Author: keely

Oregon Travels: Tillamook

After Bridal Veil Falls, we had continued along the Crown Point Scenic Highway that runs parallel to I-84 on the south side of the highway.  We stopped at Multnomah Falls and did the climb up to the Benson Bridge, took some pictures, and checked out the gift shop. We didn’t do the traditional caches there because for some reason I did not load them, so we will have to come back someday.  We were going to check out Oneonta Gorge after that, but we actually just weren’t in the mood, what with the argument earlier and being hungry and all. So we pointed the car west and headed towards Portland, and food, and other fun caches.

There was one cache in Portland that we really wanted to get, but turns out it is in a location that is not accessible on Sundays.  Darn!  It was around the corner from a Taco Time where we could have lunch (max amount of Taco Timing when we are in the Pac Northwest!) and a really, really cute TB hotel (Shelrik’s Happy Cache Inn).  Here is a picture of the inside of it:

After this, we realized we needed to make some time in order to reach the night’s destination in time. To get to the coast, we had to go through Tillamook State Forest. Maybe it was because I was wearing these sunglasses that make the world a better place (brand name: Costa’s: seriously the best sunglasses ever), but Tillamook was so incredibly beautiful. We didn’t stop a LOT, and we ended up not going for the grandfather cacvhe out here in the interest of time, but we did stop a few times for caches and general exploring, including finding this hidden waterfall due to a cache. Here are some of the photos from out there. Definitely a place worth exploring more in the future:

In my opinion, this forest was one of the highlights of this trip. It is 364,000 acres located just 40 miles west of Portland along Hwy 6. You should check it out if you are ever in Portland!
After this, we reached the actualy coastal town of Tillamook, where the cheese is made. I had to stop at the creamery. I ended up buying this cutting board and knife set and two blocks of cheese, summer sausages, and crackers that we ended up eating off of for the rest of our trip.
Finally, we made it to Nehalem Bay State Park, our campsite for the night, and base of operations for our hike into Oswald West State Park, which was so cool it deserves its own post. Next time I have computer time, I will tell and show you all about this jewel of the Oregon Coast.

Bridal Veil Falls

When we left Sandy the morning after finding those old caches, our first mission was to head for some scenic waterfalls along I-84 heading east, with the intent to double back around at some point and head west towards the coast.

The first of the waterfalls, and accompanying caches, we were after was Bridal Veil Falls.  The approach to this one got us into a huge argument that will probably live in infamy in our relationship.

Our first road trip together, there were no fights.  We were still in the Love Bubble I guess, and now we have gotten to the point where we can really drive each other crazy.  In this case, there was an argument over where to park, which direction we needed to start heading down the trail on, and what was the appropriate solution to some freaking out the GPS was doing.  In the end, we did it Jason’s way, and he turned out to be right.  Likely, he will tell you he is always right.

I almost didn’t even want to walk down the trail with him.  In the end, though, the beauty of the waterfall and the flora surrounding it was therapeutic, and I was in a much better mood coming back up the trail back to parking.  Especially after we found the cache (and turns out he was right about where it was hidden, too).  Here are some photos.  Cache is GC1A224, Bridal Veil Silver.

 

 

The Original and Un-Original Stash and Misadventures in Molalla

I’ll just say that perhaps our plan for this whole day was overly ambitious, this fourth day in our vacation. This was the same day I wrote about in the post below, where we left Ashland in the morning (after dwelling way too long at a posh hip diner in town with terrible, annoying alleged free wifi) and drove north to points just south and east of Portland, where we hiked an hour or more doing the GC16 cache, and then afterwards, where we made our pilgrimage to the spot that started it all.

The Original Stash Tribute Plaque (GCGV0P)

