Placing my Rainier100 Cache and Caching in Elbe

I received my container for the second set of the Rainier100 cache series yesterday and then started working on the cache page.  This has been my first complicated cache page to create because it contained links, HTML code and embedding a photo and a background image.  I fumbled my way through it and I think I did a pretty good job.  A lot of trial and error.

Today, I asked grandma if she wanted to go for a ride out towards Eatonville and the Pack Forest.  She said sure.  I wanted to do it today before it started raining.  The forecast said it will be rainy most of the week and I really didn't want to be inside of a forest in the pouring rain.

I picked her up and we headed towards Yelm, she had some money to deposit before we drove out to the Pack Forest. I found it ironic I was assigned the Pack Forest because it is ran by UW and I am a WSU Cougar and my caching name reflects my college pride, cougarcach24.  I have never actually been inside the Pack Forest but have driven past it many times to and from Yakima.

We followed the road to the main office so I could pick up a trail map.  I had no idea where to hide the cache.  Once again, it was a trial and error experience.  We drove down to the less extensive trails (ones that would be open year around and less muddy) and parked the Escape.  We chose one that led us east and just followed it until we found a good spot.  I kinda wanted cachers to actually get out of the cars and walk to the cache location.  It's about .15 away from the parking coords.  I placed it inside of a tree spire and put a piece of bark-like tree over it to hide it from muggles.  I hoped that area would keep the container dry.  I took my readings and wrote down everything so I could add it to the cache page I was almost done building.

I was pretty happy with the location I chose and grandma and I walked back to the Escape.  I figured since we were already out this far we need to go get the Rainier100:  Elbe Hills Forest Viewpoint (GC5V7TR).  I should have gotten it on my way to Yakima back in June but I didn't have a lot of time.  We get there about 15 minutes later and of course the day that the gate is closed and we have to walk to the cache.  Lame.  Oh well, it gave us the exercise.

Alder Lake was so dry this year actual grass and plants were starting to grow on the lake bed.  I've never seen it this dry before.  The view from here was nice.  You could even see the smoke smoldering from the area that burned a few weeks ago across the lake.  We got up to the kiosk and saw the really worn geotrail from the road down to a rotted stump.  The cache was hidden on the top of the stump away from the views of muggles.

We sat there for a bit as I went through the cache and signed the logbook.  I put it back and we started our walk down the hill.  We walked past a lady and her dog as they were going up the hill.  We said hi to her.  I picked up a few cans and before you knew it we were back at the Escape again.

I took grandma to the rest area just a quarter of a mile from the trail so she could go potty before our 45 minute drive back home.  We talked about a various assortment of topics on the trip back.  I dropped her off and then I went home to eat some burrito leftovers from the night before.

Next Adventure:  Doing the Puyallup

Southeast Mt. St. Helens and Lower Lewis River Falls

Ben and I wanted to take a few days and enjoy Labor Day together because we haven't since we've been dating.  I thought it would be fun to camp out somewhere we both haven't been.  I started doing the research and he asked for the Sunday off so we could have two days.  I found this really cool haunted pub tour in Portland, so with that and finding a place to camp out at would fill in the two days perfectly.  I've noticed these really cool locations on Instagram and some of them were very local.  The Lower Lewis River Falls really enticed me to go visit.  I even found out they had campgrounds but making a reservation was difficult for some reason.  We just decided to wing it.  Then Ben told me a few days before our adventure that the casino was not going to honor his day off because it wasn't 10 days in advance.  Lame.  Very very lame.  So we decided on a day trip instead.

I got our query together and laid out my clothes.  It was suppose to be nice today so I wore light clothing but pants because I knew we would be wandering through the trees and brush.  The next morning I got up around 8:15, got dressed, grabbed everything we would need and ate some Raisin Bran.  I left my house around 8:50 to be in Rochester by 9:30.

He had just gotten off shift at Grand Mound and he took a shower and was not ready to go when I said to be ready by.  How dare he?  I gave him a bad time and he gave me a bad time for giving him a bad time.  We eventually left around 10.  We lost a half hour of driving time.  We got onto I-5 and headed south towards Woodland.

Just before the Hwy 12 exit, a wrench fell out of a truck two vehicles ahead of me, the person in front of me avoided it, it bounced really high off the road and fell just before it could hit my windshield, it bounced and hit the bottom of the Escape, came out the back, bounced and almost hit the car behind me.  I was so so grateful that it didn't hit my windshield.  We would have been injured severely.

