Thursday, April 10, 2008

Bear in the Bush...




Yesterday we tied our record of 17 founds...and not a single DNF...and that is a new record...

The above title refers to one of the caches in Cultus Lake. The person who placed the cache made a note of the fact that when he did that, he saw a black bear nearby.
When we did this one, sure enough, we found a totally fresh bear track on our way. The accompanying picture shows the proof. This morning I went and bought bearspray...need to be prepared...have to get a whistle too...lacking that yesterday, we made it a point of talking loudly, and someone even did some singing, something about going out awandering...Did I ever mention that we have fun doing this geocaching thingamajiggy?

We did a lot of hiking again yesterday. There are trails in the Cultus Lake area I never knew existed...and some are quite steep and quite a nice challenge.
Let us acquaint those of you, who now have a GPS, with a pitfall. Our Garmin has now started, no idea why, to download parking coordinates if there are any with the cache I am loading down. Usually I just look at the three final letters or numbers to select the cache I want to bring up, and that has never been a problem. However, on Tuesday we were looking for a cache called 'Caterpillar'...supposedly the cache was under something resembling a moss covered caterpillar....When we left the car, our GPS said that we were within 10 meters, straight downhill...However, there was no trail but we knew there was a trail a little further on. So that's what we did...quite a little trip following the GPS on this winding up and down trail. When we were close and started looking we had no luck. After a while everything started to look like a caterpillar. All the while, we were just below where we had parked...so finally we just climbed uphill back to the car. Another of our Tuesday DNF's.

When we had coffee with another geocacher the next morning and mentioned this cache to him, he said that we had taken the wrong trail...and little by little we found out that we had gone with our parking coords instead of with the coords for the cache...won't do that again.

At least, we had more proof that our GPS works...it led us straight back to the car.

Another one of our DNF's on Tuesday was called 'It's a 'Groovy' thing'. The cache was supposed to be a bison tube (a little tube about a half inch diameter and maybe two inches long, with a screwtop; usually all they have is a rolled up piece of paper that functions as the log). Our GPS led us to a huge rock, taller than I am. Well, it had grooves all right; wore my fingernails out tracing them all; wore out my jeans crawling on my knees all around the thing feeling underneath it where there was space...found a nice, juicy slug too...it kind of had the right shape and size but it was too soft and slippery...Anyway, finally we gave up.

Yesterday we went back...hate these DNF's enough to give them another try (by the way, we revisited all our DNF's of Tuesday and found them all, with a little help for a couple from people who found them before...). The picture shows what we found.
Well, that is all the news for now. Saturday promises to be a very nice day so guess what we will be doing.

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