On cue, we stopped at the Toutle Lake rest stop. I sat in the car and Facebooked.
We got back on the freeway and took the first exit to Castle Rock. There we grabbed a few puzzles I solved the night before. It felt great knocking out some puzzles. Sadly, one was missing.
We grabbed a few others in town while we were there. We had to find a way to get across the river for a few and Bob remembered a road that led to a park. We went out there for a while. Around 10ish, we headed west to the group of them we came for. Bob stopped for a couple he had gotten already for me to get since we drove by them.
We got to gate, parked the truck and put our rain gear on. We were going to get soaked. We were disappointed the walk didn't go in a circle. We went up one side, walked back and then walked up the other side and back. Some were hard to get to and others were right off the road.
It rained most of the time, a bit off and a bit on. Luckily, we were in the trees when it did most of its raining. We got up to the last one of that walk and it was missing! A lot of the ones we've found so far were last found in Dec or Aug of 2011, over a year! We didn't go that far to not find a container so we left a piece of paper underneath some rocks just to prove we were there.
It was over a half a mile hike up the hill and back. We got one more and then started back to the truck for the next grouping of caches. We saw a lot of creeks snaking their way through the trees and brush.
We made it to the right road and went from there. The first one we tried looking for wasn't there. So we moved onto our second hike of the day. Another gated dirt road off into some trees. At this point I needed 3 more to reach 4500 caches.
This series of three were called the Off Road Caches. The difficulty and terrain would give me another square on my fizzy challenge. Plus, these were definitely for seasoned cachers just because the GPS doesn't work well under forest like that. No problem for Bob and I. We grabbed all of them without any problems. One of the caches we found out in the open so we put it back as the hint suggested.
I got my 4500th cache!
We walked back to the truck and drove to the other two caches down the road. One was missing but we thought we would try it anyway since we had to turn around. No luck, it was missing. We got to the pull off next to the road overlooking the creek. For some reason the coords bounced around a lot. I went on top of the hill and Bob went down the hill next to the creek. Neither of us were close. We found it eventually in a crotch of a tree that we didn't see the first or second time.
From there, we headed south towards Longview and grabbed a couple before getting onto the freeway and jetting home. We listened to Ronnie Milsap, like we do every time we go on a long trip. I've actually learned most of the words since the first time I heard it last year. We got home about 5 and I immediately got out of my wet clothes, that gained 20 lbs, and jumped into the hot shower. Afterwards, I washed my clothes, ate dinner, relaxed and logged my caches.
Onto 4600!
Next adventure: Renton-ish
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