Saturday, September 1

Psycho Vertigo

Since I've been geocaching I've always wanted to do those rare 5/5 caches.  I did one back in 2011 near home and it turned out to be a hoax.  At best, it was a 2.5/3 near Lawrence Lake.  Oh well.  I made up for it when I went out towards Shelton with Bob, Mike and Jose.  Bob wanted his 7,000th cache milestone to be memorable.  This cache would be my 3900th milestone.

I was picked up around 10 that morning and we went and grabbed Mike and Jose.  We were on our way towards Shelton.  We had to get a few so Psycho Vertigo would be the 7,000th cache.  Bob had them all planned out and on a list.  Sky Diver 2.0 and Tony's Can were our first for the day.  We tried to get Jose as involved as we could.  We headed north on 101 and found a few more to grab on the way up to the railroad trestle.  Electrifying View was quite the hike up the side of the hill.  When we got to the cache zone there was a car that had been abandoned and parted out.  It hadn't been there long because the license tabs expired March 2013.  Mike took a few things out of it.  The coords were off and it had me and Jose wandering all over the hill.  Bob found it from the road inside a stump.  I thought we were looking for a regular, not a micro.  Whoops.  The view from this location was pretty cool.  You could see the Skokomish River.


We headed further down the road to a small park to get Skokomish River story.  We thought we had the coords for a puzzle cache nearby but I didn't have my puzzle book and it would have been a hike up the hill.  We were excited to get our Psycho Vertigo on.  We still needed to get a few more before going to the bridge.

When we got to the road we needed to be on there were a few more to grab along the way.  Pre-Landslide and Skokomish View were quickly found, signed and put back.  Now that our count was right, we headed for the parking coords for Psycho Vertigo.  Nuvi took us to the wrong area so we scouted it out a bit before finding where we needed to be.  We parked the truck and grabbed the things we would need for about a mile and a half walk there and back.  I took my fannie pack with pens, toilet paper (you never know) and a bottle of water.  I took my phone with me (even though there isn't any service out there) and my camera.  We set out.


There were lots of downed trees along the trail that we had to step over.  The horseflies were really bad.  I first thought they were bees.  I really did not want to get stung out here.  Bob told us they were horseflies.  We took caution.  We chatted about random things while we walked to the railroad bridge.  We reached a part of the trail that looked like a large landslide took it out at one time.  Then it was a huge uphill walk for a few minutes.  Then we rounded the bend and there it was...


I was absolutely stoked!  I can't believe we were here doing a REAL 5/5 cache!  We started across looking for the first waypoint of the multi.  Up here you really had to go one step at a time.  For all of you who are afraid of heights, yeah you shouldn't even try this.  You look down once and you're running back to the trail with your tail between your legs.  I'm very thankful I am not afraid of heights.



We knew the first wp was a washer on the top of the bridge.  We didn't spend too much time looking for it because we knew where to go.  We headed to the southern edge of the bridge and climbed down.  The first section we walked down was doable without a rope.  We did a lot of speculating because we didn't have coords to the cache.  Bob read some of the logs, I looked at some of the logs and pictures, Kenny did this a few years ago so we had a lot of information to find the cache.  We found the rope and headed down.  It was a little steeper than the Ring of Fire cache that we did last May.


As we descended, we had to go one section at a time to avoid being hit by rocks and debris.  Bob did get hit in the leg by a pretty substantial rock.  At one point I could have been hit in the head by a rock but luckily I was off to the side.  Wp 2 was suppose to be hanging near the rope but we didn't bother looking because people have had trouble finding it.  I was the first down the bank, Bob and Mike followed after.  Jose stayed up by the ropes.  We got to the truss and started looking.  According to the last log, the cache had fallen from its hiding spot and they tucked it away somewhere else.  I automatically started climbing up the truss because I knew that's where it was suppose to be.

 
I didn't find anything.  Mike came up the truss and looked for a bit.  We both climbed down and Mike said, FOUND IT!

What?  Really?  It's down there?

We all knew it was suppose to be up in the truss.  We really didn't see how it would stay though, unless it was bolted or tied.  Oh well, we found it and we had fun.  We signed it and put it back where we found it.  (We made a note of it in our log.)

We started back up the steep bank.  For some odd reason I was looking around while I waited for Bob to shimmy up the rope, I found the film canister for wp2.  I couldn't believe it.  Inside were a bunch of strips of paper with coords on them.  I took one just because.  We continued up the rope to the top of the hill.  Then we climbed up to the tracks.  Mike and Jose were talking to some young people who were trying to get down to the river.  Honestly, I wouldn't even begin to know how to get to the river.  Even from where we just were by the cache.

We walked back across the trustle and enjoyed the scenery as we trudged on.



We got back to the trail and started walking back to the truck.  I looked at my GPS and discovered that there was another cache that we just walked past.  We turned around and grabbed it quickly.  The horseflies were really bothering me.  We hurried back so we could grab other caches in the area.

We went and got Revenge of the Stumps, which took us a while to figure out how to get to it.  Once there, the view was breath taking.  I wish it would have been clearer so we could have seen Mount Rainier a little better and Mount St. Helens.


This was our last find for the day.  It was getting late and we headed back towards Shelton.  On the way we stopped to look for the 40 non micro challenge cache and it was taken.  Sad, maybe another time.  I did write to the owner and they're gonna replace it as soon as they can.  We had a hamburger at McDonald's and went home.  We dropped off Mike and Jose and Bob dropped me off at my house.  I uploaded pictures and wrote my logs.

The next two days my legs were so sore.  I didn't realized we worked that hard getting up that rope.

Next Adventure: Ape Caves near Mount St. Helens.

No comments: