WSGA Campout 2013

I’ve always wanted to go to a WSGA campout.  I tried going to the one last year but that wasn’t going to happen.  It was too far north, I didn’t have the money or the vehicle to get me there.  I knew it had published so in January I put a maybe on the will attend log.  I had no idea what Bob or Bev would want to do and not sure if my mom would want to go with me.  For months I tried to figure it out.  While I was with Brenda and Ray on the ET Highway, they told me a little bit about what they had planned and where exactly it was going to be. 

The day got closer and closer.  Many things came up.  I knew around May I would not be able to camp but maybe pull off a day visit on the Saturday.  It would have been fun to camp.  The day got closer and closer and I almost could not go because of a yard sale that almost happened but didn’t.  Mom had Saturday sew but planned not to go but to help a co-worker move but she ended up not needing help.  She went with me instead.

Doug came home for the weekend and ended up going with dad and grandpa to Oregon to help at the Dexter rental.  Mom and I did a few chores before heading down to the Columbia Gorge.  I downloaded a query that followed Hwy 14 from the event out.  It didn’t quite make it to Washougal and Camas.  We didn’t go down there to get a ton of them but to get certain ones that would fill in my cities and towns challenge.  I am getting close to being done.  51 more to go! 

I knew we had a lot of time to get down there.  According to the Nuvi, we would be there sometime around 1:15.  If we stopped, time would be added accordingly.  I needed to get at least one in Bonneville for the challenge.  We stopped off the highway onto a side road and grabbed one underneath a bridge.  Once I got underneath the bridge, finding the cache was easy.  I went to the next cache and it took us to Fort Cascade, along the Columbia River. 

We put the parking coords into Nuvi and followed her directions.  It took us to a neatly paved parking lot with a biffy (bathroom in the forest for you), something I learned at Girl Scout camp many years ago.  I used the facilities before joining up with mom.  We took a few pictures of the Bonneville Dam and then took the self guided tour of the fort.  Due to time constraints, we only did part of the loop.  The part that we did do was very informational.

We started at the Warren Fishwheel-1894.  Here, they scooped enormous quantities of fish from the river.  The narrow part of the river created an ideal setting for the use of these machines.  Entrepreneurs in the fishing industry, from the 1880's to the 1920's used fishwheels for the main harvest of this valuable food source.  The salmon would shipped several miles downstream to be processed at the cannery in Warrendale, Oregon.  Fishwheels ceased to operate in 1934 when they were outlawed in the state of Washington.

We did the mini loop backwards and the next point of interest brought us to McNatt's Grave-1861, which was number 14 on the list.  Thomas McNatt's gravestone stands alone in the trees along the Fort Cascades Trail. Once a flat and broken marker, it has since been restored by the US Army Corps of Engineers and stands upright, braced by a supporting steel back.

Thomas and Ellen McNatt built a hotel and tavern in 1858 along the main entrance road into the fort. After crossing the Great Plains in 1853, the McNatts lived on the Clatsop Plains north of present-day Seaside and a year later settled at the Middle Cascades. The McNatts temporarily fled the Cascades in 1856 for two years during the Indian wars, after which they returned and established their business. He operated a hotel, barn and stable until his death in 1861 after a lengthy illness. McNatt’s grave lies within a tract of land that was later set aside by his widow as a deeded cemetery.

We moved onto the Cascades Portage Railroad-1863 and our second cache of the day.  It covered a distance of six miles from the Lower Landing on Hamilton Island to the Upper Landing just downstream of Stevenson, Wash.  As this section of the railroad became obsolete, Frank Warren used a segment of the track in conjunction with is tramway and fishery operation.

The next part of the trail brought us to the Warren Portage Tramway, this is where the fish were transported from the fishwheel to the cannery.  It was built in the late 1890's and operated until 1930.  We took the .01 mi short cut to the next cache along the smaller trail next to the river.  There was a great view of the other part of the Bonneville Dam.  Mom took pictures as I grabbed the cache.

We walked a large chunk of the trail back towards the car and stopped one more time at the next point of interest, the 1894 flood.  While in the area, we noticed that the trail began to lose elevation and dropped several feet towards lower ground.  This change in the terrain resulted from the great flood of 1894, the Columbia's highest recorded waters of all time.  We were standing along the river's meander line or the floodwater's edge.  The river's scouring action removed at least several feet of soil that covered Fort Cascades site and exposed the many boulders lying by the trail.  We saw several large boulders along our walk.  It was crazy to imagine the power and force of the flood waters that altered this landscape so drastically.

