I got up around 7:15 that morning and zombied out of my bed, yesterday was a LONG day. The night before I packed up all the stuff I would need (extra clothes, extra coats, some snacks, gps, geocaching stuff, etc) and left it in a pile next to my bed. I put my clothes on as fast as I could because it was freezing! I started taking stuff out to the car while I waited for mom to get her stuff together. It was about 7:35 and we needed to go. It was going to be a nice day. Yay! No rain! We got to Derek's around 8:05 and helped haul some of his stuff to his car. We threw our stuff in the pack and we were on our way to Dupont. I really didn't know Dupont very well since I really had no reason to go there. I've driven past it thousands of times on the freeway when we drove towards Seattle and came home to Olympia. Derek's college buddy Maggie was going to meet us at the Dupont City Hall. We got there near 8:30 and signed in. They went over what we would be doing today. We would be taking down an old rusty fence over 100 years old and pulling up Scotch Broom. I helped tear down the fence.
It was a collaboration of people from the Dupont community, Fort Lewis, the Watershed Council, people from Pierce and Thurston Counties. Some of these people were geocachers.
We got the fence torn down and most of the Scotch Broom ripped up. It was time to move onto the next phase of the restoration.
We all got together before moving onto the next project down stream.
We piled into the three cars that had authorization to enter the restricted zone. We drove through the golf course and to the edge of the canyon that overlooks the Puget Sound.
"In 1833, the Hudson's Bay Company set up shop on the site in a trading post called Fort Nisqually. The company raised livestock and crops to sell to Russian outposts in Alaska, customers around the Pacific Rim and back home in Britain. Some of the trees planted at the fort still bear fruit. (Fort Nisqually's buildings were moved in 1934 to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma.) In 1994 the site was donated to the Archaeological Conservancy, a national preservation organization.
The 1833 site can still be viewed today as golfers play on DuPont's championship golf course, The Home Course. In fact it is rumored that the first settlers to the area created a six-hole golf course, which would become the first golf course in the Pacfic Northwest.
In 1841, the bluff overlooking Puget Sound and the mouth of Sequalitchew Creek served as an observatory for a major U.S. scientific expedition. At what is now Northwest Landing, members of the expedition under Captain Charles Wilkes set up an observatory (Wilkes Observatory), charted lower Puget Sound and designated landmark names still in use today."
We walked out to the view point and listened to the guy who was in charge.
This is Jerry, he takes care of the trail. He carved the benches you see him here with. They were placed near the Observatory marker.
We walked down as a group on the switchback trail, it was very steep but very beautiful. We passed lots of old trees, ferns, downed trees and saw the creek cut through the valley floor.
We got to the area where we were going to tear down another fence.
Together we got it down in less than an hour.
Since we were down here and we were done cleaning up we walked towards the Puget Sound to see the view. They used to use this railroad to transport dynamite. Some of the geocachers found Riding the Rails 2.
It was nearing noon and we were getting hungry. We started walking back, this time up the public trail. We should have brought our gps's because there were like 8 or 9 of them along the trail back up to City Hall. Mom took pictures as we walked up the hill.
Once we got back to the car at City Hall, we grabbed the gps and looked for the ones nearby. We found Creek Trailhead.
Here is some more information about the history of the area, the creek and what we did that day.
http://www.dupontwa.com/history.htm
http://nisqually-sequalitchew.com/blog/2011/03/20/four-projects-completed-march-19-2011/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sequalitchew/5541744957/in/photostream/
We piled into Derek's car and hit the next closest, How Not to be Seen #1. We got out and found it under a reflector on a telephone pole. This was Derek's 200th find.
We decided we were hungry and needed food. We found a Subway and sat down and ate. It felt good to sit for a while. It was nearing 1:15 when we left and found a few in the area.
We started out with Addiction #16, part of Ohjoy's altoid series. She stole all the places in Dupont too. We saw some kids messing around the statues while we walked toward them. Kids left, found cache quickly and took some pictures.
We were running out of time and we all decided we wanted to be in Bonney Lake early because of all the interest in the event. If we got there late, it might be hard to find a place to sit. We found two more in the area. Addiction #28 and Dupont Trail, situated in a forest area in a townhouse/apartment development. We walked down the trail and the hint kinda confused us..."crook of double next to rear left leg," hmmm. Then someone read the title to us and it made more sense. We got closer and found this really cool tree that did look like an elephant. We got back to its left leg and found it in a tree. We were disappointed because the cache was not an altoids container.
We found the other trail head towards the Dupont Trail cache. I asked Maggie what the hints and other info on the cache. I asked what size it was and she looked at it wrong and said micro. I grabbed the ammo can and said, are you sure? We all laughed. There was a travel bug in there so we discovered it.