We got to Woodland before noon and stopped at the Safeway for some food and to top off on gas.  We went inside to get food first.  We grabbed sandwiches, drinks, chips, snackies and of course we each got a doughnut.  I can not resist the Safeway maple bars. We loaded the car and got gas before heading east on the 503 towards Cougar.  I plugged in coordinates to the first cache.

Since it was a holiday weekend we did get stuck behind some slow people.  At one point we went around a corner I saw a dead animal.  It was someone's chicken and it had recently been ran over.  I felt bad for the people who had lost their chicken.  We continued on to the cache we put into the GPS.

We arrived at the turn out off of the highway and found a good place to park to go get C.C. Bigfoot Hide-A-Cache (GC2CA7) an oldie from December 2001!  I told Ben we had to find this one because it was one of the old caches still left.  He was like, okay.  Of course we went the hard way.  I guess there was a parking lot area and a less hardcore walk to the cache, we entered from the highway and walked up a hill and into what I think is a swamp most of the time but because it was so dry this summer there wasn't a swamp and then a short walk to the area where the cache was hidden.  Ben didn't think I had the correct coords.  He kept asking, "are you sure this is where it is?  It looks like no one has been here in a while".  I told him I promise it's here.  He watched me from down below I just couldn't pinpoint where it was based on the hint.  The GPS bounced all over the place.  I tried several spots near the bluff and even fell down once because of the stupid ground-growing sticker bushes.  I made my way back over to the area I thought it was and sure enough there was the dog food bag and the cache container was inside of it.  Probably to protect it from the snow in the winter months.  I signed our names and took a picture.  Then my stomach dropped...where is the GPS!?  It could be anywhere.  There were so many ferns, brush and sticker bushes.  I told Ben to come up and help me find it.  He climbed up and we started looking.  We were not going to stop until we found it.  I retraced my steps about three different times.  Then I grabbed a stick to help me sort through the brush.  About 45 min into looking I finally found it!  What a relief!!  We walked back to the Escape.

We plugged in the next set of coordinates to the next cache, Lahar Viewpoint (GC3Q2XY), an earthcache on the southeast side of Mt. St. Helens.  I do not remember coming here as a kid but I am sure we did as a family.  We followed the really rough FR 83 out to a place called Lahar/Lava Canyon recreation area.  We got out of the trees into a really open area and found out where the earthcache site was.  We parked the Escape near the bridge and tried to get a view of the mountain before the clouds engulfed it.  It was too late.  I was told that the weather would be nice this weekend.  The clouds had just covered the whole mountain as we got down in the old lahar bed.  Lame. I wanted Ben to see the view.  We started answering the questions and just enjoying the area.  We looked at the volcanic rocks and we got the GoPro out and took a few pictures.

And then it started raining.  I was so disappointed in the weather.  I had so many fun short hikes to do and we can't do them now.  We got back into the Escape and headed back towards the junction of FR 83 and FR 90.  We stopped near a small creek with a bridge behind it to take some pictures.  We left as soon as the rain got out of control.

We stopped for BIGFOOT LIVES!!! (GC1T3ZJ) and we made some bigfoot jokes while we looked for it in the POURING down rain.

We ran back to the Escape and stopped one more time at the Cougar Snow Park (GC1T0X0) and I had Ben stay in the vehicle because it was pouring down rain and there was something going on in the road with a bunch of service workers so I really didn't want to stay around for too long.  I found the cache quickly, it was missing the container and was just a plastic baggie with a log book inside.  I jotted down our names, put it back and walked back without anyone really wondering what I was doing.

We got to the junction and turned left onto FR 90 and made our way towards the Lewis River along the Swift Reservoir.  The road was very windy.  We ate our sandwiches and chips along the way for lunch and listened to Aerosmith.  Dude looks like a lady!!

I wanted to stop and do the small hike up to Eagle Cliff but we didn't have enough time and we were not prepared for the rain.  We would have gotten soaked and been very unhappy.  We bypassed it for another day and followed the road out to Lower Lewis River Falls.  This road was also very windy.  Luckily we didn't have to follow anyone or it would have been an even longer day.  One section of the road was being worked on so it was a very awful potholey dirt road.  You could actually high center your vehicle on one part of it.  The road then went back to pavement and we were less than a mile or so away from the day use area.

We pulled in and found a place to park.  I finally used my forest pass that I bought three years ago.  I finally put a date on it.  We got all the stuff we would need and made our way to the falls.  It was awesome!  I am glad we came to this spot.  I wish we could camp.  We will have to keep this place in mind for future trips.  There is also a middle falls and an upper falls but we didn't have time to do those.

