In written English, letters of the alphabet usually occur in groups, with each letter being next to one or two others. Only about 1% of the letters stand alone. The most common are "a", which is a word all by itself, and "s", which is separated from other letters by an apostrophe in possessives and contractions. Together those account for about 80% of the isolated letters. The next most common are "I", another standalone word, and "t", in contractions like "isn't". Occasionally, you'll see I, V, X, L, C, D, and M by themselves as Roman numerals, and "d", "m", and "o" in contractions like "they'd", "I'm", and "o'clock". Except for those, most letters occur alone only as abbreviations.
To qualify for this cache, you need to have found 26 caches with lone letters in their names, one for each letter of the alphabet. In your log, you must list, for each letter, the name of a cache that you've found, in which that letter occurs by itself, and either a link to your Found log for the cache or the date when you found it. (A link would make my job easier, but it's slightly more work for you, so I won't insist on it.)
Here are a few more details to clarify possible ambiguities; please let me know if anything is still unclear:
- You may use any mix of upper and lower case letters for your qualifying caches.
- A letter may be next to a space, a digit, or a punctuation mark, just not another letter.
- Even if a letter isn't part of a word, if it's next to another letter it doesn't qualify. For example, you can't use CHP3 for a C, H, or P, but you can use C-H-P(cache hiding place).
- You can't use the same cache for more than one letter, even if the cache name has more than one lone letter. But if there's a series of caches with similar names, you can use more than one of them. (For example, you could use three of the nearby "L.C.C.F." caches for L, C, and F.)
- Any type of cache is OK, as long as it counts toward the Total Found in your profile. That means that your logs can be of type "Found it", "Attended", or "Webcam Photo Taken".
- There's no restriction on when you found your qualifying caches.
- In case a cache's name has been changed, the name that counts is the one at the time when you log the challenge.
- You may sign the log before you qualify, and post a note to the cache page. Later, when you do qualify, you can post a find without having to revisit the cache.
Of course, I won't log a find for my own cache, but this log shows my qualifying caches. Most of these are in Humboldt County, so if you've found a lot of nearby caches you can probably use some of these in your log.
You can park at the southern parking area for the Ma-le'l Dunes, but the gate is locked an hour after sunset. The hike to the cache is about 1/2 mile each way, on a sandy trail. The cache is a small SnapWare container. The difficulty level is for the prerequisites, not for the find; finding the container should be easy.
P. S. (6/1/2016): It turns out that someone has written a checker for this challenge. I haven't studied the source code, so I don't guarantee that it always works, but it seems to be OK. Feel free to use it to figure out if you're qualified. But you still have to list your qualifiers in your log.
Congratulations to the FTF, Bruhn.