2020/09/26
5.79mile / 118ft / 1:59 / 3:58
Los Alamitos Creek Trail
When I looked up the trail on google map, it looks quite exposed and it doesn't seem summer is the right season to visit. Given it's very short, I still decided to have a try, as we have done most of the creek trails in south bay, and kids want to explore new trails.
Surprisedly, this is a very pleasant trail, with trees aligned by the sides most of the time. The trees are not high or big enough to block the sun, but in the morning or in the afternoon when the sun is not over the sky, they provide enough shades at most places and surely the different layers of green leaves add the beauty to the trail.
Los Alamitos trail is 4.7 miles long, from Harry road in the south connecting to Calero Creek Trail, to Lake Alameda in the north, extended to Guadalupe River Trail. Our starting and end point is the trail parking lot in the middle. When we arrived at 2pm, there are only few cars in the parking lot, but when we finished and returned at 6pm, it's already full.
As the trail is fairly short, the original plan is to first go south to reach the trail end and make a u turn to go north to the lake to make a round trip. But we spent so much time on finding some interesting geocaches that we eventually ran out of time and could only cover the south portion. We will definitely return soon for the north part and remaining geocaches.
There are several geocaches on the trail, spread evenly at about 0.1-0.2mile distance in between. Many are placed by Masa , and they all have lots favorite points! These do make us wonder how special the caches are, so surely we don't want to miss any fun. Some comment even mentioned this as Masa trail - and we do agree that these are real treasure hunt!
The trail is paved with dividid line in the center. In parallel on the left-hand side (going south) there is a sandy single track trail which looks quite shady and more attractive for hikers. Most caches are hiden in between the trails so some bushwhacking might be required. Luckily in most places there are always opening and side trails to connect the two, so it's not too difficult to get close to the cache.
Right next to the parking lot is the Creekside Trunk Cache. This is an faily easy find once the stump is identified (which is quite obvious!).
Shortly afterwards is the first street crossing with stop sign on the trail side. We do see cars passing by frequent, so watch out for the crossing here.
The next cache MASA12 is around the corner. We guess it's outside the fence on the road side, but there are lots of trimmed branches around, and we don't want to risk on any touch of unexpected creatures, so after searching tree, the braches from outside, and then back to the other side of the fence, we gave up. This is the first Masa Cache we encountered and we don't really have any idea of it. But now back home, read the hint again, i have rough idea of what to look. So next time!
I've saw the pictures of the helper of Masa 9 , so it's not easy to give up too quickly. While i watch for the bikes on the trail, kids are walking around inside the woods for quite a long time, until they finally saw the helper and found the cache. When it's my turn to check on the helper, i did pull out the camouflaged cache and put it back without knowing it's the cache! Too lack of geo-sences! Definitely a very creative one and worth a recommendation for those who like to have some challenge on this activity!
The Masa 11 is comparetively easy from previous one as it's in a empty space so not many places to hide. With geosense it's a quick find. And it's also an interesting one of a beautiful green cute tiny container.
The Masa 1 is deeper in the woods and different from others in the way it's huge! Still well camouflaged, and took some effort to pull out the log - a big one which can last for years for sure!
Though the kids did spend some time to search for Masa 2, Masa 3 , and Masa 4 , we didn't have the luck to earn the grin. By now kids are tired and the little one lost patient, so we'll surely come back again to finish the hunt.
Finally a non-masa one. Bicycle Primes is the *traditional* hide and quite easy to find. Kids mentioned there is deer poop on the container and the stuffs inside are quite dirty so they didn't take anything.
Then finally a longer strech of biking without stopping for the next 0.8 mile to the next cache. There's another street crossing, also with the stop sign on the trail side. But there is less car traffic here. After the crossing, the trail is along the residential area and it looks like a nice neighborhood.
Kids search two rounds for NotSo: Little Tiny Cache but came back empty handed, even though it seems to be an easy find according to the comments.
We pushed on and soon arrived the trail end by the road. We made a left turn, crossed a bridge, and back to the trail again. This is also part of the Los Alamitos Creek Trail, also with ample trees and bushes by the trail to provide shade and nice green colors.
We stopped for Quickwood Microwood. According to the comment it should be a quick easy one, but now we set time for 1 minute for trail side search and don't have the luck to find it before we need to move on.
I don't really know how juniper tree looks like, which is mentioned for Jack's Juniper Hide . But nevertheless, the older one go ahead toward GZ without hesitate, and the little one spot it immediately! Nice team work!
And then we are back to Masa! Masa 6 is quite educational. It demostrated how GPS works - two poles are used to represent satellite and two stringss to represent the distance to the cache. Well, in the real world it requires at least 3 satellites to pin point the right position, as the junction of the two satellites is a circulur surface. This is why we started from guessing which side the cache is located, as it doesn't seem there's any hiding place in the open space. Of course we found it eventually after reading some logs. Kids had fun playing with it and taking videos.
By now the kids do love the Masa cache. As there's another one cross street on the Calero Creek trail, we headed to Masa 5. Kids found it immediately, and no mistakenly there's a Masa 5 written on it. However, how do we get the log out of it? It's locked, and no password mentioned on the descriptoin or the box or the comments. Kids looked up and down and increased the search area to location the cache in vain. Looking throught the comments i do learn a new word "red herring"! So checked again the only place we haven't looked at and the cute red cache flied out!
It's indded a nice biking trip full of fun. We only finished half of the trail, but harvest all the nice experience to talk about in the near future! If you happen to be near the area or plan to hike/bike the trail, consider to have the fun by looking for some of the Masa caches!
Found some man-made leaves, but the cache is nowhere to see
No comments:
Post a Comment