San Diego's Cache Placers Thursday 010611

Today's plan was to do an easy paved trail of caches 'This trail is to honor all of those cache owners who provide us so much fun. These represent San Diego’s top cache owners – those who hide the caches we love to find. But at the last moment TLC had noticed that there were three more placed in the canyons beyond the pavement. Some of the honorees of the series had been busy doing what they do best, placing more caches!! We met up with our group of friends, hikers and cachers, we call The Thirsty Ladies.

We set off and as we had not met as a group since before Christmas we had a lot to catch up on. The trails are mostly access roads to the power line towers criss crossing the canyons. Our first cache MCAS Borderline I was the newest cache so we hoped for a FTF, first to find, so skipping a couple of older ones we made straight for it but we had been beaten to the punch by Ritz Crackers the CO of the 'cache owners' power trail! We then retraced our steps and found a couple more caches.

It had been a cold start but we had warmed up by now so walked back towards our cars to off load our hats, scarves and coats. We then noticed a car on the trail on the next ridge and guessed it was another cacher, we waved even though we did not know who it was!! It turned around and parked up behind us and turned out to be Harmon of the SDRowdies, a veteran cacher well known for his photoshopping skills on the forums. As we stood chatting I noticed a SDG&E truck pass and go through the gate Harmon had just driven through, close and lock it. I think we just saved Hamon from being trapped on the wrong side of the gate!

Harmon joined us for some more caching and we also met a couple of cachers on bikes who stopped and said hi and who, later on, we also met at a cache. The caches with CT12 prefix (Covering Tom's 12 mile) are being placed as a friendly challenge for one our keenest SD cachers, flagman, who tries successfully to keep the 12 mile radius of caches around his home found. The next ridge trail only had one cache at the furthest point so Harmon was going to place some more caches along the way but luckily as it turned out he left them in his car because three quarters of the way along we met another cacher, Lulu499, who excitedly told us she had just had 3 FTFs on caches that had been posted while we had been out on the trails and we had just passed one of them!! Good thing Harmon had not dropped his caches or he would have had to come out again and pick them up!!
Nancy shared the new cache details with TLC and I checked my iphone and put the coords in my GPS. I love my iphone for paperless caching, reading hints and previous logs but prefer to use a 'real' gps to actually find the box.

It was now a lovely warm morning and lots of fun going on. At one of the newest caches ahead we could see a cacher searching, no doubt hoping to be FTF. We did not recognise him and cheerfully called out as we approached, 'have you found it?' he did not seem pleased to see us!! We introduced ourselves and spread out to help him. I made the find but felt bad that we had spoiled his fun! He did not want to join us for the next closest one and strode off back towards the other caches! Oh well, he obviously was very keen FTF seeker!

Harmon needed to turn around and find the caches we had found earlier so we said our goodbyes and made our way back to our cars. A great morning's caching, meeting cachers on the trails is one of my favourite things! Oh and along the way TLC drooped a cache to add to the mix!! Not many photos today as we were too busy.