Ring of Fire, Wynoochie River, May 20, 2012

We had an idea to do an event at the Ring of Fire cache.  Chris (Mc3cats) got to it first.

I got an email a few weeks ago from Mc3cats asking me to come to his 3000th cache event at the Ring of Fire.  I was stoked.  I went to the cache page and put, you bet I'll be there.  We put it on the calender.  The day got closer and closer and was pretty upset that it might be raining at the event.  I was really hoping it wouldn't.  He added a few updates about the event over the course of three weeks.  Some cacher complained that having an event there would ruin the terrain.  It didn't matter because over 250 other cachers have gone down there since 2004.  The gate would be open for the event so we wouldn't have to hike the 2 miles in.  And since the storm someone went in with a chainsaw and cut the trees that fell across the road.

I got up at 8:30 and got ready to go.  I made my sandwich, got some chips and a pop and put it in my orange Scooby Doo lunch box.  I put some pants on knowing the terrain would be wicked (I really don't want any new scrapes and scratches on my legs) I wore my hiking shoes because of the good tread on them, no slipping for me and Underarmor, t-shirt, sweatshirt and my Frog Toggs jacket.  I grabbed my hat just in case.  My backpack of caching stuff came with me and now I was just waiting for Derek to drive up.  We were gonna drive Bob's truck but decided against it because it might be too much of a beast and take up a lot of room at the cache site.  Derek got there, I threw my stuff in the car and we were off to pick up Bob.  We grabbed Bob and his stuff and we were on our way to Montesano.  We were suppose to meet people at the Thriftway in town at 11ish.  The weather was so disappointing.  We had almost two weeks of awesome weather and it pooped out on us on the day I wished the sun would come out.

We got to the Montesano parking area and met up with some people I've never seen before and Art (Omnispirit).  We talked for a bit before the Kent group showed up, Terrible T's, Mc3cats, Tobias and Petronella.  They went inside the store to get some food before we head up the road towards Wynoochie Lake.  Mc3cats had to get three on our way up before we got to the actual event.  We followed them on the way up and grabbed the three that he needed.  The last time I went up this road it was gravel and that was back in July 2000, when I went camping with some people in high school.  It was great to see it paved.  We made it to the appropriate gated road, the gate was open for us and the event, and followed the SUV down the road.  It had lots of potholes, mud puddles and we had to swerve to avoid downed trees.  We came to a part of the road where someone barely chain sawed the trees wide enough for a car to drive through.

We turned around the last curve and saw all the vehicles. We were about a half hour late to the noonish meeting listed on the cache page.  We parked the car and got out and walked to where all the people were.  Apparently, some people got here earlier and already went down to the train.  We chatted to the people waiting to go down.  Some ate food and some just hung out.  I grabbed my sandwich and chips and ate before we went down.  Tallgirl84, who is from the Aberdeen area, definitely had the redneck thing going on.  She was dressed in Army cammo pants, boots, had a zip up jacket on for a while and underneath was a tank top, which she went down in after cramming her zip up in her back pack.  That didn't top it off yet.  She had a tall boy Hurricane High Gravity beer before heading down the hill.  He gathered everyone and we all headed down the less steep route.  We all wore gloves because the ropes would rip up your hands.  I flew down the hill with no problems.  Once I got down to the bottom, I was in awe.  What pretty scenery next to the river.

Looking south.

Looking north.

I started walking around since I had no idea where Derek or Bob was or when they would come down.   So I just continued taking pictures until I followed everyone to the cache.  I signed my name on the cache and saw Bob right behind me.  So I had him sign the book too.

The log book.

We took a few pictures of Bob and I with the train and Bob's sign for his 5700th cache at the Ring of Fire.  I can't believe he is that far along, but then again Bob is crazy and gets every cache in the area and then some. Some of our trips we usually grab over 50 each time and that adds up.  

We saw Derek come down the hill behind someone so I told him he better sign his name before they put the cache back.  We spent some time looking at the train from all the points of view and of course taking pictures.

Train wreck facing north.

Bob and Derek train wreck looking west.

My train pose.

Climbing back up the hill to the cars.

We took in as much as we could while it rained on us down at the train wreck.  We were one of the last group of people to climb back up the hill.  I flew up the hill after lagging behind taking pictures.  Tallgirl84 and KickerV were the last ones to come back up and after she made it to the top she cracked open another beer.  Wow, talk about defeating the purpose of being active.  It falls into the same category as working hard and then smoking afterwards.  Oh well.  Mc3cats got everyone together, had a few words and we went right into the raffle drawing.  About 12 people won a chance to grab something out of the bag.  Bob and I had our numbers called and got to grab a prize out of the bag.  We both grabbed a micro cache.  Then the whole group got together and took a picture to celebrate Mc3cats 3000th find as well as other cachers celebrating milestones.

The Ring of Fire gang.

We spent the rest of the time caching as we headed back towards Montesano.  I believe we grabbed 24 of them on the way home.  There were a couple park and grabs we did with other cachers so our Cooperation Challenge list got bigger.  I was very thankful we were caching with other people because Derek parked too close to the side of the road and it was quite soft.  When I opened the door and got out for the cache, I said to myself, uh oh...

I grabbed the cache, signed it, got back in the car and we were stuck...crap.

Luckily, Omnispirit, the Dutchgoers and Wingriders1998 were there to help pull us out of the ditch.  

 I really hope this situation never has to happen again.   We continued caching.  We found a cache in a glove, we went to one called Lunch Break and it took all of us (8 pairs of eyes) to miss it.  We must have been there for a half hour looking for a 1.5/1.5.  My gps kept taking me to this one spot.  I had to look one more time before we gave up.  I went down there and got tangled in a sticker bush.  I bent down to release it from my pant leg and happened to look up and there it was.  "Found it!"  Everyone was relieved.  Val was the hero.  :)

We continued down the road grabbing the ones off the side of the road.  We got in to Montesano and grabbed two more before calling it quits for the day.  We were hungry and tired and needed to dry off. 

I would totally go again.  The train wreck was that cool.   

N 47° 19.785 W 123° 38.595.

http://coord.info/GCJYHZ 

Next adventure:  Monopoly Series, Mt. St. Helens

Scappoose, Oregon

We've been putting off Scappoose, Oregon over and over again and filling our weekends with geocaching trips here and there. For some reason we didn't think of doing it during the week. So we came up with a date and it was officially put on the calender. Then the internet stopped working on Sunday so we couldn't do a query for Monday so we pushed it back to Tuesday. I never sleep very well the night before a big geocache outing. I don't know if it's because my alarm might not go off and I won't be ready or I'm just too excited to go or maybe a combo of both...?

My alarm went off and I got up and got everything I would need that day together. I put my clothes on, made a sandwich, etc. Then Bob showed up with his truck. He grabbed my bike and slung it in. We took the next hour and a half and talked about caching stuff. Cool ones we've encountered, fun stories about caching etc. We did stop for a potty break at the Toutle Lake Rest Area. There, I waited for Bob while I ate my Lucky Charms.

We got to Scappoose and headed to the beginning of the trail. We grabbed one before we actually parked and got our bikes out. We didn't realize that we were gonna have to go down hill and then back up it. So we decided to do a few and then ride back to the truck and then drive the truck to another parking spot...we did this three times so we didn't have to work as hard up the hill. When we got closer to town, we just parked the truck and walked to the close ones.


There was one multi near the beginning that we really enjoyed. We were given coords to a container and within the container was a door bell ding donger. From the coords, we had to walk 18 steps down the trail pressing the button we got until we heard a ding dong. We did, it was coming from a bird house and the cache was a few feet below it. It was very well put together. We both gave it a favorite point.


Most of the caches on the trail were hanging micros and smalls buried in moss, sticks and rocks. A typical power trail. I hit my 2800th cache while doing the CZ Trail.

We got into town and grabbed a few before we found the road we needed to be on to get to the rest of the trail caches. We ate snacks as we went from cache to cache in the truck. I brought a sandwich with me and Bob had some Cheetos.



We found the parking lot, parked the truck, grabbed the bikes and we were on our way to the end. We saw a few people walking their dogs and people with small children enjoying the nice afternoon. A few of them stumped us but we prevailed. We came across an evil micro and Bob made the find. We almost didn't find one but on our way back we grabbed it. It really depends on what angle you are looking at it from. The views from the trail were pretty cool, especially on a really nice day. We reached the end of the line and celebrated.



We rode back to the truck. Once we got back, we put the bikes into the truck and grabbed some down the road. There was one that really wasn't there so we moved on. We grabbed as many as we could along Highway 30. We grabbed one in the cemetery, near the cinemas, out by the airport.



There was even one we had to use the cooler for because we were both too short to reach it. One of our last stops was near the Scappoose Bay Marina. There was one we actually did not find that afternoon. We did get to talk to some people fishing near the area.


There was one called Dragon's Breath, at someone's actual house off of Hwy 30. It was a dragon head on a motorcycle. We could not help ourselves.

It was almost time to head back home. We grabbed a few more on our way north towards St. Helens. We could not end on a DNF so we got food at McDonald's and gas at the nearby Shell Station. I ran over to the Burgerville and grabbed one more just to end the day with a find. From there, we went all the way home. Traffic wasn't that bad and I was definitely tired when I got home. All in all it was a great day. We found 78 caches.

Next adventure: Ring of Fire

Seattle, May 1, 2012

Bob and Bev haven't been to Groundspeak so we decided to get a hold of one of the Lackey's and set up a date. Going off the weather for that week, Tuesday May 1, looked the best. So we went with it, hoping the weather turned out to be decent. I know it's a gamble living in western Washington.

