Deb and Bernie's Excellent Geocaching Adventure

      Last week I decided to take the plunge and fork out the $30 for a premium membership on geocaching.com.  That does two things I thought would be useful and/or fun.  The first is the ability to run pocket queries (more on that in a later post).  The second thing a premium membership offers is the chance at notifications.  You can set up lots of parameters, but the thing I was most interested in was being notified when new caches are published in the area. That's really the only way you have a chance at getting a FTF.
     So all of a sudden last week I started getting emails about recently published caches.  The first two cane too late, but then on Saturday there was a notice about a new cache called March Hare on Shell Ridge, about 5 miles from the house.  The cache posted late at night, so I didn't imagine anyone would be after it on Saturday, so we decided to try for a FTF on Sunday.  
     I googled the directions to the cache, and Sunday morning we headed out about 8:30 or so.  It turned out that the cache was about a mile from where we needed to park the car.  We headed up one of the northern trailheads, but got worried about where we had to leave the car, so we looked for another way in.  Bernie drove us up by the Borges Ranch entrance and we decided to give it a try.
     Now for most people, I'm sure this hike would be just a lovely Sunday walk, but for two middle-aged, overweight, out of shape women, this was only slightly easier than an iron-man triathlon.  We hiked up the hills, and down the hills, stopping at every available patch of shade.
     About an hour into our marathon, since I hadn't been tracking every step on the iphone to conserve the battery, I managed to miss our trail by 100 feet or so.  Of course they were 100 incredibly steep feet.  So we stopped to rest on a lovely bench and I decided to see if there were any other caches in the area.  One popped up at 0.0  miles.  So we looked around while we took our break and found Ridge Trail,  a tiny magnetic nano.  At least we had one find.

      Back on the trail again we took a little side trip to look for Mad Hatter, but found ourselves below it and decided not to try to find another trail up.  Another 45 minutes of walking and we were finally zeroing in on March Hare. Now every time someone had passed us going the other way on the hike in, we said to ourselves, "I wonder if they found the cache," so we didn't have much hope of being FTF.  The cache was about 20 feet off the trail down a fairly steep hill for those of us with bad knees and no walking sticks.  We carefully made our way down and Bernie spotted the cache.  When she opened it I saw FTF on the log and thought someone had found it, but it was just the cache owner making a specific place for FTF to be recorded.  After our two hour hike and several dozen rest stops, we actually had our FTF. 

     We left the Galactus travel bug and took the Rabbit with Mrkeff travel bug (which started in the Czech Republic and is on his way to Machu Pichu.  We will send him on his way soon.  We headed back and got to the car about 4 hours after we started (which we realize is about 5 times as long as the real Shell Ridge Hikers would take.)
     We were very happy to get our first FTF, and we learned some important things.  First, we need to be in better shape before we attempt any more hikes of this magnitude.  Second, one bottle of water is not enough. Third, if you use an Iphone as your main GPS device, you must have an external battery (we stopped at the Apple Store in Walnut Creek where I bought the Mophie Air external battery case, which seems to be working well.).  
      We definitely felt a sense of accomplishment with this one, and we'll be looking for newly published caches with a little lower terrain rating in the coming months.