I bet this place is awesome during late spring and early summer.  I kinda want to go swimming in it some day.  We spend a good chunk of our time wandering around the top of the falls.  I have never been to a river where the bed was almost perfect bedrock.  It was awesome!  We saw some really cool formations that have been carved into it from water erosion.

We took some pictures from the waterfall and Ben took a bunch of GoPro videos and photos.  Look for the video in a future post.

We walked back up to the trail and looked at the fall from the various viewpoints.  There were quite a few people around but it wasn't swarmed.  The rain let up a bit but was still falling lightly.

To end our visit, we found a place further down the trail to see the falls from the river bed level.  Of course we took the hard way down and the easy way up.  Haha.

We walked back up to the parking lot and went and looked for the cache before we left. Lower Falls on the Lewis River Cache (GCP6AR) was down a small trail off the road that lead into the recreation area.  We knew where it was before we even looked at the hint.  Ben ran over and pulled it out from its hiding spot.  We signed the log, looked at the trinkets inside, took the TB's and put it back where we found it.  We covered it up better too.

We left the Lewis River area and made our way back towards Eagle Cliff  and took a right to our last cache of the day.  It was an earthcache called Recipe for a Mudflow (GC1F7WY).  It was at a very iconic rock from the Pine Creek mudflow and we had to answer a few questions on the informational board and it was literally a recipe for a mudflow, we thought it was very creative.

We got back into the Escape and made our way to the 503 towards Woodland.  It took us about an hour and it rained off and on.  Like I said, I was very disappointed in the weather but I am glad I got to spend the day with Ben.  We got stuck behind a douche going 20 below the speed limit and no one would pass him and made our trip back longer than it needed to be.  We got to I-5 and drove the 30 miles to Longview.

To top of our day we were going to try this brewery I found online, Ashtown.  It was a small brewery created and owned by two cousins, they were preparing to celebrate their two year anniversary of the brewery opening up.  I had their Red Tape Razz Wheat and Ben had two of their stouts.  They were pretty strong and made him a bit silly on the way home. 

We ate the rest of our food and talked to Ben's mom.  When we got to the station we hung out a bit and then I had to go home because I really needed a shower.  I got home just before 11 and unpacked the Escape.

Next Adventure: Placing my Rainier100 Cache and Caching in Elbe

Geocaching Road Trip Challenge (June 19-September 2) (#geocaching15)

Geocaching was celebrating its 15th birthday and this summer our challenge was called the Geocaching Road Trip and it encouraged us to grab our buddies, get in the car and drive around to see the wonderful places the earth has to offer.  Unfortunately, all of mine were local.  I didn't get to take any far away trips this time.  Our incentive was to earn badges or souvenirs (depending on who you ask) to add to our collection.  More and more cache challenges have been used based off of how many you've collected.  Instead of grabbing all of them in one day, Groundspeak spread them out over a course of about four months.  It started on June 19 and ended on September 2.  There were five mini adventures to earn souvenirs for and when you finished those you unlocked a sixth souvenir to complete your road trip.

WaStPks100:  Wenatchee Confluence (GC4BE6E)

Fun with Favorites, June 19 (we actually found this on June 21):  The first one that was launched challenged us to find a cache (didn't matter what kind of cache) that had ten favorite points or more.

Ben and I were in Wenatchee/Chelan for a wedding while this one came out so I was going to hit two birds with one stone.  I got my 60th WaStPks100 cache and we got our first road trip souvenir.  We parked in the lot and walked the round trip mile to and from the cache. I have heard other cachers talk about this one so I knew what to look for. I also knew it was one of Mr. Gadget's famous bird house caches. We were excited to figure the puzzle out. As we walked down the trail a guy on a bike had his medium sized dog in his back pack the dog even had on sunglasses. That plus the cache was worth the walk down here.  We found the cache easily but took some time to figure out out to open the container carefully (I knew someone had forcefully ruined the previous one days before we arrived) signed our names, stamped our passport (the stamp is getting worn out) and took a few pictures.

Memories of Zenkitty (GC2BN5C)

Meet your Road Trip Crew, July 3 (we actually found this one on July 22):  The second challenge we were to attend an event to meet other cachers.  It didn't matter what type of event it was as long as you were out socializing and meeting new people.