We finished the last few feet of the tour and got back in the car and drove to Timberlake Campgrounds.  We passed Beacon Rock, a place we visited about three weeks ago and the Bridge of the Gods.  I asked mom if she wanted to go across and back, she said maybe another time.  We drove through Stevenson and noticed the town was having a bluegrass festival across the way.  We followed Nuvi's directions up a long winding hill.  We saw the turn off and made our way to the check-in.  A truck was in the way.  I waited a few minutes and paid my $4 day use fee.  He told me where to park and we grabbed our stuff and went inside the lodge.  I was greeted by Brenda.  She got us our goody bags and I shared the ET Highway scrapbook I made with her.  Ray showed up and gave it a look as well.  We got all situated.  I left my scrapbook and coins out to look at and discover.  We decided to go find the two caches inside the camp area.

The first one we went after was up along the treeline of the dog walk area.  We found that one pretty quick.  We moved onto the next one on the south side of the camp.  That one required us to do a little bushwacking until we came to a clearing.  There were lots of downed trees.  I knew it had to be near one of them.  We had a little trouble at the beginning because of the jumpy coords.  I just started looking behind the logs and eventually found it.

We walked back to the lodge and there we remained until we left.  I talked to Sean, Jo, Margaret (Flutey), Tumbleweed2 with trackables, Mike, JD, Lisa, Ben and Jayme and several others in passing.

Brenda mentioned that we should go and participate in the GPS accuracy competition.  I walked out there and got my flag and the coords and went where my GPS zeroed out.  I went back out there with a slight change in the coords and it was about the same spot so I left my flag there.  Somehow I talked mom into going out there and putting a flag down.  She wouldn't use the GPS so I just said to go out there and do a blind guess.  She walked out there and put down her flag somewhere between my flag and Sean's.  She ended up winning a WSGA coin and her guess was within 14 inches of the coords.

It was getting closer and closer to dinner time.  The grills were fired up, Brenda started putting stuff on the table and everyone added their dish, dessert or goodie to the dinner table.  I felt bad because we didn't bring anything but it turned out we didn't need to because there were so many leftovers.

The WSGA treasurer finally got there so Ben came and got our money for dinner.  We bought a few more raffle tickets for the upcoming raffle drawing.  There were over $500 worth in raffle items.  Brenda and Ray got donations from Cabela's, Walmart and several of the other geocachers.  They even donated their own money for prizes.

It was now 6 and the start of the food frenzy. I grabbed myself a hamburger, some chips, potato salad and a handful of fruit.  We brought our own drinks.

At about 7, is when we had our WSGA meeting.  Brenda opened it up and handed it off to Ben to discuss the Washington State Parks Geotour.  He told us how well it was going and rattled off some impressive overall stats.  I was wowed.  Then Kristine got up and shared some information about the APE event coming up in the middle of August.

And now the raffle.  It took about an hour and a half to finish.  There were so many prizes.  Between mom and I, we had 8 raffle tickets.  We all laughed a lot, tons of jokes and lots of memorable moments.  Just about every caching family/cacher won something.  I came home with a Cabela's multi tool knife.  As soon as we got to the end, some little girl, I don't know who she belonged to, came in out of breath and said there was a kid lighting paper on fire and throwing it into the woods.  Sean immediately got up to check it out.  We really didn't need another forest fire in the area.  About an hour and a half east and north of Goldendale, a raging fire was having its way with the forest.  They actually closed US 97 for a few days and closed Brooks Memorial State Park.  One a lot of cachers were hoping to do this weekend.

It was almost 9, I said goodbye to Brenda and Ray and thanked them for a wonderful campout/event.  We used the bathroom and I grabbed a pop for the road.  We had a long drive ahead of us with two stops along the way.  We got in the car and headed for home.  I plugged home coords into Nuvi and she said we would be home around midnight.

Luckily there wasn't that much traffic heading west on Hwy 14.  We got to our first stop, Washougal.  I needed a cache here for my towns and cities challenge.  We had to go to three places to find a cache that was there.  It was dark so I had to use a flashlight to find one up in a tree.  Got it!  Mom wanted ice cream so we stopped off of Mill Plain at the Dairy Queen.  It took a long time to get my fries (it sounded good at the time, but once I got them about 15 min later, I really didn't feel like them anymore) and mom had already eaten her ice cream when they showed up.  The guy told us sorry for the wait and he gave me more than I ordered because we had to wait for them.  We got back onto 205 and then north on I-5.   When we got off the freeway on exit 88, the moon was very cool.  I think it was a super moon night.

We rolled into our driveway about 12:15 a.m.  It was a fun adventure and I got to talk to friends and make some new ones.

Next Adventure:  Relay for Life