Randy has been talking about getting to the top of this mountain for over a year. Once we even drove around trying to find a way to the top. When I discovered there was a geocache hidden near the summit, I started to really get motivated as well.

Randy had the idea that we could go straight up the construction at the end of San Elijo Road then north to connect with the trail leading up to the top. On the way there was another cache, Twin Oaks To Be. We found that without much trouble. Randy figured we just needed to head north from there and we’d hit the trail up to the summit for sure. I couldn’t see anything and couldn’t really tell where we were exactly, so I was sceptical. I had nothing better, so I figured if he wasn’t right we’d probably find a way anyway.

Not more than 400 feet later we found ourselves at the sign pointing the way up to the top!

The trail was no sissy switchback trail, it went straight up to the top at quite a steep grade. I was trying to keep up with Randy and pushed myself a little too hard. I started to feel light-headed and a little queasy. I sat and rested for a while, and we continued on. From the top we could see almost all of San Marcos. On the one side is San Elijo Hills and all of the earth moving going on there, and on the other is Lake San Marcos and the rest.

There is quite a bit of trash up at the top including a bathtub and an old rusted refridgerator. There is evidence that there may have been a house or a cabin at the top at one point.

The cache was well hidden under some rocks at the base of a bush. I moved the rocks on a whim. They didn’t look like they were anything special, until the top rock was removed and the old World War II relic was revealed.

We returned the cache as best we could to its hiding place and started considering our descent. Once we reached the top the “hard way” we realized that there were some construction roads that went almost all the way to the top. We were going to take one of those down until Randy heard construction traffic down below. I didn’t really want to go back down the way we had come, but what goes up must come down, and so it was with us.

After we got back to the car we went and got Slurpees at the 7-Eleven on Rancho Santa Fe and San Marcos Blvd. Randy thought it would be cool to get a picture of the peak we had just been on from the vantage point of the 7-Eleven parking lot. It was pretty hazy. I’ll never look at that peak the same way again.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 9:00 am and is filed under Geocaching, Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.