Geo-art: Putting Kat on the Map

Kat on the Map

Today I had a window of opportunity to cache in the morning, and a veteran local cacher had asked earlier this week to go on a cache quest this weekend.  So, the stars aligned and we were able to get out for what would be, for me, a new one-day record for geocaches found.  What was even more exciting was that we were going to do some geo-art.

SDPD even logged this one

I teamed up with Unknown_2_You (U2U for short) at about 6:30 am, and we drove down to an area near Otay Mesa.  Mexico was clearly visible, as we were only a few miles from the border.  I hadn't cached this far south of San Diego, so there were hundreds of unfound caches down here, but since U2U is closing in on 12,000 finds, we focused on what he still needed to do. There was a smattering of new caches in the area, but the big kahuna was a cache series known as 'See Kat on the Map' (an example is here) that was placed by Kat-Attack. There are about 40 caches in this series, mainly hidden in a residential community.  Neighborhood hides are my least favorite because you never know if the neighbor with the shotgun knows about the cache.  In fact, one of the caches we found today had been signed by the SDPD (they even left a 'the SDPD was here' sticker by the hide site), so somebody must have reported some suspicious activity.  However, it turned out that most of these were fine, but the real attraction to this series for me was the geo-art.  When you look at the series on the map, it spells out the word 'KAT'. The screen shot above shows this reasonably well.  Although this is a pretty cool example of geo-art, some of these can be very elaborate. The two series below are a couple of my favorites, but you can see others at this blog. It's hard enough placing a few caches along a trail and getting it right, I can't imagine how complicated these series are to make.  Truly Geo-art!

A jet in Idaho (Picture courtesy of
The Geocaching Librarian)

One of the first examples of geo-art:
Alien Head in Nevada (GC253ZN)

One of the best examples I've seen of this type. I
looked at it several times before realizing.

I love when the log is as tricky to find as the cache!

U2U and I did this series in segments, parking on a side street and walking to 5-6 caches before moving to the next spot.  We probably did several miles of walking on this beautiful Saturday morning.  One of the things I really liked about this series was the variety of hide types.  Many times, an experienced geocacher can walk up to an urban cache and spot it instantly.  There are a number of common types of hides in the city, and it takes a lot of creativity to think up clever ways to hide things along streets.  I found many surprises in this series.  Hide sites in tiny cracks, magnetic pouches containing logs, the standard magnetic bison container, cammo'd spice containers, peanut butter jars, and Eppendorf tubes. Although I have been caching for several years, I learned several new tricks today.  I posted pictures of the coolest cammo/caches, but they are not necessarily from the Kat series (and, hopefully, no spoilers here). It was great to have a veteran geocacher like U2U along, because he was able to figure out a couple of toughies that I feared were going to be DNFs.  Speaking of those dreaded DNFs, we did have a couple that we could not find.  One where a bunch of homeowner muggles were standing right next to the bush we needed to search, and one that appeared to be missing. But between the Kat caches and some other ones in the area, we found about 40... a new 1-day record for me.  We did miss some of the Kat caches in the 'K' segment, so we wound up spelling something that looks more like 'Cat' than 'Kat', but it still looks cool on the map. I can't imagine how long it must have taken to plan this picture, set all the interesting geocaches, create all the cache pages at GC, and then maintain them. A big "Thank You" to Kat-Attack for this fantastic new series!