If you’re in the Silicon Valley area, grab your GPSr and navigate to N 37° 11.329′, W 121° 50.846′. There you will find a geocache filled with WordPress schwag. Two .50 caliber ammo boxes hold WP stickers and t-shirts. You have your choice of black or red t-shirts.
To get there, start at the Mockingbird Hill entrance of Almaden Quicksilver Park at N 37° 11.594′, W 121° 50.191′. There is a big parking lot here as well as water and restrooms. Grab a map at the trail head and head out on New Almaden Trail. Take New Almaden trail approximately 1.4 miles until you reach N 37° 11.475′, W 121° 50.832′. From there, head uphill along an unmarked but well-used trail that runs between New Almaden trail and Randol trail. There’s no sign post, but the trail is easy to spot. Take this trail a quarter mile to get to the cache. If you want a big hint as to where to look (cheater), this gives it away. The cache consists of two ammo boxes. Make sure to check them both. Shirts are available from S to XXL in both men’s and women’s sizes. Please don’t bankrupt the cache. Take only one shirt per person. Stickers I have plenty of, so feel free to take extra stickers. Before leaving, make sure everything goes back in the ammo cans and that the cans are fully latched. From here, you can keep heading uphill for some nice views of Almaden Valley, Santa Clara Valley, and the Santa Cruz mountains. Use your new t-shirt to wipe the sweat from your brow as you climb.
Beware of Western Poison Oak while on your hike. It is everywhere. There are usually plenty of opportunities to observe wildlife. Be on the watch for deer, wild turkeys, California quail, birds of prey, lots of lizards, and gopher snakes. Mountain Lions live in this area, but they are a rare sighting. I’ve spotted a few coyotes in nearby parks, but never in Quicksilver.
Here are some photos of the route you will take, and here are photos from all over Almaden Quicksilver. Enjoy your hike, and leave a comment on this post if you visit the cache.
I am so bummed. You put the cache virtually in my backyard and I am no where near my house…right now I am at 47* 42′ 29″ N 104* 8′ 29″ W (not very close…am I) and would love a moonlight hike of Quicksilver. Arrgh.
it`s hard to get there from germany, but really great idea & stuff. 🙂
haha amazing idea… you are crapped though if you are stuck in Europe, but hey… at least no bush to crap you out! 🙂
Brilliant!!! Absolutely brilliant, you keep giving me ideas… I think that there should be a WordPress cache in every country in the world!!! I will talk to the local WordPress establishment and fire up the GPS on the weekend 🙂
no bush is the only good bush =)
dan, great idea! maybe i can support or start a cache in munich, germany.. hmhmhm. why not! 😉
I’ve a friend still back in Cali who wants to get into Geocache, unfortunately she probably wouldn’t appreciate the WP gear, and she’s in the Valley, not the South Bay.
BTW, you may think Bush is not so hot but could you imagine Crusader Gore as President or Dead Dog Kerry? Well, you probably could, but there’s enough who couldn’t, so Bush got the nod again.
Great idea, I’d love to participate in one of these! I wanna live in Silicon Valley now 🙁
So jealous right now it hurts. Hmm.. I should move. Hopefully whoever gets to them appriciates it.
Awesome idea there, Ryan!
damn… a few miles away from home… Argentina 😉
Neat idea. But did you know Canadian Club in a series of memorable 1970s ads hid cases of whiskey in different locales — the Arctic, Angel Falls, atop a NY skyscraper — with clues to help find them. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_185.html
Argh! Those ammo boxes are sitting there just MOCKING me, mere minutes from my hometown of Palo Alto, as I sit here schwag-less in L.A.
I can practically smell the Live Oaks. Ah, to be cresting the foothills again, anti-rattlesnake walking stick in hand, steering a non-native companion away from a swath of poison oak. Word to the wise: it’s not up in the trees – it’s a ground-covering shrub.
Sorry – to clarify, poison oak *can* be up a tree trunk, since it’s a kind of vine… but in the Santa Cruz foothills, it is most rampant as a ground shrub.
I found the cache. It looks as though I was the first one there…one of the boxes actually hissed with a pressure change as I opened it.
Nevertheless, I return dejected and empty handed — Ryan, it is great that you included 2 XXLs and a bazillion Smalls, but where were the plain old XLs? I am not into muscle shirts so I left the Larges…and I already own a tent so I left the XXLs. To say that I was bummed is to understate it a bit.
