Saturday, January 12

Renton and May Creek

My alarm went off around 7.  Bob was picking me up around 7:30.  I got all my stuff ready the night before including my lunch.  I used the bathroom, put my clothes on because it was going to be a cold one.  Layers are magnificent.  I saw the truck headlights coming down the driveway...we were on our way to Renton. 


We went into Spanaway, got onto 512 through Puyallup, onto 167 and merged onto the 405 towards Renton/Bellevue. We really weren't sure how to go about the May Creek area so we figured it out as we went.  We found out we were on the wrong side of the creek but managed to grab one before driving to the right side of the creek.  We found legit parking but did not find any parking coords for the area...



We started with the mail truck cache I found interest in a few weeks ago.  How do people find these things and how are the preserved from the public?  I was stoked!




After finding the mail truck cache and taking pictures, we did the May Creek multi, which was somewhat confusing but not at the same time.  It was a very pretty walk.  Too bad the leaves had fallen already.



We must have done the multi right because it led us right to it.  For some reason when we have questionable, not very clear, multis we do them wrong.   Yay!  We moved on to the northwestern part of the trail.

We walked past, what we assumed was another cacher because he looked the part, a tall man in sweatpants staring into his phone.   We got to the treehouse cache and found out the man was indeed another cacher by the name of Fish Soup.  


The cache was about 100 feet from the actual tree house next to a pile of old logs/stump pieces.  Bob was on that one right away.  We continued to the next one.  The next few caches were pretty straight forward and right off the trail.  We completed a mc3cats puzzle the night before.  It was a cipher cache so I learned a little bit about ciphers.  It hadn't been found since October.  We had a hard time zeroing in on it.  By the time we found it, our GPS said 140 feet off!  

We got to the end of the trail of caches and near the other set of parking coords.  We found an area that had a trail come through at one point.  It was built in the 1880's and torn down in the 1920's.  The trestle that they dug up left footprints in the ground.  We had trouble locating that one too but we eventually did.  Then a few people walked by and I assumed they were doing the same thing we were doing and they were.  We introduced ourselves on the run.  

Our next cache was a pretty hardcore one.  We had to take a steep trail down to the creek, snake our way to a log to cross the creek, without falling off, there was a lot of frost on the moss attached to the tree trunk.  I made it across without any problems.  Bob tried to find his balance and had to go back and get a stick to help him across. 


I started on the old stump and he met me a few minutes later.  We looked and looked and looked.  We knew it was going to be a hard one.  Finally I got the idea of climbing up on top and searching.
 
There it was.  A black container with a green lid smiling down on us.  I grabbed it and threw it down to Bob, he signed our names.  We put it back, walked back over the log bridge and back up the hill to the main trail.  

We walked back to where we parked the truck.  We were exhausted.  We scarfed down our sandwiches we brought in our lunchboxes.  We moved into the housing developments for caches.  There were about 7-10 northwest of where we were.  Some of them required us to walk down a short trail...some uphill, and some required us to bushwhack.

I hate sticker bushes.

We had some help from some kids at a cache on the Newport Hills overlooking Lake Washington and Seattle in the background.  They were Seahawk fans and were really excited about the game tomorrow.  We moved onto another area before calling it for the day.  We found a gnome and the cache was in its butthole.  We giggled.


We got a few more and started for home.  The traffic wasn't bad.  We came out with 20 for the day and had to come back up to Renton for the WSGA holiday party and the same grange from September.

Next adventure:  Covington, Washington.

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