Geocaching

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive hobby, geocaching, to the Mac. Mac FizzyCalc celebrated its 2500th download in November, a year after it was released. Cupcakes were served. FizzyCalc is used primarily to precisely project waypoints and convert among the most common geo-coordinate formats. Applied judiciously, it can help you in finding the center of a circle given points on its circumference or the intersection of three circles. (Latitude/longitude is a Cartesian grid superimposed on a spheroid earth. At my latitude, one minute west is far less than the one minute north/south. Thus, my tenth-grade algebra fails.) One of the reasons I wanted to port it is using a Windows virtual machine always takes … a … w-h-i-lllllllllll-e to start because, oh, merde, Adobe Flash has another security update – Reboot to make the changes take effect! ...

Booyah! To add variety to geocaching, “blackouts” challenges are posted whereby one has to find a slice of geocaches in an area. The last one I did was the Bellevue Blackout, which was nicely constrained within the city limits of the town I work. It took me about two years to finish. Other blackouts have included much wider geographical areas like the Delorme challenge, where you find a cache in every page of the Washington Delorme map book. Since they’re so far away from being attained, I’ve been content to ignore them. ...

I was going through yet another hard disk of photos to find an appropriate “timeline” image for Facebook. Had a lot of fond memories of a geology-themed vacation through southern Washington and central Oregon. The first stop was at Mt. St. Helens, home of the ‘sploded volcano from 1981: Mt. St. Helens - needs a little TLC Very close by is Ape Caves, a really long, dark lava tube you can go in. We walked the south (easier) segment. I wanted to extend the trip to the north end with my more adventurous, younger daughter. We went about 500′ into the section before coming to a huge pile of rocks we’d need to climb over (and then back) — great stopping point. ...

About three years ago, on the way to our summer camping trip to Mt. Rainier, I launched a travel bug: George is young, enthusiastic, and poor as a student George’s stated (and optimistic) goal was to visit its eccentric cousin who spends his days in Concourse A of Terminal 3 in Cincinnati’s airport doing street performance art for spare change. The Concourse has had a rough couple of years, being closed in 2010 (because Delta and Northwest merged) before being reopened in 2011 as its sibling, Terminal 2, closed. ...

As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones. Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good. Usually these adjustments are anywhere from 50-500 feet, but that’s a lot when you consider the cache may be the size of a pinky and located in an area with a lot of hiding places. Like a forest, perhaps! ...

Bellevue is blacked out. Behold! The Bellevue Blackout challenge is to find all of the geocaches within the city limits. Unlike the Delorme or Thomas Guide challenges, where one finds a cache in a region defined by each page of the respective road atlas (and does a lot of driving in the process), this one kept me relatively local. Since I traverse that corridor five times a week, I reasoned I could pick up stuff here and there. How hard could it be? 🙂 ...

Day 3: Baker City to Halfway – The big epiphany today was that skipping the (now monotonous) breakfast meant I could sleep in. By getting on the road at 7:30, versus 6:30, I didn’t freeze my … um… didn’t need a jacket for the hour it was too cold. Now I just needed a step 3 (“Profit!”). The ride up to the Oregon Trail interpretive center was marred by the cacophony of aid cars zooming past. Rumor was a rider had been grazed by an RV. (RVs scare me. When I rode the coast a few years ago, I was far more worried about RV owners – often leased vehicles being operated by someone with age-induced sensory loss – than logging trucks. Loggers know what they’re doing.) Ahem. I don’t remember much else about the route other than there was one significant climb whose significant descent led us into the town of Halfway. I was surprised how uncomfortable some people were in going downhill, without braking. The landscape of Halfway was pretty: ...

Almost time for the product launch! (image by Scott Meyer) Last year at this time, Cacade’s Ride Around Washington was leaning towards the “Ring of Fire” volcano route. I’ve had good experiences on two of their other events, and was looking forward to riding this year’s. In every other year, the ride has open slots through June, plenty of time to figure out my plans for the summer. This year, it sold out January 3rd, two days after signups opened. Great for Cascade, sucks for Jim. ...

Not that I need another hobby, but… I’ve belatedly taken my friend Tracey’s suggestion to try geocaching, essentially a treasure hunt. When I started reading about it last month, I was impressed with how many of these things there are. Check out the map of geocaches within a few miles of home: So many caches, so little time The first one I found is known as a multi-cache – the little icon that looks like a sort of yellowish file cabinet drawer opened. With these, you have to find one or more intermediate waypoints to end up at the final, “traditional cache” (the shoebox icon) destination nearby. It’s not the best type of cache to try at first, but in this case I lucked out. What made finding it memorable was how much effort its creater put into the ingenious contraption. Externally, it looked like the ubiquitous bird house found in suburbia. When inspected closely – not that you’d ever have any reason to do so – one might notice the bottom pulled out to reveal the Cache of Geo-Joy. ...