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.

Maple Valley, Black Diamond

I drug myself out of my bed.  I really didn't want to get up in the morning.  I probably stayed in bed way too long because as I was putting my shoes on I heard the diesel truck coming down the driveway.   I grabbed all my stuff, hustled to get my bike pump and realized I forgot about my walking pole.  Bob put my bike in the back of the truck and we were on our way to Maple Valley/Black Diamond.

It was sure foggy on the way there.  There wasn't a whole lot of traffic on the freeways which was a huge benefit on our time schedule.  Our goal today was to get around 40 caches if we could.  We had a plan to tackle everything west of Wilderness Lake.

We grabbed a couple on the way to Maple Valley, one near a church, one at a library and one at a community center with really old buildings.  It was pretty cool.  The cache near this old building was constructed pretty cleverly.  It looked like it belonged on the informational board.  I gave it a favorite point.

We grabbed all the ones in that area before moving on to another section of town.  We parked the truck in a housing development and grabbed our bikes and got on the trail for a multi we screwed up.  Haha.  We got two nearby and one at a small park.  We had to make sure the guy walking his dog didn't see what we were doing.  

We got back in the truck and went to the next section of caches.  This took us to the Lake Wilderness area.  We got out and parked near a housing development and saw that the trail we were looking for was behind all the houses.  There was a trail that led us in the right direction.  We also noticed that the forested area behind the houses was a arboretum.  

We spent some time in the arboretum wandering around looking for one cache.  We decided that we needed to be on the lodge side of the trail.  Before we drove over there, we stopped for a cache nearby.  A few years back someone had told me about a light bulb cache, not sure if they meant this one.  Pretty rad though. 

We corrected our mistake, drove over there and parked.  We found a mini trail from the lodge that took us to a small mushroom someone had made, we found the logbook inside, signed it and put it back.  From there, we waked around the lake to two more caches that were within walking distance.

There was ice on parts of the lake.  Also, nearby there were some kids playing that role playing medieval game.  They even had the costumes on and swinging fake styrofoam swords.  Bob and I just giggled.  We got back to the truck and moved it to the trail parking, got our bikes out and rode down the Wilderness Trail.  There were about 7 or 8 of them.

This was one of them.  The rest were your basic tupperware, ammo can, pill bottle caches.  One of the caches along the way made us go up a small hillside. I was wearing my shoes with really worn out soles, slipped and hit my elbow on the frozen ground, my gps slid almost all the way down the hill but Bob snagged it.  We reached the end of the cache load along the trail and headed back.  We were going to get the multis on the way back since they were along the other side of the trail.  The ride back was a lot quicker than riding there, there the trail was slightly at an incline.  We got back, found the arboretum multi and the peace one we did earlier that morning.  The peace one we messed up a few times but eventually figured it out.  We ate our sandwiches as we drove to the next section of caches.

We drove closer to Black Diamond into some housing developments.  There we got about five caches and a few along part of a trail behind a grocery store.

We looked on our map again and drove further south towards Black Diamond.  We made it to an area with a lot of buildings and patchy plots of forest.  

We had our first real DNF of the day.  It was out in this forest area where a lot of kids hang out and tons of garbage was everywhere.  There was a truck cab out in the brush and there was suppose to be a magnetic container on it.  It wasn't there.  We moved on to small pipeline area where we got two caches.  One was on the backside of a school and the other was in the woods near a creek.  We saw a cool tree while we were in there.

Roughly around this time it started getting dark.  Not right away but subtly.  We were a few away from 40 so we pushed it until it got dark.  We got one at a parking lot trail head, there we used the bathroom because it was there. It was an ammo can that was hard to get out of its place because it was frozen to the stump.

We had a hard time finding one on the side of the road but found it before we almost walked away and then one took us for a short hike out in the forest.  By that time it was almost too dark to see.  We had 39, we needed one more.  We found a quick one before we called it quits.  We had to use a flashlight to find it.  We got our number 40.  Bob asked on the way to Hwy 18 if there were any more along the way and there was a quick park and grab on Holmes Lake.  What a way to end the day, with a guardrail cache.  That was number 41 on the day.  I hit my 4600th milestone that day and we stopped at Arby's in Spanaway for some roast beef sandwiches.  I got home, logged my finds, took a shower and went to bed.  Long days tire me out.

Next adventure:  Maple Valley, Wash. take II.

Covington, Washington

I got up around 7 and started getting my stuff together to go to Covington with Bob for the day.  I got my cereal and orange juice and I headed out the door.  Bob was in the driveway.  It was going to be another cold day.

We got to Covington in a short amount of time and got right into it.  We grabbed about 12 of them in about an hour and a half around the south part of town.  We went on a short mini walk and got about 5 of them.

 

 We came back into town and did the northern part of Covington.  We did lots of lamp skirt caches.  The Walmart and the Lowes both had two caches each.  We drove over to Jenkin Creek Park and saw the bridge on the west end was down so we had to go to the other parking coord on the east side.

One of the caches in the park was near the pond.  It was being found but hasn't since the fall.  We gave it a try.  For some reason we were having a hard time looking for it.  We went for another and came back to it about 15 minutes later.  We called Bev to see if we could get a hint because Mike found it a while back.  We did not hear from them so we tried one more time.  It was on one of the pieces of bark Bob threw out from underneath the log.  I just happen to check the back of it when I was checking again.  We called Bev back and told her we found it.  

We got back in the truck and Bob declared it lunch time.  We drove back into town to the McDonalds.  We got chicken sandwiches and I ate my sandwich and chips as we sat in the truck deciding where to go to next.  I found a spot of about 15.  It was northeast of town.  We drove over and found a few before we had a stretch of DNF's.  

The DNF's were killing us!  Almost to the point where it wasn't fun anymore because we were wasting our time and precious daylight.  We had to pass up I think 5 caches that weren't there.  We moved onto a small trail along a pipeline.

There were a lot of patches of ice along the trail that had a few no trespassing signs but that didn't stop Bob and I.  There were 4 caches along the pipeline and all of them were covered in frozen large maple leaves.  We had to literally dig a cache out of the pile of leaves.  We grabbed the furthest one away from the car and headed back.  It was actually sunny outside and we got warm walking to the last one before the truck.

We moved on to a different area and found a few more before heading to one that used to be really hard to get to but because of the recent construction it was pretty easy.  If you went the wrong way you could get very wet shoes and socks.  

It was getting colder and our daylight was slowly disappearing.  We headed south of town and found ourselves at a small park in an expensive neighborhood.  There, I found a dollar and found a cache we could not sign because it was stuck in a hole and we had no tools that would remove it.  We took a quick nature walk for an ammo can and then found ourselves at Morton Lake, where I could not help myself.  I had to throw a rock at the lake with the layer of ice on top of it.  It made this weird echo-ie thwak sound.  It made a hole in the ice but the rock did not sink, instead it rested on top.

We made our way out towards Hwy 18 down a very busy road.  We grabbed about 5 more before it got dark and the traffic got worse.  

   We ended our caching adventure at a mansion right off of the highway.   I can't believed I never saw it from all the times I've driven past it in the last few years.

We drove home with 35 more caches under our belt and we learned more about the Covington area.  We took a few pictures of Mount Rainier as we were stuck in 167 traffic.

Next adventure:  Maple Valley, Wash.