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SC-14 - Finding a race track? Mystery Cache

Difficulty:
2 out of 5
Terrain:
1 out of 5

Size: Size:   micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

A race track in SC?

Studying satellite pictures sometimes reveals interesting patterns. Some are man made, others are not.

The picture below shows the symmetry of a gated community.

 

Browsing for possible cache locations (running out of lamp posts) in Santa Clara I came across the following structure:

What looks like a gigantic bone must be some sort of race track? Laguna Seca here in Santa Clara?

I tried hiding a cache on the premises, but there is no public access. The whole facility is out of sight and close by you will find a very impressive arsenal of ground weaponry.

So I opted for a more traditional hide for a 35mm film can, not too far away. The exact location is shown below. 

Finding the bone (which is more or less within city limits of Santa Clara) shouldn't be much of a challenge if you use terraserver for example. Zoom in to Santa Clara and look around for the structure. The parking lot is close by, and the cache is hidden within meters of an American landmark which can not be missed.

If you insist on using the GPS for this cache, the info button (in terraserver) provides you with a crosshair. Click on the right spot and you will see coordinates for the cache at the sides of the image. You can use boulter's excellent GPS Coordinate Converter to convert the Decimal Degrees (WGS84) to the format you are more used to. Or, you can try finding the cache without a GPS! I bet there are a few cachers who won't even need to look at any satellite pictures.

Extra points for figuring out what kind of vehicles normally race here.

The terraserver is an impressive effort to store data on products sold by a certain company in Redmond, WA. Recently several urban areas have been updated with images taken in 2004. The resolution of .25m allows you to see people and possibly even your car in the driveway. My favorite is here (low res). An image you can find every Wednesday on your TV in more detail has been blacked out - " The West Wing"

EDIT 01/22/05: Marky shared the following:Some people might find my terraserver viewer easier to use. Plus, when you click to recenter the map, it will display the coords. (Note: The formula for calculating the coordinates of where you clicked is just a rough estimate)

Additional Hints (No hints available.)