Pinnacle Peak

It all started with a post on The South Sound Cachers group on Facebook.  I find this group very informative and a great way to plan trips with other cachers.  Chris (Mc3Cats) posted he was interested in hiking up Pinnacle Peak, which was in Enumclaw, about 25 miles from Rainier.  He wanted to know if anyone was interested and when and where to meet up.  No one expressed that much interest in it and I thought it sounded fun so I told him I would come.  I talked Bob, Bev and my mom into it as well.  All the information was hammered out and all we needed to now was to get ready for the hike and download all the caches we needed.

I grabbed the things I would need, made some sandwiches and Bob and Bev rolled up about 8:30.  We headed to Enumclaw via 512/167/410 and grabbed two on the way to the peak.  It was almost 10 so we out the parking coords into Nuvi.  Part of Mud Mountain Road was blocked of so we had to take the detour around.

When we arrived there were a bunch of cars parked along the road.  I knew most of those cars were non-cachers just enjoying the hike.  We spotted Chris and Ben and from there decided how we were going to tackle this.  We left our car, Ben and Chris drove to the other side to leave Chris's car behind so we all could be driven back after the hike.  While they dropped the car off, they had us look for the first one near the gate.  It was a 4/1.5 and all of us touched the cache at least twice without realizing it was the cache.  Chris and Ben got back and we had to have a hint from them to find it, lol.

We headed up the gradual elevation end and worked our way up to the top.  There were a few difficult spots and everyone was out of breath.  We got the first few caches on the way up.  One of them was a tribute/memorial for a Black Hawk that crashed on this peak on December 21, 2006.

 (http://www.komonews.com/news/4987776.html)

We got to a landing to wait for the others to catch up and the views were breath taking.  We could see the town of Buckley and because of the clouds we could not see Mount Rainier today.

 We reached an area that took us into the woods.  Autumn made the surroundings very beautiful.  Chris had told me about a challenge that took you all over King County to learn about how certain areas have been kept forest land for everyone to enjoy.  He gave me the link to check it out and told me about the caches and the passport so we can stamp all the ones we've been to.  Apparently, Pinnacle Peak is the furthest south.  One down, 18 more to go to get the coin.

There were lots of trails and if you didn't have a guide, have been up here already or a GPS with maps, you could get turned around.  We're glad this sign was here, haha.  No, I thought it was funny so we got a picture of it.

 The terrain started getting steeper and steeper.  Bob, Chris and I had to go off and grab one on another trail while Ben, mom and Bev headed up the hill.  We grabbed it and headed on back towards the top.  Wow, was that climb exhausting. I know for a fact Bev was mad at Bob and I for making her walk up a mountain.  I knew she would forgive us after a few days.

Then we got to the hardcore part.  We had to climb up basically a natural staircase to the top.  I had to stop a few times to catch my breath.  Chris and I headed off of a spur to grab another cache off the beaten path.  Some other hikers walked by and talked to us for a bit about caching.  They've done it in the past.  We joined our group near the top.  Ben told us about the lookout on the tippy top.  It used to be a building and now is just benches for people to enjoy.

We got to the earthcache and that's where we decided to have lunch.  Just before busting out the sandwiches, we got our picture and got the answers taken care of.  We found a wide spot in the trail and started eating our food.

A few people and some dogs walked by as we were eating lunch.  About 15 minutes later we were heading down the peak.  We stopped at the more picturesque basalt columns.

And now the descent down the steeper side of the peak.  There were about 5 or 6 down the hill.

Ben, Chris, Bob and I went for one that took us a while to pin point.  Meanwhile, Sue and Bev made their way down the peak.  I ended up finding it shoved up a hole in the tree, about 60 feet off the coords.  The hint was terrible.  We made our way down, grabbing the caches as we went.  We got to the bottom and found Sue and Bev standing in the parking area.  We grabbed the letterbox nearby, the original coords were horrible, so we used the coords Chris found on the cache page.  We used our stamps.

We drove back to where we had parked originally and Ben wanted to show us some cool caches in the area by a guy named roadtrip.  They were pretty creative.  One was in a rock wall, one was near a bridge hidden really well and the other was in an metal arbor.  I touched it twice before realizing it was the cache.

We found a TB hotel and one more placed by Ben and Jayme before calling it quits and heading home.  It was a fun day had by all and we're looking forward to the next caching adventure.  :)