On my last tide, WB6HPW threatened to hide in Anza Borregol if I hid in Oceanside again. What he didn’t know is I was already planning to hide in Anza Borrego and had a few locations in mind. With this Hunt, unlike the last one, I had more time to plan and I had the whole weekend off.
On Friday I headed straight out to the hide location after work. While in route, I hid one of the micros. I ended up not getting down to Borrego Springs until after dark. While in route to the main T location up on Vista Del Malpais, which overlooked the Borrego Springs valley, there were multiple trails to get there and the one I took ended up not being so great and as I had lack of vision, I decided to grab a hotel for the night and have a go at it again in the morning. This worked out because I still had micros to hide. I would have had to come off the hill anyways. I know there is camping basically everywhere in Anza, but I was tired and didn’t want to mess with camp setup.
First thing Saturday morning I set out to hide the rest of the micros, then raced up to the main t location. This time I took a different route, which turned out to be a lot easier. The trail was hard pack and easily 2 wheel drive accessible. The main T was located at Vista Del Malpais. My goal was to bounce off of the Santa Rosa Mountain. I arrived there just in time to quickly setup. At 10 o’clock Scott gave me a signal report basically saying he couldn’t hear me. His first noted bearing was to Oceanside. I think he must’ve been imagining that. I think at the start line Doug was the only one who was able to hear my signal. I’m told the signal was about 110°. Then later I have reports of a bearing of 160. It seems the 110 was straight to the Santa Rosa mountains so my bounce worked.
As the teams tried to head what they thought was my direction I got continuous updates, saying they could barely hear me and my signal was very weak. It seems teams took many detours in route to determine where they thought I was located RJN even headed to Julian for pie Alamode. I think it was almost 5 PM when the first team reported they thought they were in the area. I didn’t have good cell coverage at the truck, but if I hiked up the hill where the transmitter was, I could sometimes get 3 bars. I did however have decent T-Mobile Starlink coverage, which is text only for now. Some screenshots of my text conversations with the hunters are below for your amusement.
I was camping out at the main T location and at about 930 PM, I decided to head to bed. I think it was about 11:30 PM when Seth and Paul arrived they reported having found all but two of the transmitters and were debating if it was worthwhile to continue to look for them. After chatting with me for a bit, they decided to continue hunting, hoping they might pass the ones they missed on the way home. Back to bed for me.
Sunday morning I woke up early at about 6 AM, packed up, headed to collect all the other transmitters and raced back home to try and catch the start of the Chargers football game. I got home at about 1030 AM.
Thanks to everyone for coming out. I had a blast hiding and hope you guys had an enjoyable hunt. I’ll save all the other Oceanside hunts I have planned for a later date, hi hi.
Congratulations to Doug WA6RJN the winner of this Hunt for finding the most T’s. Honorable mention to WB6HPW and N6PL, the only team to find the main. Darn I thought I was going to be able to use this spot again.
Results below:
