The Geocache is WHERE????

Today’s adventures took us on a hike with a little Geocaching thrown in for fun.  “Us” included Janna, Mike, Ainslie, Jim, me, and little Emmi (Janna & Mike’s baby Mini Schnauzer).  Ainslie has a background in Geology, so he was primarily interested in checking out the composition of the rocks in the area.  Janna is still deciding whether she wants to take up Geocaching, Jim was along for the exercise (yes, true!), and  of course, I will always jump at the chance to go on a treasure hunt.

Our first objective was a rock formation just a few miles down the road from where we’re parked, known as The Crab Claw.  Janna and Mike had hiked here before, but after I checked out the www.Geocaching.com web site, I knew there was a cache hidden here, and that it was a pretty difficult one, both in terms of the terrain and the hide.  But, I thought we’d see how far we could get anyway.  It sort of reminded me of the day last summer when Pat and Mike McFall and I went out on a search near Custer, South Dakota that was extremely challenging!  I knew going in today that I wouldn’t be spending as much time or energy on this one as we did in SD, so I didn’t have real high expectations – good thing, because it was a very tough location!

Emmi turned out to be quite a Rock Hound, though, here she is almost at the top of the formation!

Ainslie and Mike spent some time examining various rocks in the area, but they were not especially interested in finding a geocache, so we soon moved on from this place without seriously trying to find the cache.

I had another cache programmed in to my Oregon GPS that promised to be much easier to get to and find, so we headed off in the direction indicated.  Since we were going directly from the first one, we had to cross several ridges.  This was the view as we topped one of the ridges we climbed:

We finally crossed the last ridge to come into a beautiful, flat valley about a half mile from where the cache was hidden:

Eventually, “orrie” (my name for my GPS) zeroed in on the location of the cache:

And we had success!

A mere three hours after we’d started out on our “little” hike, we were back at Ainslie’s truck, and he brought us gratefully back to the home base for an afternoon of rest and relaxation before we gathered our salad and steaks and headed over to Janna and Mike’s coach for dinner with them.  Ainslie and Beryl, his wife, joined us and we had a fine evening of eating and visiting.  Beryl and Ainslie are a couple that Janna and Mike met in Alamos, Mexico the same year we went to Mexico.  They live in Oregon, but have just returned from their winter visit to Alamos and are staying in a nearby RV Park.

It was a beautiful day!