Bev and I wanted to go to an event that was held at the Lacey Train Station to celebrate Zenkitty, a Thurston Co. geocacher, who passed away in April.  I met Jim (Zenkitty), at an event in Centralia May 2012.  Before I met him I thought the Zenkitty handle I saw on several logbooks was a woman!  Boy was I wrong!  Haha.  He was a very sweet guy who knew how to entertain people.  About 25 people came to Ohjoy's event, we had snacks, reminisced about Jim and how he touched our geocaching lives.  It was an awesome event and I was glad I got to attend.

Lake Lawrence Lollygagging (GC4RDKC)

Let's Get Extreme, July 17 (we actually found this one on August 4):  The third souvenir we had to earn was finding either a D5, T5 or a D5/T5 cache.  You could take a strenuous hike, climb a mountain, find a cache that needed special equipment such as a boat or scuba gear, the possibilities were endless.  Most of the caches around my area were boat caches.

Little over two years ago, Ohjoy and her posse got into their kayaks and started placing caches on lakes.  Bev called me around lunch time and asked what I was doing.  I told her getting dad some lunch and that I would be done with all of my stuff in about an hour.  She said okay and if I wanted to go out to Lawrence Lake to go get our T5 cache.  I said sure and I would meet her after I was done.  She cleaned out Bob's boat while I was getting dad's food and mile walk out of the way.  When I got there, we crammed the boat and the oars into the Escape and off to the lake we went!  It was a nice day, roughly around 80ish degrees.  We got to the public boat launch, walked the boat down to the water, made sure we had everything, phone, walkie talkie, plastic bag to put everything in, an extra cache just in case this one was missing...again, and the GPS. Bev stayed on shore while I paddled the 0.15 to the cache.  It was hard paddling there because of the breeze and the two jet skis that flew past me.

I got closer to the shore and pinpointed the tree that I suspected the cache to be attached to.  Because of our dry summer, the shoreline was a lot lower than when it was hidden.  Thus, I had to get out of the boat to retrieve it.  Unfortunately, I had a hard time paddling myself to shore because of the thick Horsetail Rush plants along the shoreline.  I had to set the oars aside and pull myself to shore with my hands in the lake.   Once onto shore, I noticed this giant bees nest that someone had lopped the top off of it, rendering it abandoned, thank goodness...no one has time for bees. I found the cache tied to the end of a Douglas Fir branch.  I radioed Bev telling her I found it and I will be on my way back in a few minutes.  It took less time getting back to the boat launch because I was going with the current the wind was making on the surface.  She grabbed the boat as I made it to shore and I definitely got wet on my way back.  I had to wipe off the items that got sand all over them.  We dumped out the boat, which had roughly a cup of water inside, shook it off a bit and stuffed it back into the Escape.  We drove back to her house, I dropped her off, put my raft into the Escape and drove home.

For the Love of Peat (GC5E5QY)

High Five for the Earth, July 31 (we actually found this one August 14):  We could either get an earthcache or attend a CITO to achieve this souvenir.  We chose an earthcache because we were not able to attend any of the CITO's in the area.  I am so glad I saved this earthcache.  The next closest one to grab was either Flaming Geyser or Mount Rainier National Park and this one was on the way to Seattle for the block party.  I've been to the West Hylebos Wetlands before...many years ago before this earthcache was here, so I was familiar with the area. We pulled in and noticed a van of people getting out. I knew we would see cachers here being BP weekend and all. We tried to get here earlier to avoid Seahawk, Hempfest and concert traffic and the thunder storm that was rolling in. We had to get this earthcache before it down poured. We got the necessary information, the pic and the cache at the picnic area before we started feeling the drops coming down. We ran the rest of the way to the Escape to avoid getting drenched.  Once inside the Escape the sky let loose and it poured.

Tacky 1: Map Quiz Revenge (GC1XBZW) 

Put on your Thinking Cap, August 14 (we found this one on the correct day!):  This challenge we had to solve a puzzle cache.  I have a huge list of caches I've solved but they were in places we weren't going to go for a while so I looked near the earthcache for one and there was one I could solve.  

I was trying to maximize our time by getting two in one area so we didn't have to do any extra driving.  I love geography so this one wasn't hard to solve. We grabbed the earthcache and ran back to the car as the sky opened up and poured down rain. We parked the car and out to this one in the rain, thunder and lightening.  I had to get my jacket out of the back mostly for the hood, I was also wearing shorts and flip flops.  We found the container, signed it as quick as we could, put it back and we were absolutely soaked when we got back to the Escape but it was worth it.

 
The Road Trip Hero souvenir was earned after completing my puzzle cache. 

Next Adventure:  Southeast Mt. St. Helens and Lower Lewis River Falls