Biking to an Earth Cache

This past weekend got me outside and into the California lifestyle in a couple of ways. First, it was International EarthCache Day, which meant that if I found an EarthCache, I would get a souvenir on my geocaching profile.

EarthCaches are slightly different from regular geocaches, in that there are no containers to find. You go to a location and answer some questions about that location to the cache owner. Sometimes you have to take a picture of yourself at the location and post that. Often there are EarthCaches around interesting geological sites. And you can learn a lot from answering the questions. Sometimes the kids think it’s a little too much like school, but the teacher in me thinks I will probably be setting up an EarthCache of my own someday, if all the good sites aren’t already taken.

I don’t have alerts for new caches set up on my phone, the way my husband does, but some of our new area geocaching friends had already chosen a suitable Earth Cache to go after: Santa Clara Sub-basin. I loaded my bike in the car and went over.

It was an easy ride, and then we had to answer some questions about water. The subbasin is a recharge zone, where water pools in recharge ponds and then gradually seeps back through rock into the aquifer to recharge the ground water. There was still a surprising amount of water in the recharge ponds. Enough for a turtle to swim in!

Swimming turtle. You could see it from the bridge.

I’m glad to be getting back in the swing of cycling, too. I used to ride my bike to work 5 miles each way, when I worked in Cambridge MA. The Boston winters were hard on the bike. I realized the rear brake was almost completely frozen, and got it fixed this week.

The four of us at the Earth Cache, I’m in the back on the left.

And, it was another day in paradise: gorgeous fall weather. It’s not New England foliage, but it’s pretty all the same.

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