My first time to Groundspeak was about last year right around this time.

The night before I did not sleep very well because I thought it would rain and our trip to Seattle would be ruined. When my alarm went off, ugh...it's 7:30 already? I got up, got ready, made sure I had food with me and put away the dishes and took out the garbage. By that time, Bob and Bev were out in the driveway waiting.

We headed out to our first spot. Near Angle Lake, a L-Shaped lake in between Pacific Highway and I-5. Bev found the first cache near the block facade. I went to take a picture of the lake and low and behold, socks! Side note: every time we go geocaching or have gone geocaching we've found socks near or around the cache zone. We headed off to the next one.



Now we were getting closer to SeaTac, you could hear the airplanes taking off and landing in the distance. The next one was on a fire hydrant near a hotel off of Pacific. Just as we were signing the log, we heard a truck slam on its brakes and screetch their tires to prevent them sliding into the intersection. This was at the intersection of 176th and 32nd street. As we were putting the cache back we heard pedestrians, "woah, did you see that truck? It almost hit someone...OMG, WOAH"...

We got back to the car and headed off to our others nearby. we found one near a library, a small park that didn't look like a park but someone's back yard and a really cool botanical garden.



By this time, we figured it was time to head to Seattle via the Nuvi. From where we were, it was easy to avoid I-5. Plus, we forgot about the riots that were about to happen downtown Seattle. Luckily those happened after we were in Seattle. We got stuck behind a train on our way to Pike's Place. We got to the piers and found a parking spot, paid our money and headed up to the market. We did all of the challenges that were on our list for that area. I took them to the gum wall.



Only to find out that the hiding place and the cache were changed since I was there last June. That was frustrating. Another side note: I emailed the cachers who found it yesterday, that's how I found out. Our time on the meter was running out so we had to abandon the gum wall cache for another day. On our way out the traffic was terrible and the train was ruining the flow, so we did something crazy that made my heart stop. We drove over the railroad tracks just as the lights and the gate came down. In other words, you probably should not have crossed the railroad tracks at that time.

It was getting to be lunch time and I had one more place on the list I thought everyone would enjoy. Up on Queen Ann Hill, Kerry Park!! I've always wanted to go there but for some reason other things got in the way or we ran out of time to go. This time we had plenty of time to go. We had the Nuvi direct us through downtown and up on Queen Ann. We found a place to park the car, grabbed our lunch and headed to the view. Wow. Why haven't we come here before now!! We ooed and awwed and sat down on one of the benches and ate our sandwiches. We noticed the helicopter hovering over the Seattle center/downtown area. We had totally forgotten about the crazy stuff going on downtown. We had just left the area that the riots had started up in. We took our pictures, looked for a few caches and decided that it was time to move on to Fremont.





Nuvi guided us over Queen Ann and to the bridge that takes you to Fremont. We drove to the address that the GPS was taking us to just to see where we were going. I knew it would be one of the buildings where the Block Party was last summer. We spend some time looking for a parking spot so we can go down to our appointment at Groundspeak. We found a place and walked down the hill. We looked at our time, oh man we're 45 minutes early. Let's go find the new traditional up the road. And that's what we did. It was near the library and it didn't take us long to find. We decided to do the Colorful Fremont multi. We had a hard time at first until I looked something up on my phone. Thank goodness for smart phones. So far it has gotten me out of some binds. We found the first waypoint, the second and the third but didn't have enough time to look for the final. It will have to wait until we were done at Groundspeak.

We walked into the building and took the elevator up to the 3rd floor. Their new office was so pretty...for lack of a better word. The lights and glass made it pretty. The lackey at the front desk greeted us and told us to sign our name and look at the trackables inside the chest. That's what we did for a few minutes. Then a kid from Denmark came in so we got to talk to him for a while. We took pictures, some with the Lackey's, some around the building and so on.







A couple from Michigan came in and was digging through the chest. We did our photo booth picture and were given a trackable for visiting. We finished the math on our multi and one of the lackey's gave us a hint on how to get to it easier. We said our goodbye's and were on our way to the final. We walked down the trail near the house boats towards the cache. We found the tree and started looking. The people who were here before us did not find the cache. But we kept on looking because the Lackey told us it WAS there. We looked and looked and looked. Circled the tree a few times. Got down on our hands and knees and dug through the tall grass. A few moments later, Bob came up with it. Yes!



We walked back to the car and headed out before the traffic got bad. Once on the freeway, it was stop and go until we got out of Seattle. It got slow around Federal Way and near Hwy 16 in Tacoma. We listened to some of the destruction caused by the May Day Riot on Seattle. I can't believe how stupid people are. Oh well. It was slow through Dupont and near Nisqually getting on to 510 to Yelm. The whole day it did not rain until we got on the freeway to come home. Go us. Next trip: Possibly Scappoose and St. Helens, Oregon on Monday May 7, 2012.