through on my Sunday. I really should be working today. I have several jobs :(. Instead I decided to get out of the house and take shila on a geocache hunt. We took off, I bought some new sunglasses cause somewhere in Anchorage I lost mine, then I totally missed the turnoff to go to the cache trailhead. I knew I had to go down to the Eagle River VFW and turn around, I pulled into their parking lot and realized suddenly that there were dozens of people with huge cameras pointed up at some trees. I pulled off to the side before I interrupted anything and took a look. There was a similar amount of eagles up in some trees. I immediately thought about the irony of a bunch of eagles having an air show above the VFW post. I also thought maybe they had been baited to be there by old geezers with nothing better to do. The eagles swooped all over the place and chased a few ravens around, huge cameras with huge lenses were snapping away. Shila could't care less concidering how much she hates ravens. Eagles must be out of her scope of things to pay attention to, maybe the rewards are outweighed by the risks :)

We jetted off to the geocache site which also turned out to be an awesome dog walking trail very close to my house. One day I will detail it on http://www.alaskadogparks.com/ in the near future. I own that domain and plan on doing something with it sooooon.. very sooooon.. I hope everybody will be happy with the results.

The cache was Texas Goodies and was located near a trail following Eagle River (the actual river, not the whole town). Shila and I got to sit on a hot rock on the edge of the river and enjoy the pretty scenery with me, she got a yummy chummie for being such an obedient little girl and sitting there with me when I needed somebody to share the moment with. I can't wait to show Skyefoil before it all thaws.

Thats a wrap!

Operation Bum Bug Brigade (BBB)

Earlier today from my office window I spied somebody parking illegaly. I don't mind, however I am starting to enjoy watching this fat old cop waddle out there and give people a ticket. He does this 2 or 3 times a day depending on his glucose level. I also monitor this area for geocachers going after one of my caches - I typically snap a pic and put it online.

Today I noticed two strapping young lads with papers and gear of some sort and was pretty sure they were going after my cache. I got the camera ready and watched them walk to the wrong side of the street and squat down near a park sign with their paper. Hmm.. ok these guys aren't cachers... who are they? One of them walked briskly up the road a bit and ducked into the wooded area, this peeked my curiosity and I started snapping pictures wildly so I could find my way to that area later on to see what they were up to. He popped back out of the woods and went to his buddy, they checked something off of their notepad, ran back up the road and jumped back in the woods, back out, then they left.

What the heck...

I donned my camera and headed down to the area a bit after they left to see if I could uncover what they were doing. I found it too. They were maintaining a bug trap that said "Government Property Do Not Disturb" on it. It was also right next to a homeless persons bedding area. Ok, so they are either peons or biologists.. I'm guessing biologists since they drive a Subaru Outback. Subaru Outbacks are a clear signifier that a hippie is in the area.

Ok, this got me thinking. I the local government collecting bugs? Protecting the homeless from bneing carried away by mosquitoes? Maybe they are counting bug populations and types. Either way it was very odd. I took a photo of the trap and placed it in my caches image gallery to inform people of the nature of the device. Bug Trap Picture.

I'm pooped

It's been a while since I wrote in my blog.. Probably a good thing.

Today was fishing and geocaching day. Skyefoil is in Seward, AK with a friend and I have a few days to myself during the 4th of July holidays. Adam and I decided to start off the our day with fishing at the Euklutna Tailrace (whats a tailrace?) and it was dead as a doornail. Our friend Cinaminx joined up for the fishing however our awesome combined presence must have scared all the fishes away. Right next to our fishing area there is a geocache full of unique keychains - I stole a Jagermeister one.

After fishing Adam and I ran up and down a hill in a very forested area trying to get a good GPS signal so we could find 4 caches near the Glenn/Old Glenn Highway intersection. The mosquitoes were out in full force putting us into a foul mood. My GPS also showed bad positions for a certain geocache which sent us on a wild goose chase. Cache hunters go where the caches are of course and there were a few we had not logged on our way back to Eagle River, AK from the Euklutna area - one of them was at a scenic hike to a waterfall I had done before. The bummer about this hike is at the end there is a "lookout" to see the falls which you can't actually see the falls from. There was a hollowed out standing tree that I thought would fit a small child, so I of course attempted to wedge myself into it. I fit and it was very snug :). There was also a tree knurl I was looking for on this hike, I had seen it in the past and it looked very much like a hawk or eagle using its wings as shelter. I found the tree the knurl was on, however some prick removed it and probably took it home to add a few chisel marks and sell for $500.

We continued the hike down to the falls on the trail then went Rambo after the trail ended and traversed a rock face to get up and over to the falls. Wonderfull sight! I of course fell off the rock face on the way back to the trail. It was a steep rock face maybe 70 degrees up and I think I fell around 20 feet while grabbing for several very handsome hand holds which would have been very useful had they not been covered in mud. Adam was impressed and I was in awe that there was no sort brokenness to my body, I was quite covered in mud however.

Like I said - I'm pooped after walking lord knows how much

Yay for hiking!

Yay for me, another hike so far thats a hike a week!!! This being my second consecutive hike week out of two total hikes in the last six months.. well.. thats not really that impressive to all you fit people. I'm totally pooped and glad I had Adam around to talk with, the dog is really warming up to him which is quite different from when they first met up, I believe Adam and Sam the dog had to be on other sides of large rooms initially - Sams a little shy.

Today was Mt. Baldy, which isn't really a Mt. at all and more of a big foothill leading to a few peaks overlooking Eagle River, Anchorage, and the Matanuska Susitna valley. The cache I went after was called Baldy Eagle and the trek to it wore Adam, Sam, and I out. My legs aren't going to feel very good tomorrow and I plan on stretching tonight, right after I drink the rest of my beer and pass out crying on the couch.

Go hiking people!

The Sticky Humpy

I'm talking about humpback salmon of course a.k.a humpies. I am creating a new cache as a replica to some metal fish artwork lining several walkway railings in downtown Anchorage, AK. My plan is to hide a sharpie marker near this cache and have people sign the back of the fish. I tried thinking of neat ways to add a compartment to the fish for things like travel bugs and geocoins - I may make take it offline temporarily to do that once I figure out how, or if it gets enough traffic to merit that sort of modification.

When I am finally finished the cut out fish should be painted similar to the above outline. Take a peek at the gallery detailing the creation of and placement of the Sneaky Humpy cache, as of this post there are only a few images detailing the magnet placement and glueing.

50th Cache Woot!!

View my first 50 caches in Google Maps - My 50th Find Map. I hope you enjoy seeing this as much as I do, I've been all over Anchorage, Eagle River, and tons of great little towns on the way to Homer Alaska.

My 50th find is waypoint GC13CYE - Chief Alex 3 named after the park it is placed in, it was my first rock cache that I officially found. The placing was obvious and I am thankful it was nowhere near the sap dripping bark of the evergreens surrounding it.

On another note, my previous post about the cache 'Big Boy' just happens to be in the area Adam is visiting right now, everybody pester him to go take a picture and log one of the biggest caches in the US.

You have got to be kidding me...

IRC channel #geocache on SlashNet is a great place to be if you want fun cache information, or to boast. I recently found some tall ammo cans (image to the right) at "Second Chance", a store specializing in military surplus in Anchorage Alaska, that I plan on sinking into water after filling most of the bottom with concrete or sand, then pour clean water in over a motion activated light. The holy grail of caches right? Its an ammo can, its apparently bottomless, it shines holy light out from the eternal infinity. It sounded like a fun idea and a few cachers agreed they would check it out if in the area. One cacher had a bookmark he shared with the channel of another, similar, cache.


Big Boy appears to be a gigantic cache container made out of wood with a very decent resemblance to a real ammo container. Color me impressed. The owner of this cache parked it on his own property and most likely gets a huge giggle when preload cachers (like myself, cachers who preload cache data into GPS recievers and just head out for the day in the dark about the cache size, color, or other such obvious attributes) approach the area with a GPS in hand, heads bowed to the screen, and then a huge smack to the forehead when they finally look up. I'm also guessing he keeps a constant supply of cookies around for the guests his house must get due to this insanely large and unique cache. Bravo on this one.

Ouch.. Why.. ?

Last night was fun, Skyefoil and I did some us stuff and headed out for ice cream. It should have stayed that innocent, but we rarely let a good thing last for too long. We needed to take the dog for a walk and I knew the perfect place! I had recently tried to find a geocache in the parking lot of a trail head called South Fork in Eagle River, AK. I only had a minimal amount of information about this cache, ended up not finding it, and later found out that it was a puzzle/multi cache listed improperly. Boo..

I knew there were to very real caches in that area however, just up the trail a bit and it seemed like a good place to take the dog off leash and let him find some fuzzies to chase and get some exercise with his people. So I drove us to the trail head and we embarked on a quick walk that ended up taking several hours. The initial cache out of two was 0.7 miles away as the bird flies, straight without taking elevation into effect, so the real linear distance is 4100 feet instead of 3800 once you add elevation in. The next cache along the route was an extra 450 feet away, no big deal, right? It was slow going, we cursed a lot, the ground gave way a lot and made it hard to hike up leisurely, thankfully I had just loaded topographic information into my GPS and knew when the ground would level out, which personally kept me going. We met up with a group of 16 or so teenagers who found a quick route down, snow veins in the hillside had not melted away yet so the teens rolled down head over heel until they were nearly at the bottom of the trail, mad props for being efficient.

0.7 miles turned into 0.5 miles very slowly, we rejoiced when 0.2 miles were left and the ground levelled out dramatically, and we eventually found ourselves between two small peaks (link to topographic map). The hike from this point on was simple and straightforward. We reached a high enough elevation to get some sunshine for a little while, until the sun moved behind one of the peaks, and the dog ran all over the place chasing ground squirrels in the area. We found a lot of new and very intense ground dwelling animal holes. The wind almost blew Skyefoil away and was getting pretty chilly to me, wearing just a button up shirt instead of a coat, so we had to bunker down every so often and let the wind die down a bit. This simple walk was turning into enough mini-adventures to keep me pretty damned happy. I love the elements!

We found the caches (Momma Bear, Cache In The Notch) took some photos and headed home, totally exhausted. The dog curled up in his chair and snored away while we ate our simple dinner. Today I am totally wiped out, and am very thankful for caffeine.

To all you locals, Lets go Geocaching!

"When in doubt, poke it with a stick" and other fun stuff

This is one of many small useful idioms (is this an idiom?) that relate to Geocaching and other hide-n-seek style games and scenarios. Skyefoil started the poke-a-stick-into-random-hole-until-you-find-treasure technique for me and it has helped numerous times while cache hunting. Adam and I also tried the magnet-on-a-string technique against a notoriously difficult cache. We found nothing but iron rich rocks doing that.

I miss 'Force Field' a magnet and other fun science store in Fort Collins, CO. I don't know if they are still around, however if they are I would love to go back and purchase massive quantities of the large magnets they carried. I purchased and destroyed many of them a couple years ago before I moved to Alaska, don't ask how, and I am wishing I had kept them around. The uber large ceramic composite aluminium backed plate magnets were the best, and would have found quite a few caches very quickly for me. Which brings me to the following....

Magnetic Fingertips, how cool would that be? Nerves growing around a surgically embedded magnet.. very cool stuff. I read about this a long time ago on Slashnet and it often comes to mind when I need to find my keys, check out Slashdot - Implants for Sensing Magnetic Fields. I could start an electrical consulting firm with that kind of sense, some sort of hokey behind the walls Feng Shui electrical discovery and adjustment. Can you say Millionaire?

Other things I need to do: Gas balloon aerial photography and recreational vehicles; lots and lots of programming; buy a Clue x 4 to put the smack down with; and a hundred or so other things...

The kick butt weekend that kicked my butt

Well, Skyefoil and I went down to Homer Alaska this weekend to check out the sights during Memorial Day. We were fortunate that Sunday was very sunny indeed and totally showed off how pretty the view is.

We figured we would see more than a typical tourist in Homer if we did some geocaching, which took us all over the place and we found some fun hides, and we met other geocachers as well. A total of 14 caches found, 2 not found. One of the 2 we couldn't find appeared to be in around 15 or so feet of water, 45 feet from shore :(

I will post pictures and links to good food and such in "The kick butt weekend that kicked my butt, part II"

Terra Weekendo!!

This weekend was pretty cool for not doing anything too exciting. Most of my time was spent outdoors which was great, I'm really beginning to get into the Summer mode with a lot more momentum than last Summer. Girlfriend is finally feeling better after a month of being sick and this weekend had the gumption to go walk the dog with me on Saturday... which I flipped into an excuse to maintain one of my geocaches... of course. Girlfriend got to view the beaver pond near our house and went with me to my cache and helped go through the contents and reposition the cache into a bit easier location. The dog on the other hand was on a mission to figure out whats making that wonderful smell and ended up finding and standing on one of the beaver huts.

We found some porcelain electrical line insulators all over the place, including a chain of them still stuck together and unbroken just scattered about the wooded area. Part of geocaching is to clean up the world a bit as you run into discarded material, so we slowly dragged the heavy insulators out of the woods and back to the car for disposaling/ebaying/antiques roadshowing. See the gallery here.

I noticed there was a lot of trees flagged for in the surrounding area. Typically new construction projects use EA's (Environmental Analysys) or EIR's (Environmental Impact Reports) to show they studied the surrounding area. Tree flagging is typically a sign that an EA or EIR is being done or has been done on the surrounding area. Trees are flagged for some of the following reasons:

• Boundary of an area to be demolished
• Tree of interest (Archaeological and historic value)
• Waymarks to other areas and trees

Since these markings are purely commercial in nature and typically on public land, feel free to take and dispose of these flags as you run into them. Typically it will slow down environmental reports needed to demolish the area which may be a cause for concern when the developer attempts to obtain a permit to do construction in the area.

