Snoqualmie Falls: at which I have a bad idea.

[rwx]

Snoqualmie Falls
Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist.

So, today I went out to Snoqualmie Falls. I'd wanted to go in the past, but it's one of those areas of Seattle that tends to be completely overrun on any day that it's actually reasonable to go there. Since it's a weekday and raining, it was fairly unreasonable to go there. This is the most Twin Peak-ish of the various photos that I took while I was there.

While I was there, I also did some geocaching.

• Pandora's Cache I is right on the path to the observation platform at the bottom of the falls. It was pretty easy to find, but was hidden along a fairly frequented trail.

After finding that cache, I walked to the bottom of the falls and looked at it for a while. I took a bunch more pictures, the ones that aren't bad are stored in flickr. There's a couple photos of live trees growing on dead one that I found pretty interesting from a forest succession point of view, but weren't as scenic as the photo I included.

The rain stopped while I was looking at the fallls. After climbing back up to the top of the trail, I went and found another cache and had a bad idea.

• Salish Lodge Micro was a couple of hundred yards into the woods on one of the Snoqualmie ridge trails. It had a custom-made cache container, and was hidden easily reachable. Unfortunately, it's conveniently enough located that I was able to track people's paths through the ferns to it.

Then, since the rain stopped, I had an extremely bad idea. The bad idea was since I was on a trailhead and the rain had stopped, I should go walking along trails back in the woods seeing if I ended up running into any videocaches. In general, this was a bad idea given that I lacked maps entirely, didn't have any water, and wasn't dressed for hiking. So, I walked around back in the woods for about 2.5 hours and had a nice hike on three different trails and only came near one geocache.

• Tokul Treehouse was back in the woods after a couple of different color-coded trails that I don't know the proper names for (blue, red, green; although red is probably the Snoqualmie Valley Trail.) It was an interesting look, the cache was past a huge wireless antenna and was hidden in a large, half-rotten treestump.

After that, I picked the wrong trail, and instead of seeing the valley, eventually came out of the woods far away from my starting point. It was, however, extremely scenic and I eventually backtracked. The main part of the trail was on a ridgeline over the snoqualmie valley and falls area. Going for a long map in the woods by yourself without maps isn't a great idea, in case you're wondering what the bad idea was.

After that, I went into the original 'historic' Snoqualmie, and found another cache more or less by acciden. My waypoint proximity detector went off, and I saw that I'd driven within 150 feet of another cache.

• Seekers History Cache. This is a virtual cache, where you log a photo or something else about the find in with your cache log to prove that you found it. It was more or less pure coincidence that I found it, so I looked up the cache information on my sidekick. The cache itself is an insanely huge log.

After caching and suchlike, I went and relaxed for a while. All in all, a really fun day.

Comments

[bbcaddict.livejournal.com]

I need to ask a silly question -
what IS caching?
Like in the UK on country trails where they have boxes and you collect stamps from these boxes?

[rwx.livejournal.com]

yeah, it's like letterboxing (the usual name for that) with a GPS element. A lot of the GPSes in the US have less of a puzzle element than the letterboxes do because they're tied to the GPS and therefore the challenge is reaching the location or more suitable to children as opposed to traditional english letterboxing which was puzzle-based.

That said, though, there are a bunch of letterbox/geocache combos and geocaches that do nvolve puzzles.

[matrushkaka.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed that there are no deer in this post.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

They're too busy ambushing people on the highways to be doing anything in the forests.