We dropped Maggie off at her car and had her follow us there. On our way to Do You Feel Lucky? We got there about 2:20 and mingled with some of the other people. We even had some time to discover a bunch of trackables. Some people ordered pizza and drinks. More and more people started showing up, way more than the host intended. At some point Maggie came back and said that all but one table in the pizzeria had name tags. We played an ice breaker bingo games, he told us about upcoming events and had a raffle for door prizes. Maggie and Derek won a prize from the bingo game and Derek and I won a prize from the raffle. It was a coin. One more to add to my trackables collection. :)
One of the old men told us that there was a cache behind the pizza place. That's the first place we went after taking pictures of the car travel bugs. We got our gps's ready and headed out behind the KFC. The trail took us right to it. This one was called BBQ Chicken and it was a pretty awesome cache.
As we walked away, three other cachers looked for the chicken cache. We pointed them towards the right direction. Dereks gps lead us to nowhere so we turned around and looked for Evil (C)ammo 8. We found out it was on the other side of 410 near the Papa Murphy's. We walked to it and saw it was by one of those green power boxes. This time it wasn't on the green box but next to it.
We walked back across 410 for our next one and a lady yelled to us, "if you go to that one over there, with all the people by it, you'll get a co-FTF!" We hustled over. It was called, The French call it "Suriphobia". There were almost 15 people over there laughing and having a good time. They were waiting for it to post because it was one of the guys' caches. They said not to post it online until one of their buddies comes to look for it. He said he'll poop his pants when he sees that 28 people signed the log before he did and before it posted. Haha.
As a large group we went and found The Awesome Power of Nature. It was another cache done by one of the guys with us. He stepped back and watched us find it. Eventually my gps lead me right to it. Some guy reached over and grabbed it off the tree.
Most of the people we were geocaching with are from the area so they've found most of the ones around here already. We broke off into mini groups, some went home and some went finding more. We headed over to Trick or Treat. The cache was easy to find but the log was more difficult to get to. This was similar to An Eggcelent Cache in Lacey.
We put all the eggs back in and decided to hit the woods. There were five of them out there. The first one was Oliver's Superman Birthday Cache. We headed closer to it and we saw some movement. There were other geocachers in the area. They were trying to hide from us. Haha. They told us that the cache contents were all over the place and they just finished picking them up. The inside of the cache was soaked. Fozzie Bear acted like a huge sponge. You could wring him out. We couldn't sign the log book so we were going to log it and tell the owner there needed to be some huge maintenance on the cache.
Next was the Branch Prediction, a little further in the woods. Our gps lead us to a tree, we searched it out...a few minutes later mine took me to another tree. Low and behold, a film canister attached magnetically to the tree trunk. I took it down and passed it around for everyone to sign.
We headed down the trail towards another birthday cache, Ethan's Batman Birthday. We got to know our group additions as we walked around the woods. We got to the GZ and it looked like someone(s) had built themselves a campfire and forgot their sleeping bag. It was kind of a sketchy place for a family-friendly cache. One of us let the owner know in our online log.
There was one more cache in the forest loop we made, Bethany's 7th Birthday Cache. We took the little trail back towards the businesses and the parking lot. We reached the cache and Derek made the find.
We headed out of the woods and onto our next find, Curb Your Addiction. We all knew it would be in the parking lot of Fred Meyers...but where? I thought it might be a part of the yellow parking space block but I went to far over and I heard Maggie yell, found it! The log book was wet but we decided to write on it anyway. We let the cache owner know to change the book. It was a clever hide. We exchanged information so we all could be contacted later on. I found out that two of the ladies had season tickets to the Storm games. I told them that my friend Shauna had season tickets as well and I go often. We headed back toward the cars and it was time for Maggie to go home. She's been up for a long time and needed some sleep.
The ladies expressed interest in doing another one down the road called Beam Me Up Scottie. You had to bring a TV remote control and there was a LED receiver to show you what to do next. Once you found the red lights the cache would be 11 feet to the right. We met up, put the coords in the gps and off we went. There was a rock wall behind some stores and it had to be in there. The coords took me right to a tree, so I assumed from the tree it would be 11 feet to the right and that's where I went. There were a bunch of snails hanging out. We all looked, and looked and looked for at least an hour. Two of the ladies had to take the little one home, it was getting late and she was getting cold. They drove off. We almost gave up. Two minutes later my mom found the cache behind the snail. I probably, along with everyone else, looked there at least 7 times. We couldn't believe it.
The remaining cachers went and found Bonney Lake Welcomes You. Derek's car gps had us going a bizarre way. We did an illegal move and turned left. The lady following us didn't see us turn. She had to go all the way down to the bottom and turn around. We felt really bad and hoped that she figured it out and found us. We found the ammo can pretty quickly.
We said our goodbyes and told her we had fun caching with her and her friends today. We headed back to Lacey. Derek with 216, me with 350, mom with 91 and Maggie with 25. It was a pretty good caching day. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment