THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE POSTED COORDINATES.
The cache is hidden in Ed
Levin County Park, which has a $5.00 (currently) admission fee. There
are two ways to find the coordinates.
The first, and IMHO more interesting,
way is via a “war picnic”. War driving is the practice of
driving around with a WiFi seeking program and a GPSr
to find WiFi wireless networks. (For this cache, there is no need to
hook up the GPSr to your laptop.) We were inspired by the excellent
SV
War Driving (GCMH6P) cache in Scotts
Valley. Programs such as netstumbler
for the Windows environment or macstumbler
for the Mac OS X environment are useful for finding WiFi networks and
diagnosing problems with them. To get the coordinates, go to In
and Around the Park (GCNCN2) and set up to look for WiFi networks
while you have a picnic (hence a war picnic...) In this upscale
neighborhood many of the homes have WiFi. (Only some of them are
protected by encryption. If you have a WiFi
network, note how easy it is for someone outside your house to see,
and even use it! Protect yourself!) netstumbler
provides the MAC address and the network's name (SSID) and
information about the network. The coordinates will come from the MAC
addresses below. Because these are home networks, we have some
redundancy in the MAC addresses, there are several ways to get each
number.
The cache is located at N 37 26.UVW
W 121 51.XYZ
where
00:0W:2F:0Y:FD:FE
00:06:25:97:7E:FU
00:06:25:A1:95:UC
00:06:25:A1:9Z:XC
00:09:ZB:95:3V:22
00:09:ZB:AB:1F:F2
00:0A:95:FU:3B:F6
00:0D:VV:A1:7B:W5
00:0D:97:01:28:XW
Even in Silicon Valley,
not everybody is totally high tech, so we have provided a second way
to get the coordinates, though you do need rudimentary algebra.
UVW + XYZ = 888
UVW – XYZ = 78
Could you please note in
your log entry which method you used to get the coordinates?
The initial contents
include a single use camera. Take a picture of yourself. Let us know
when the last picture has been taken, and we'll put the images on the
cache page.
The cache is just off the
Los Coches Ridge Trail at a site with
lovely views of the South Bay area. This is a loop trail, and the
cache is about half way around. Going clockwise (go straight at the
Vista Ridge Road entrance) is an easier hike; the trail has two very
steep pieces, and counterclockwise would make them downhill, and
tricky. This set of trails has been closed when its wet. Park at any
of the places near the Spring Valley Pond, where there is a park
entrance collecting the fees. Then follow the trail at the south edge
of the park. When the cache was placed, the trails were pretty
overgrown in places, but passable. I wound up giving a tick a ride
home. One of the reasons we picked this site was that there was no PO
there, a rarity.
