More Geocaching, plus horses!

Saturday, I got up fairly early, and managed to find a geocache I hadn't been able to find before, which gave me a mile of hiking.

The geocache has "eco challenge" in the title because
the area is full of trash and homeless camps.  This is an
abandoned homeless camp, it looks like.

A relaxing place to stop and rest?

Then I headed to the barn to see Trigger and help S take photos of some horses she has available for sale.

Trigger checking out a fellow palomino (paint)

That's Trigger on the right

Most adorable horse EVAR!

Trigger and the curly making friends

Apparently he doesn't like me taking his picture any more than Nathan does!

After I left the barn, I found four more caches in the vicinity.  Unfortunately, a couple of them mentioned needing tweezers in the description, and I'd forgotten Nathan's pocketknife at home.  So I skipped those.  At least they mentioned it, though...better than finally finding it and not being able to sign the log!

Gorgeous view!

Then I came home and processed about half of the 500 photos I'd taken of S's horses.  :-)

Sunday, I slept in a tiny bit, no thanks to Cookie for waking me up and keeping me awake from 4:00 to 6:00, and unfortunately just barely missed a call from my brother in Thailand.  :-(  But when I finally hit the road, I went to Shevlin park and knocked out four caches on the Aspen Hall side of the park.  Which was tricky, because I wasn't getting cell service, and hadn't downloaded the caches to my GPS unit, so I had to go back to the car and write down the coordinates for all the caches so I could manually plug them into my GPS.  But then I didn't have access to the hints and prior logs while on the trail.  I also realized (luckily before going back to the car) that I didn't have the memory card in my camera, so I put the big camera back and only had my phone that day.


I couldn't find the nano that's right near Aspen Hall, but I didn't try all that hard because of all the people around.  I found all but one along the trail, including a multi-stage, then found the one I'd missed before on the way back.  My coordinates were off the first time around, but I found it easily on the second try.  I saw some evidence of wildlife, including some poop that was very deer-like, but too big to be deer--evidence of elk.

I got back to the parking lot and took advantage of the porta potty plus the drinks in my car, then parked just a ways away to try a different cache.  It was in a really treacherous area, and I got a little bold on the rocks, surprising even myself, but found the cache.  There were some stoner kids up there, too, but they didn't mind me clambering around on the rocks.  They probably would have found it hilarious that that was find number 69 for me.  :-)

These are the rocks I was clambering around on

This was in a crevice at the top of those rocks,
though I'm guessing it ended up there because of humans

I stopped back by the college to find one there that I'd tried to find twice before, both times at dusk, but had no luck once again.  Ugh.

As I left the college, the winding mountain road that takes me home had a traffic jam.  People were standing around and sitting in their cars with their cameras.  My first thought was that there had been a car accident, though none of the stopped cars seemed damaged.  Then I figured it was tourists getting all excited about a few deer.  Then I spotted them myself--a whole herd of elk.  I tried to snap a few photos, too, but kept moving so I didn't irritate the people behind me too much.

Off the Beaten Path

We got a later start on geocaching today than yesterday, so only did one session.  We headed first to a puzzle cache I'd solved the puzzle for a couple weeks ago, and looked for last week but couldn't find it.  There was quite a bit of snow still in the location, but the drifts were frozen solid, so I had wondered whether  the cache was tucked away behind a snow drift.  Most of the snow was gone this time, and I had Nathan with me, plus the benefit of a clue from a fellow cacher (and hider of some of the caches I've most enjoyed so far, so I'm kind of flattered he/she wrote to a newbie like me).  I had been looking right in the area where it was (amongst other spots in the vicinity), but I do think the spot had been drifted over with icy snow last time.  Regardless, with Nathan's help and knowing a more precise location to look, we found it in no time.

We drove right past Shevlin park, where there are a lot of caches, but there was still a lot of snow (and ice!) last week, so I'll give it another week or two (of course, it'll probably snow soon, but whatever).  We grabbed a cache that's barely off the trail on the opposite side of Tumalo Creek from the state park, but even though it's not far as the crow flies, it was a steep hike down to it.  My thighs were already sore from yesterday's hiking and climbing, so I thought of letting Nathan just grab it and log it for both of us, but in the end, I went all the way down to it, too, then had the joy of hiking back up the hill to the car.  Pretty spot, though!

From there, we drove to Tumalo State Park, where we parked and started hiking upriver.  The river is lined with caches.  The first wasn't far from the car, and was a pretty quick find.  I spotted the likely location, and Nathan checked it out, and sure enough, cache!

The next two were also relatively easy finds, with some beautiful scenery along the way.

Then the trail disappeared.  Lovely though these rocks were, apparently they WERE the trail.

Nathan scoped the "trail" ahead, but it didn't get better as far as he could see.

There were trails (probably just game trails, but who knows) heading uphill away from the river, and the cache description said that if you go around the rocks, the route gets better.  We headed up.  And up.  And UP.  Nathan was getting whiny (didn't help that the stick he'd found yesterday and carried around all of both days was sitting down in the boulder field.  He'd carelessly tossed it once, and I let him go fetch it, but when he did it again, I was tired of worrying about him scrambling around on the boulders, and didn't let him go get it again).  The air was getting colder, though it was still a couple hours until sundown.  The batteries were dying on both my phone and GPS.  Plus my legs were sore and tired, and getting more so by the second.  So we turned around and headed back to the car.  Maybe some other time, with a better start and a warmer day...

More Geocaching Fun

I did some more geocaching today, but this time with Nathan.  There was one multi-cache I didn't attempt last week because the description indicated it involved climbing some rocks, and not only does Nathan ejoy that, but depending on how precarious they are, I don't.

First, we headed back to Sawyer Park, where I'd done a different multi last week, to attempt that rock-involved multi.  The trail to get all five stages plus the cache was about a mile, but we lengthened it a bit when I put in the wrong coordinates for the final cache (only off by 200 feet).  The river trail is lovely any time of year, and most of the slippery ice that I had to work to avoid (and work even harder to avoid slipping on when I couldn't avoid it) was gone this week.

Did I manage to catch Sasquatch on camera?

This hole was about the size of a five-gallon bucket, and frozen over.

Cool frost pattern (or freeze/thaw pattern, most likely) on the trail

The scene of the final cache on the multi

When that multi was completed, I searched for nearby caches, and there was a traditional one (just go to the coordinates and start looking, no puzzles, not multiple stages) nearby.  We retraced some of our steps, and then the trail quickly narrowed until it was overgrown (though still a trail) and finally petered out entirely at a big rockslide area.  Unfortunately, I hadn't checked the cache's logs until we were there, and realized that the last few people hadn't found it (in the summer), but we poked around a bit, and found the exact spot that someone took a "found it!" photo (though that could have been a decoy), but no cache for us.  We finally gave up, headed back to the car, and went home for lunch, a change of clothes (both Nathan and I had slipped throughout the morning, and muddied our pants), and to decide where to go next.

Do you see the happy couple on the left?

The scenery at the failed attempt to find the cache.  I didn't mind sitting there while Nathan looked.

No shortage of rocks for Nathan to climb on, much to the detriment of my heart.

At home, Nathan told me he wanted more rocks to climb, so I found a nearby cache with "rockpile" in the name.  It was another multi, but this time only with two stages plus the final cache.  Each of them was on a natural rocky hill, plus we passed a man-made rock pile twice.

Next, we drove less than a mile to re-park the car in a more central location to FOUR more traditional caches.  The first was a miniature version of Fort Rock, which was pretty cool.  This is what makes geocaching awesome.  You barely have to leave the road and it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere, and there are all sorts of interesting sites, and if you had to scour the wilderness for them yourself, it would take forever.  But with geocaching, other people have found the cool sites for you, and you get to go there and do a treasure hunt.  How awesome is that?

This is from inside the "fort."  Nathan's probably 20 feet above the surrounding ground level.

We did three more caches, which were a little less remarkable than the fort rock one, but still enjoyable.

Lastly, we swung by a "park and grab" on the way home, which brings me to a total of 34 geocaches, of which Nathan has "helped" with 24.