A little under-rated on Difficulty, but a very interesting walk along an abandoned section of highway below the failed St. Francis Dam.  One can see chunks of the dam on the walk.  Lots of flowers along the roadbed at the right times of the year.  Be prepared for lots of foxtails, and be sure to bring a hiking stick, for probing and for balance, as some minor rock-climbing is necessary, and at least two necessary caches are in the (usually dry) stream bed.  The questions are not terribly challenging, especially for locals, but those not familiar with a certain "nearby" landmark will likely have to find a few "Try Again" decoys before getting to move along to the next stage.  Still and all, a creative and well-planned series; most of the stages follow the canyon from parking towards the old dam in a logical (and generally straight) progression.  Bring a camera and plenty of water!

"Mountain Quest"

On Mulholland Highway, a mile or so east of its western end, this is a nicely done cache with lots of "extras".  The concept is simple, the execution is marvelous: the effect is not so much magical as it is delightful.  Enjoy :-)

{MHX} The Garden

Very similar to SoCalifSue's 1,2,3,4...? cache (GCX2Y4), in Thousand Oaks.  This has an added little twist that makes it that much more fun [:)]

1 of Eighty-5

Some caches blends in to their surroundings very well, and some, due to their placement, can be very hard to spot.  And then there are the caches, such as this one, which are so "organic" that they truly look to be part of the thing on which they are placed.  One doesn't give them even a first glance, let alone a second one.  This is in a parking lot of a large outlet mall in The City, a commercial/office complex in the middle of Orange County, CA.  It was also our 1,000th Find in 2012, the first time we have ever gotten as many as 1K in a single year.

Those who know us well might be surprised to see an urban micro cache on this list.  It's true: we tend to disparage a lot of urban caches, mainly because so many of them are merely derivative of so many other urban caches, making it obvious that they were hidden to punch up the numbers of those for whom the numbers really are what it's all about.

That being said, when we come across an urban hide that is clever, we feel that it should be heralded a bit.  This type of hide has certainly been done many times, but in this case, the situation, and the write-up for it, combine to make it a little more fun [:)]  The hide is pretty secure, fairly obvious, rife with muggles, many of whom should be aware of the thing but appear to be able to ignore it, and a bit tricky to retrieve.  Well done, all the way around.

3 Card Monte

The hide is clever enough, but the write-up for this is one of the funniest cache descriptions we've ever seen :-D  This is worth reading even if you never get within 100 miles of the cache.

When it was active, it was along CA-33, near the tiny hamlet of Ventucopa, CA.

A Bigger GPS!

In San Dimas, CA, near Bonelli Park, on Fairplex Drive, in a small industrial area south of Brackett Field.  This is an example of what well-done camo looks like.  It blends in perfectly with the surroundings because it was made with some of those very surroundings.  Hard to get much more authentic than that!

A Fence Post Hide??

Old-time stenographers might get a real kick out this.  The rest of us will grind our teeth.  This puzzle doesn't look all that tough, as there are tons of references out there, and it's pretty obvious what this is when you look at it, at least for those of us old enough to remember when dictation was taken on a pad of paper, not from a recorder or an iPad.  But once you get into it, you realize that some of it just does not want to be solved.  Remember that steno is just another form of handwriting, and no two people write exactly alike, so you'll have to take some guesses as to meaning, and then do a lot of comparisons of characters.  Ultimately, though, it's another block in the Fizzy Grid, and so worth the effort.  The Final is in the hills in Newbury Park, CA.

BTW: this was a very appropriate tribute cache for us from TRUROKR and the chick, and it was very appreciated, despite the time and mental sweat it took to solve it.  Thanks, John and Monica!

A Little Chaos

This is a very easy, two-step multi-cache, in a community college in the City of Orange.  The first step is very easily found, as is the Final, a three-minute walk away.  Parking is a bit hard to find; there's lots of it, but only one small area is marked for Visitors.  Saturdays, Sundays and late afternoons are best, although you can probably even do this at night, but be prepared to explain yourself to Security.  The neat thing about this is that there is a fair amount of information about Surveying, and a little "bonus" is at the Final.

A Monument to Surveying

This is just off Highway 150, a few miles north of Santa Paula, on a side road that dead-ends a couple of miles past this cache. The cache is both obvious and not, depending upon one's caching experience. It work well with the host, and what a host it is! We won't describe, because you really gotta see it for yourself. And there's more just down the dirt driveway.