Sunday Girlfriend and I took her little sister from Big Brothers Big Sisters to go on what we called a treasure hunt. She helped us find two caches, one girlfriend found by poking at with a stick and the other little sister found all by herself. We signed the logs with her name and she was happy she got to keep some loose change somebody put in on of the caches.

The Pirate and his Sneaky Beaver

Hid more caches today, woot dee doot! (best if said as if singing). Adam came with to find a good place to hide an ammo box and some micro caches. We came upon a beaver lake near the highway and a popular exit for sledders and apparently fishermen. I had only been to this area during winter and saw all the sledders having fun down a man-made hill for the highway exit (its not as bad as you think). Today we met a young whipper snapper fishing in what appeared to be a beaver made pond thats been there for who knows how long. He approached us and immediately spotted us as Geocachers, he took a class in high school on Geocaching, then asked if we had anything to take a hook out deeply embedded in one of his finger. Later I agreed with Adam that the normal state of mind for that sort of thing is to run around screaming and get to a hospital as soon as you can.

The beaver pond was a great place to hide one of my new purchases, a fully waterproofed ammunition container, which we filled up with rocks and left under water near the shore of the beaverpond in a sneaky little location. My only fear is one day having to maintain this cache by throwing a magnet on a string out into the water to retrieve it. This cache was called "Sneaky Beaver" which was the iterated result of a long list of crass beaver jokes.

A little hike later and we were in an area ideal for hiding a micro cache, the location is surrounded by Cow Parsnip (a.k.a. Pushki) which should make it a little more aggravating for cache hunters to find. I didn't know much about Cow Parsnip until I checked it out on Wikipedia and saw what other names it goes under, I remember now some Alaska Native folk talking about some foods they eat including Pushki stems. This cache was named "Walk the Plank" due to the tree positioning and balancing act required to reach the cache.

My first TravelBug and Micro Multi Cache

Yay, I recieved my TravelBugs in the mail and moved one of girlfriends mini statues "Bad Mojo" into a local cache. Yay! Also I plotted out and placed a devious Micro Multi Cache named "Don't Jump" which is pending review as of this post. Its super sneaky, and I can't say much. However I got to use my fishing line I somehow didn't use last fishing season.

I searched all night for a bridge to place a geocache. Bridges are like magnets for geocaches since they typically have parking areas near them and lots of places to hide magnetic geocaches. I need to find a more interesting place to hide geocaches than the finds I have had so far which include holes in trees, under sticks, shoved behind a rock somewhere. Please help me think of fun things to do.

I have a few neat ideas so far:

• Tied to a balloon as an Event Cache
• Tied to a strong line and tied to a rock placed on the shore of a river with the micro cache floating down steam
• On a clotheline pulley spanning some remote gap

1 out of 3 ain't bad for a muggle

I set off with buddy Adam to find some geocaches. one of which already tormented me and I was determined to figure it out. We started on one that I thought would be easy and as it turns out I forgot to look at the online journal for Spud Cache (GCJMAR) which later showed I wasn't alone in my frustration. While sitting back in the car trying to get online to check for hints by way of my phone and Adams laptop we spotted some person poking his nose around the area we were investigating. Adam went to go great the person who just assumed we were 'muggles' as he put it. I had no idea that was the term for non-geocaching persons. :) After a half hour of looking for a potato shaped *something* we gave up and went on to the next, which we didn't find.

Adam convinced me to take a crack at the Meadow Creek Cache (GCH6W2) and we ended up finding the magnetic mini capsule holding the finders journal. Wahooo!!

I also need a better GPS.. or the ability to be online all the time. If I were online and had a tiny linux powered system I would be able to immediately correct my position via DGPS Over the Internet (DGPSIP).

I made Adam find some caches I had found earlier to test his geo abilities. He did just dandy and was impressed at the tiny little containers some of these caches have. He now has a new item for his birthday wish list - a GPS.

Geocaching - (GPS Easter Egg Hunt)

I've always wanted to try out Geocaching as a past time, it would help me get out more and say hi to good old mother nature, and at the same time loot something. I recently scored a Garmin GPS V for $25 from a garage sale. It was populated with current Alaska maps (no topo, but I have those somewhere) and the only thing it was missing was the data cable. I ordered a data cable on Ebay for $17.50 since local dealers wanted upwards of $65.00 for one. Soon I will be able to put my limited amount of GIS know how together with my limited how to walk know how.

I went out for my first Geocache hunt last night via bike since there was a cache located near my house. At first I couldn't find it at all and I could have sworn the GPS coordinates are gone and then I found it under a rock just chilling there waiting to be opened and have another Geocacher log their name in the journal. I was quite happy and took a little green finger monkey from the cache, then ended the night by finding a builders benchmark on a bridge near my house. I checked off my two finds on geocaching.com (see my profile ) and looked for more. Today there are a few around work I will try to find during lunch and after work hours.