Geocaching two

Tom and I and our friend Marc decided to take another geocaching excursion last weekend. We went to Angel Island, an island in the San Francisco bay that has a long, fascinating history. We've really enjoyed visiting there once before - you have to take a ferry to get there and then you have the place practically to yourself. The entire island is a state park - there are no cars allowed on the island and TONS of old historical buildings and artifacts to explore. The wikipedia entry has a lot of information on the Angel Island history, but two of the more visible past uses were that of an immigration station during WW II, and a military stronghold and missile silo during the Cold War.

The last time we went to Angel Island, we took the ferry from Tiburon. This time we decided to save on the driving a bit and take the ferry from Pier 39 on Fisherman's wharf. The ferry itself is always part of the fun, and this time was no exception. In fact, one of the coolest parts of the day was when an entire flock of seagulls descended on the boat and trailed us the entire way to Angel Island. The birds were just cruising along within a couple feet of the boat - you could really watch how all their muscles and feathers worked together in flight. It was almost like our own little nature documentary, although I suppose you wouldn't have hyperactive youngsters throwing the seagulls cheetos on "Nature".
Marc, Tom and I brought our bikes along with us so we could make short work of the 6 mile perimeter and swoop up more geocaches. We quickly discovered that it wasn't going to be that easy. First, we had hoards of geocaching boy scouts to contend with. We had to skip the first three caches on our list because they were swarming with kiddos. Glad to see kids are getting out there and learning about this - they definitely seemed excited to be there!

So we decided to shoot for the more challenging caches. This lead us into all sorts of interesting places on the island. The first one we found involved navigating down a steep slope onto a beach, where we waded through shrubberies and found a large ammo box tucked in behind a palm tree. One of the other caches we found (below), was deep inside a stump that could only be gotten to by skirting around a recent landslide. Very cool terrain, overall.

Around lunchtime we headed inland, up to the top of Livermore Peak, in the center of the island. During the Cold War, the military planed off the top 40 feet of the mountain in order to install a radar system and missile silo. After the military left the island, the state reconstructed the top based on photos of the island before the alteration. There was a nice little cache hidden up there at one of the picnic areas - and you can see part of the sweeping 360 degree view (Tiburon and Sausalito) that we enjoyed while we were up there.One of our afternoon caches was cleverly hidden in "Battery Wallace". There are two batteries still standing on the island, and although you can't go in all the rooms in them, enough are left open to give you an idea of how they operated during the war. There are lots of bunkers and lots of room for the ammo for the guns at the batteries.

We ended the day after finding 7 caches and managed not to miss the last ferry back to the mainland. We celebrated with a fantabulous meal at the "Burma Superstar" - worth the 90 minute wait that we encountered when we showed up there at 5:45. Just enough time for a pre-dinner celebratory beer and a little walk around town!