FINAL LOCATION IS ONLY AVAILABLE DURING BUSINESS HOURS!
Monday & Wednesday: 9 a.m.- 6 p.m.
Tuesday & Thursday: 9 a.m.- 8 p.m.
Friday & Saturday: 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.
Sunday: CLOSED
A very special thanks to the staff for allowing geocachers to come and play at their facility!
Stage 1 is available anytime, however Stage 2 and the Final are located inside a building and only available during business hours.
At Stage 1 (posted coordinates) you’ll find a Book Return Wall to the left of the main entrance. Solve for HJK.LMK (checksum = 31).
H = The number of letters in the word beginning with “A”.
J = The number of apostrophes (‘) on this wall.
K = The number of Book Return chutes.
L = The number of letters in the top word + 1.
M = The middle chute is designated for what type of books? (# of letters).
At Stage 2 you’ll need to enter the building and find HJK.LMK (Checksum = 31), from Stage 1. You will then have to crack the code to find the Final located at RWB.YGO (Checksum = 37).
R = r + 2
W = w + 2
B = b + 5
Y = y + 5
G = g + 2
O = o + 0
Cache is placed with permission of the property owner.
For more of our favorite caches that we have created and placed in California, Nevada, Washington and Hawaii, check out this bookmark list: JoyfulNomad's Favorite Owned Geocaches
Grizzly Island History
SUISUN CITY — Grizzly Island has plenty of ducks and geese, but definitely no grizzly bears.
That’s not surprising, given that the California grizzly hasn’t been reported seen since 1922, despite being designated the state animal and appearing on the state flag. But they were once found in Solano County and some say the grizzly bear is the reason Grizzly Island is so named.
Marsh historian Joan Frost in her book “A Brief Pictorial History of Grizzly Island” tells of an interview with Jack Soares, whose family came to the island in the late 1800s.
Grizzly bears used to swim across the bay from Mount Diablo to feed on rose hips and blackberries on the island, Soares said. He also recalled the story of a boy who rode a horse on the island and came across a bear sleeping in a patch of rose bushes. The horse threw the boy, who accidentally shot himself with his rifle. The story doesn’t say the extent of his injuries or whether he lived.
“According to Mr. Soares, Grizzly Island was named after those bears that came from the Mount Diablo hills,” Frost wrote.
But there’s another explanation for the island’s name. Early maps show the spelling as Grisly Island. “Grisly,” according to Webster’s Dictionary, means “terrifying, horrible, ghastly.”
Certainly, explorer Edwin Bryant in 1841 had a healthy respect for the potential terrors of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Suisun Marsh. This was long before the Delta and marsh got tamed behind levees. Bryant contemplated the scenery at the mouth of the Sacramento River at the eastern edge of Suisun Marsh.
“These sloughs wind through an immensely timbered swamp and constitute a terraqueous labyrinth of such intricacy that unskilled navigators have been lost for many days in it, and some, I have been told, have perished, never finding a way out,” Bryant wrote.
Whether he meant the Delta ahead of him or the marsh nearby or both, the landscape was similar. Grisly, indeed.
And Rachel Vennick told Frost how she came to the island as a girl in November 1906, when it rained often and there was no electricity and no phones. “Grisly” as in “ghastly” described the experience to Vennick, who remembered thinking at the time the island was well-named.
Of course, those grizzly bears would only add to the grisly reputation.