A Glorious Day
Dec. 29th, 2010 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deaneI didn't sleep well last night. Seven hours of tossing and turning without a lot of Zs. Despite that, I felt sufficiently rested to get up by 11:00 and was out of house just shortly after noon. It was a glorious day, with not a cloud in the sky. The lack of overcast meant cooler temperatures but it wasn't as bad as I'd expected and once I'd been walking for a few minutes I'd warmed up enough to unzip my jacket.
My goal was to do the caches along the Cable Bay trail, all the way out to Dodd's Narrows. When I'm just walking the trail normally, without any stops, it's about an hour and 45 minutes round trip. There are 11 caches along the trail or near it. Assuming an average of 15 minutes to find each cache meant that I was looking at a four and a half hour outing, plus some extra time on the side trails needed to access a couple of the caches. I only had four hours of daylight so something was going to have to give.
As it turned out, most of the caches took less than 10 minutes to find. Subtract a complex letterbox cache which I decided to skip altogether and I was able get back to the truck with 15 minutes to spare. I even found time to spend a couple of minutes watching the tidal currents roar through the narrows before heading off to find the final cache.
The batteries on my cellphone turned out to be more of a concern than the daylight. The last three caches were all found after the phone had already started flashing the red light which meant that it was about to die. To save on power I read all three descriptions, committing them to memory as best I could, then shut off the phone, only turning it on to get GPS fixes whenever I thought I was near a cache. Each time I turned it on I was expecting it to die, but it didn't and by the time I got back to the truck it still had a 1% charge.
None of the cache containers or their hiding places was particularly interesting, but one did have a nice clue:
I counted paces (again, to save battery power) until I was in roughly the right location, then started looking for large cedar trees with lots of branches (which is what I assume the "monkeys" part meant). But there were too many possibilities. Then I thought about the word "board" in the description. Assuming that it wasn't just a typo, it had to be a clue. A few meters back there was a muddy patch in the trail which someone had spanned by nailing a plank between a stump and a fallen tree. Could that be the "board" referred to? I retraced my steps to that point and spotted a large cedar with little foliage left on its many lower branches, but its crown still intact. That could be "king cedar". Right beside it, a bit closer to the ocean, was a smaller cedar which could be its "offspring". I checked out the smaller tree and, sure enough, that's where I found the cache.
Of the ten caches that I searched for I was able to find eight, bringing my total to 187. So much for the power of 3!
My goal was to do the caches along the Cable Bay trail, all the way out to Dodd's Narrows. When I'm just walking the trail normally, without any stops, it's about an hour and 45 minutes round trip. There are 11 caches along the trail or near it. Assuming an average of 15 minutes to find each cache meant that I was looking at a four and a half hour outing, plus some extra time on the side trails needed to access a couple of the caches. I only had four hours of daylight so something was going to have to give.
As it turned out, most of the caches took less than 10 minutes to find. Subtract a complex letterbox cache which I decided to skip altogether and I was able get back to the truck with 15 minutes to spare. I even found time to spend a couple of minutes watching the tidal currents roar through the narrows before heading off to find the final cache.
The batteries on my cellphone turned out to be more of a concern than the daylight. The last three caches were all found after the phone had already started flashing the red light which meant that it was about to die. To save on power I read all three descriptions, committing them to memory as best I could, then shut off the phone, only turning it on to get GPS fixes whenever I thought I was near a cache. Each time I turned it on I was expecting it to die, but it didn't and by the time I got back to the truck it still had a 1% charge.
None of the cache containers or their hiding places was particularly interesting, but one did have a nice clue:
As you reach the water you may get 2 board with the trail so look up for a King cedar that could be a home to monkeys. His offspring prefers the water view and protects the cache.
I counted paces (again, to save battery power) until I was in roughly the right location, then started looking for large cedar trees with lots of branches (which is what I assume the "monkeys" part meant). But there were too many possibilities. Then I thought about the word "board" in the description. Assuming that it wasn't just a typo, it had to be a clue. A few meters back there was a muddy patch in the trail which someone had spanned by nailing a plank between a stump and a fallen tree. Could that be the "board" referred to? I retraced my steps to that point and spotted a large cedar with little foliage left on its many lower branches, but its crown still intact. That could be "king cedar". Right beside it, a bit closer to the ocean, was a smaller cedar which could be its "offspring". I checked out the smaller tree and, sure enough, that's where I found the cache.
Of the ten caches that I searched for I was able to find eight, bringing my total to 187. So much for the power of 3!