At least it was a nice hike.
4 tips for future explorers:
1. Don’t get scared off by the two gauntlets of poison oak at the beginning of the hike. Except for those and a small patch just before the cache, there really isn’t all that much.
2. 15 yards after you cross what is left of the creek you will come to an unmarked fork — to the right, a trail heads up the hill and in front of you, a trail follows the creek toward a picnic bench. Head right, don’t go to the picnic bench.
3. Pay attention to the first set of GPS coords (the ones marking the path off the main trail toward the cache). I walked right past that trail at first.
4. Look at the stickers in both boxes…they are different.
Good luck to all the explorers.
Oh and Ryan: (i) don’t get me wrong it was great fun and I very much appreciate all of the effort and creativity that went into this; and (ii) if I want an XL (in any color) who do I bribe?
😉
— Jerry
Sorry Jerry, I ran out of XLs for the cache and forgot to mention it. I’ll order some more and update the post once they’re in the cache.
@Jerry, did you happen to see small size in there?
Ryan, can we organise something like this for The Netherlands, Silicon Valley is a little of the beaten track for a Dutchie like me 😉
@Yohannes: Yep. As of 5:00pm Thursday, there were lots of smalls (and in both black and red). Note that when I left yesterday, there were only 4 black shirts (2 small and 2 med).
@Jerry, Ryan must have returned to the spot to restock. I will stop by tomorrow morning. What i am worried about is getting lost down there and i suspect cellular service is non-existent. Anyway, Thanks!
This is a brilliant idea! I suggest starting on in Scotland (or give away tshirts on the wordpress website?)!
I made it to the boxes this morning w/o a gps, which is my primary concern of not locating the last path. The hike took about 45 minutes each way. I also wrote my experience on my blog. Thanks Ryan for putting this inventive treasure hunting and of course for the schwags. 🙂
Here is another hint for those trying to find this without a GPS. When you see those rocks off to the right of New Almaden trail, look for the unmarked path off to the left. The tall grass can obscure the path from some angles, so walk around the vicinity of those rocks until you spot it.
Haha, Jerry: we got there at around 8:30PM Wednesday…I guess you beat us by a few hours.
Flickr photos (spoiler warning):
http://flickr.com/photos/8914547@N07/tags/geocaching/
Additional notes:
1) Parks close after dark. They also leave $35 tickets if you are still parked in said park after dark (most expensive free shirt ever…). They also lock the gates in said park, requiring a call to local police to get out.
2) There are Western Rattlesnakes in the area, so if you are in said park after dark and cannot see well, be careful. Stepping less than a foot away from one is not a fun time…
So yea, I guess we were second to get there…
Oh: Yohannes: cell service there is great, I had reception the whole time (Verizon).
Freakin awesome! Got me 7 geocaches today where I live (Louisiana) would be nice if you guys could send some swag down here so I can make a box for you guys, otherwise that cache is stuck there unless someone moves it along. Oh here’s an idea – WP Geocoins anyone?
This is hilarious!
:))) how cool … just makes you want to hop a plane to Silicon Valley,
Now!
That is an awesome promo. Thanks for putting this out there – its just great!
this is the first time i have seen a wordpress schwag. what ia a schwag anyway?
Sounds like fun!
I’d love a shirt, and I bet the view is great…unfortunately, I’m all the way over in Ontario, Canada so it’s a bit of a trek for me!
🙂
Is this cache also listed on geocaching.com? Or is it intended to be more insider/secret, i.e. not intended for “normal” geocachers?
Made the trek with Miles (5) today and had a blast. Found the ammo cans mid-day and there are still plenty of shirts – go get ’em! This was extra special for us — coincidentally, this turned out to to be our 100th geocache find exactly.
Blog entry | Flickr set
Scot, I didn’t list on geocaching because I wasn’t sure if it would trip over the non-promotional rule. And I wanted to give those in the WordPress community first shot it. I might list it on geocaching.com if it gets past the rules against commercial/promotional caches.
Ah, good point – hadn’t thought of that. The other potential problem would be that people would feel the need to leave something after taking a shirt, and the cans could fill up with geocrap (though I guess you could leave a note telling people not to).
The downside of not listing is that I wasn’t able to log this as my 100th find 🙁