A Train Buff Still Lives Here

Uncle Al does some of the best virtuals!  This is certainly a spot that any travelers through Eureka should take a few minutes to see.

A very unique garden

Heh. That pretty-much says it all. The hard part really is finding the "parking area" to be empty when you look. Most of the time, there is a food truck or a seller of fresh fruit, or juices, parked nearby. The write-up has a bit of agricultural history, which is nice. In the middle of the farm fields south of Camarillo, east of Oxnard.

I admit it!  The main reason why this is on our list is because the puzzle deals with astronomy.  The other half of chaosmanor has had a life-long interest in Outer Space, and he even majored in Physics, with the intention of making a career in astronomy, but that didn't work out very well [:I]  

In any event, this is a well-done puzzle on a topic that might seem arcane.  But every answer is easily researched in a search engine (I admit to needing to use one for a couple of things which I'd forgotten over the years), and the cache is hidden in an appropriate spot in the city of Moorpark.  

This cache has had an average of about three Finds per year, which is a real shame, as it deserves better, so work out the coords and go Find it!

Ad Astra

This was our first lab cache of any kind, and it certainly is memorable. We spent about six hours caching with Webfoot, and this was one of the foci of the day. The stages are in Old Town Newhall, in the city of Santa Clarita. We had lunch in the middle, and wound up meeting a couple of other cachers who were also working this AL. Quite a lot of fun, and we saw a dozen bison, too! Not bison tubes: real bison, in Hart Park.

Adventure Lab Bonus Cache - Hart Mansion

If you are interested in the history of aeronautics, or early astronautics, then come to old downtown Lancaster, CA, and take a walk down Lancaster Blvd, starting at Sierra Highway.  The whole area has been spiffed up, and there are a number of plaques that tell a lot of stories of the men and women who pushed the envelope of flight.  Many of the stories have a connection to nearby Edwards AFB, or Muroc Army Air Field, as it was known before it became Edwards.  This virtual is well done and quite educational.

Aerospace Walk Of Honor

One of a zillion cool stops along the Avenue of the Giants: this one is a little south/southeast of the community of Pepperwood.

The cache is not that hard to come up with, if one is patient and checks the likely places within 30 feet or so of where you zero out. Signal can be difficult to get in here.

The real prize is the namesake for the cache.  It can be hard to realize what it is that one is seeing, as the light in here can play tricks on your eyes. Once you *do* see it, though, it's pretty amazing! Yet another of those things that one would likely never even know about, let alone get to see, if not for a geocache nearby.

Albino Redwood Tree

This one is in Riverside, CA, in the region known as Woodcrest, from before it became part of the City, proper.  If you know the story of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves (from the Thousand Nights and a Night), then you might have a bit of a leg up on finding this.  If you don't know the story, the cache page tells it.  Either way, if you can figure out what the hint means, you'll have a good idea of roughly where to look.  *Exactly* where...?  Well, that's another story for another night ;-)

Ali Baba

In Camarillo, CA, this "tribute" to several unrelated things took the other half far too long to solve. It's nowhere *near* as difficult as he made it, but YMMV. The container and such are appropriate to the theme, or least one of them [;)]

American Pie

A real shame that this one has been archived.  We did this one the night before GW6, with a group of about a dozen other people, all of whom had come for the same thing.  Between us all, we managed to get the cache unlocked :-)  I suppose that the whole experience on this one is what makes it so memorable, but it was still a well-done cache, and would have been fun (and a lot harder!) had we been the only two people there.

Are You Smarter than a 7th Grader?

The hide is pretty standard for a cache near a paved road out in the middle of Nowhere-in-Particular, NV/CA/UT.  It's the location that makes this interesting.  The cache write-up has a link to the story behind the mailbox.  And Area 51 really does exist: it's about five or six miles out that-a-way; just follow the (not yellow brick) road.

Area 51 Black Mailbox

This is a list of the caches which we thought were especially good, either because of the way they were put together, or the hike to them was very scenic or interesting, or the location was really interesting, or even because the write-up was funny, fascinating or thought-provoking.  There is no minimum or maximum number of caches, no percentage of our total, nothing like that.  This is just a simple listing of the caches which we thought were especially well done, for one or more reasons.  

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chaosmanor's creative cache collectionPublic