Maple Valley/Black Diamond, Take II

I really didn't want to get out of bed this morning.  It was freezing, I was tired from the day before and for some reason I knew this day was going to be longer than anticipated.  I got up, used the facility, got my clothes on as fast as I could, grabbed my stuff and my lunch box, locked the door and met Bob at the truck rattling in the driveway.  He had already put my bike in the back.  I opened my trunk and grabbed the tire pump, just in case.  I crawled up into the truck and we were on our way to Maple Valley, this time the Cedar Creek area.

We had no idea how physical this was actually going to be. 

We broke this area up into four different parts to make it less intimidating.  I was intimidated on the drive up here.  Plus I was tired from getting up so early this morning.

We got to the first section of caches along the Maple Valley Pipeline, there were five caches waiting for us.  They were easy and progressively got harder and harder in difficulty and terrain.  Most of them were Tupperware lock n lock containers.  One had us go down a steep trail only to punish us when we had to walk back up it.  It was a chilly bike ride that early in the morning.

We rode back to the truck and Bob stopped to get his gum and rode along the pipeline on the other side of the road.  This second section was way tougher.  There were a couple of hills that murdered us on our mountain bikes.  We got to one and the coords were really off.  I mean over 150 feet off.  Then we read the cache page and found out someone had posted closer coords so we used those ones.  While to the cache site, we saw this raccoon and it was laying weird.  We weren't sure if it was still alive so Bob threw rocks at it.  We really didn't want it to come after us and rip our faces off.  It was dead.

I made my way to the cache while Bob stayed up with the bikes.  It was a cache with a dinosaur head on it.  Kinda weird.  We moved on down the trail and saw some people walking their dog.  The next two took us off the pipeline and into a horse trail forested area.  There was frost and ice everywhere.

We rode back to the truck which was rough because of that hill.

We drove on the other side of the Cedar River to do part of the trail we left off of the last time we were here.  We barely found a parking spot, got our bikes out and hit the trail again.  Some of them required us to climb up hills.

It was getting rougher and rougher as we went throughout our day.  Our legs were already burning from our bike ride.  We reached one that took us down a hill towards the river.  The guy had a large PVC pipe that he covered in moss.  It really looked like a large branch covered in moss.  We weren't fooled.  We found other creative caches that we enjoyed looking for.  We reached the end of the cache trail so we turned around and went back to the truck.

We took a large detour and picked up a few as passed them, getting to our third section of trail for the day.  By this point I was starving but really had no time to navigate Bob, juggle GPS's and eat food all of the same time.  Plus Bob didn't bring a lunch so it wasn't important to take a break and eat.  Luckily I had a cliff bar to munch on to take the hunger away.

We parked at our third section of trail, got our bikes out and were on our way down the other side of the pipeline.  Most were easy grabs.  There was one that was part of the King County Parks GeoTour, we already got one of our stamps from Pinnacle Peak a few months ago.  We didn't have our passports so we had to stamp on a piece of paper and tape it to the paper later.  A few of them took us on side horse trails and there was one with a great view of the Cedar River from above.  It was about a 150 foot drop from where we stood.

We went as far as we could until there weren't any more caches on our map.  We rode back towards the truck, took a rest and rode our bikes to the Cedar River Trail.  This would be the fourth and final stretch of trail for the day.  We were getting tired.  There were ten along this trail and this was roughly around 2:30-3:00 that afternoon.  We had about two hours to do them in.

The coords jumped around a lot at this location.  There was a bunch of USGS stuff nearby, not sure if that messed around with the GPS or not.  This one took us a while to find but we prevailed!  This use to be a zipline across the river.  Not sure when they stopped using it.

A little further down the trail was one that we had to do some crazy walking up hills to get to.  We were only 80 feet from it on the trail but had to walk over 700 feet just to get to it the correct way.  We found a quad trail that led us right to it.

We had a few that gave us trouble because the coords bounced in the woods.  They weren't hard finds there was just so much to look through.  There was one called Walking the Tree Line, we literally had to walk down a maze of trees to get to the cache, it even included walking over a log across the creek.  I gave it a favorite point.

Then came one by the same guy with the tree line that was on the edge of the river.  It was a pipe covered in moss to make it look like tree branches again.  Except this time we had to dump water in it from the river.  Remember it's frozen outside.  I got the water, dumped it in but we never saw a hole where the water comes out eventually, plus the cache never floated to the top.  Uh oh.  We had to take the hiding spot apart to dump the water and cache out.  It clearly was suppose to float because it had corks on the bottom of the peanut butter jar.  Whoops.

We moved along because we knew it was going to be dark soon.

We got a couple past the small bridge, those were easy and not onto some walking ones along the other side of the trail next to the river's edge.  One was at a tree that looked like an octopus.  We had a duh moment there.  The next one was a bone someone put a bison tube in.  The temperature was getting warmer and we heard huge splashes nearby.  The cliff above the river had tons of icicles that were breaking off and splashing in the river.  Some of the sounded like gun shots.  We went to the last one and the daylight started to disappear.  It was an ammo can that's been out since 2002!

We rode our bikes back to the truck and passed several people walking dogs.  My legs felt like jello.  I know Bob was hurting.  We got back to the truck and went back into Maple Valley, it was 5 on the dot and still had a smidgen of daylight left.  We had warm food at McDonald's or we like to call it McBob's, because he loves going there.  We used the restroom, washed the grime off our hands and scarfed down our dinner.  I was starving.

We got home about 7ish, I took a shower, logged my finds and went to bed.  I was exhausted.

Next Adventure:  Buckley/Enumclaw, Wash.