Maple Valley, Black Diamond

I drug myself out of my bed.  I really didn't want to get up in the morning.  I probably stayed in bed way too long because as I was putting my shoes on I heard the diesel truck coming down the driveway.   I grabbed all my stuff, hustled to get my bike pump and realized I forgot about my walking pole.  Bob put my bike in the back of the truck and we were on our way to Maple Valley/Black Diamond.

It was sure foggy on the way there.  There wasn't a whole lot of traffic on the freeways which was a huge benefit on our time schedule.  Our goal today was to get around 40 caches if we could.  We had a plan to tackle everything west of Wilderness Lake.

We grabbed a couple on the way to Maple Valley, one near a church, one at a library and one at a community center with really old buildings.  It was pretty cool.  The cache near this old building was constructed pretty cleverly.  It looked like it belonged on the informational board.  I gave it a favorite point.

We grabbed all the ones in that area before moving on to another section of town.  We parked the truck in a housing development and grabbed our bikes and got on the trail for a multi we screwed up.  Haha.  We got two nearby and one at a small park.  We had to make sure the guy walking his dog didn't see what we were doing.  

We got back in the truck and went to the next section of caches.  This took us to the Lake Wilderness area.  We got out and parked near a housing development and saw that the trail we were looking for was behind all the houses.  There was a trail that led us in the right direction.  We also noticed that the forested area behind the houses was a arboretum.  

We spent some time in the arboretum wandering around looking for one cache.  We decided that we needed to be on the lodge side of the trail.  Before we drove over there, we stopped for a cache nearby.  A few years back someone had told me about a light bulb cache, not sure if they meant this one.  Pretty rad though. 

We corrected our mistake, drove over there and parked.  We found a mini trail from the lodge that took us to a small mushroom someone had made, we found the logbook inside, signed it and put it back.  From there, we waked around the lake to two more caches that were within walking distance.

There was ice on parts of the lake.  Also, nearby there were some kids playing that role playing medieval game.  They even had the costumes on and swinging fake styrofoam swords.  Bob and I just giggled.  We got back to the truck and moved it to the trail parking, got our bikes out and rode down the Wilderness Trail.  There were about 7 or 8 of them.

This was one of them.  The rest were your basic tupperware, ammo can, pill bottle caches.  One of the caches along the way made us go up a small hillside. I was wearing my shoes with really worn out soles, slipped and hit my elbow on the frozen ground, my gps slid almost all the way down the hill but Bob snagged it.  We reached the end of the cache load along the trail and headed back.  We were going to get the multis on the way back since they were along the other side of the trail.  The ride back was a lot quicker than riding there, there the trail was slightly at an incline.  We got back, found the arboretum multi and the peace one we did earlier that morning.  The peace one we messed up a few times but eventually figured it out.  We ate our sandwiches as we drove to the next section of caches.

We drove closer to Black Diamond into some housing developments.  There we got about five caches and a few along part of a trail behind a grocery store.

We looked on our map again and drove further south towards Black Diamond.  We made it to an area with a lot of buildings and patchy plots of forest.  

We had our first real DNF of the day.  It was out in this forest area where a lot of kids hang out and tons of garbage was everywhere.  There was a truck cab out in the brush and there was suppose to be a magnetic container on it.  It wasn't there.  We moved on to small pipeline area where we got two caches.  One was on the backside of a school and the other was in the woods near a creek.  We saw a cool tree while we were in there.

Roughly around this time it started getting dark.  Not right away but subtly.  We were a few away from 40 so we pushed it until it got dark.  We got one at a parking lot trail head, there we used the bathroom because it was there. It was an ammo can that was hard to get out of its place because it was frozen to the stump.

We had a hard time finding one on the side of the road but found it before we almost walked away and then one took us for a short hike out in the forest.  By that time it was almost too dark to see.  We had 39, we needed one more.  We found a quick one before we called it quits.  We had to use a flashlight to find it.  We got our number 40.  Bob asked on the way to Hwy 18 if there were any more along the way and there was a quick park and grab on Holmes Lake.  What a way to end the day, with a guardrail cache.  That was number 41 on the day.  I hit my 4600th milestone that day and we stopped at Arby's in Spanaway for some roast beef sandwiches.  I got home, logged my finds, took a shower and went to bed.  Long days tire me out.

Next adventure:  Maple Valley, Wash. take II.