In May of 2000, Dave Ulmer hid a bucket here and then posted the coordinates on a website and asked people to see if they could find it. This was the beginning of geocaching, but before there was even a word for it. So many people were interested in the concept, and then wanted to hide their own and find more, that a game was born. Read more about the history of geocaching here. Eventually this original geocache was destroyed, but Team 360 and some others realized the importance of this location and had the plaque made. A person finds the plaque and signs a log at the nearby ammo can to claim the find.
I had actually logged this find in August of 2008, in a previous life, but J had never been here. As someone who has been involved with the game from the early years (2003), I thought he really should have this find under his belt. Plus, it is part of what is called the Geocaching Triad, or Trifecta – which includes the (now archived but reborn as just a regular) APE cache, Groundspeak Headquarters, and this cache. We were headed to Groundspeak later this week, and I wanted us both to be able to say we completed the Triad.
Meanwhile, while he was checking it out and signing the log, I made the trek right up the hill behind this cache site to get a grandfather cache, GC92, or: The Unoriginal Stash.
I didn’t get this one last time I was here because daylight was fading and I really needed a flashlight to be able to find it, and it is up this hill that is really muddy and slippery. That day, I had already gotten the bottom of my jeans dirty that day and we were kind of in a rush to get to the Portland airport at the time to fly back to Houston. This time I had daylight and wasn’t in a terrible hurry. I didn’t fall down either, which I thought was impressive because it had been raining on and off out here (go figure, being so close to Portland) and the ground was quite wet.
We weren’t in a particular hurry up to this point in the day, but perhaps we should have been. The thing is, we didn’t give ourselves enough daylight to get to GC12 and 17 together in one day. GC17 we ended up having to skip entirely. It’s a five mile round trip hike when done correctly. We had about an hour until the sun went down when we got to the area where the trails began, and we gave it all up on GC12, which should have been a lot simpler.
To get to GC12, you take these forest roads that get more narrow and remote. We finally ended up parking at this “y” juncture and first taking the wrong fork, then the right fork to walk to it. It was only about a half mile walk but it was like the longest half mile ever. Some people drive right up to it, but the trees lean their branches in and scrape their little “fingernails” against the car, and we didn’t want to have to pay for a paint job on the rental car. So we walked, but we weren’t really thrilled about it. I think we were sore from some other hikes or just kind of tired and not in the mood, but mostly we were a little freaked out, feeling really small and vulnerable in this forest. J was worried about human predators and I was worried about animal ones. Then, the cache took forever because it was surprisingly hard to find, considering it is a big white and blue bucket.


So it was almost dark when we got back to the car from this misadventure. Plus, we needed to find a camping spot for the night, and my original idea was to find one northeast of this little area, and we never made it out that way.
We had a long day of hiking and driving and the last thing we wanted to do was go without dinner and fumble around in the dark pitching a tent to stay in for one night, so we wended up paying too much for an only halfway decent hotel in Sandy, Oregon.
Now we’ll have to go back to this area one day, yet again, so I can scratch that darn GC17 off my list of the oldest geocaches left unfound.

GC16

So, our fourth day in to our vacation, we were in the heart of Oregon, traveling north up I-5 towards Portland. Our goals this day were some of the oldest geocaches in the world, including the site of the Original Stash (the very first cache, placed in May of 2000).
I shouldn’t diminish the events that came first, though. The day before, after our rainy adventures along the Rogue Highway, we had gone just a little south after hitting Grants Pass, and then to the east along a long and winding mountain road to this place I had found for us to stay at called the Green Springs Inn. If you are ever in Ashland, or, I should say, outside of Ashland, you should stay there. It is 17 miles out of the way along this scary little road that eventually leads to Klamath Falls, where my boys and their dad are from (essentially). I picked this place to stay for a few reasons, one of them being this:
A handful of the rooms are outfitted with these private jacuzzis that are screened in and look out into a beautiful wilderness area. Beyond that are back roads and trails to hike, including parts of the Pacific Crest Trail.
One of the other reasons I picked this place was to be closer to dear Carlene, who drove an hour from her house to come pick up my boys to take them the following day to see their grandmother for a week, who lives out this way but a bit far from our path at this point. We had dinner with Carlene and her son in the Inn attached to the lodge, and then eventually went our seperate ways. Our way was to head out into those back roads and go exploring, and geocaching.
Anyways, we almost hated to leave the Green Springs Inn the next morning, and the people there were so darn friendly. We got complimentary coffees and best wishes for the road as we headed out, listening to Kerouac’s “On the Road” audio CD and dodging bikers on the way to Ashland proper for breakfast (and a few more caches) and then the open highway, taking us to places like Estacada, Sandy, and Molalla; places that are just south and east of Portland, in the Oregon country, near great swaths of christmas firs and dark green luscious forests interspered with green fields roped in white fencelines. The drive was great towards the end, but also slightly annoying, as the GPS was routing us in weird circles and out on some random road that we felt we weren’t supposed to be on but eventually led us there.
For GC16, there means a parking spot across a quiet road from an yellow fence. The fence marks the beginning of the trail. It wasn’t terribly long and difficult, but carrying our packs that were a little too heavy with camera equipment and travel bugs, and going up a pretty steep grade at the beginning, we were beginning to huff a little and ponder the wisdom of our decisions before the trail leveled off.
The hike was beautiful, though, and after the initial grade, we were really enjoying it. Or at least I was. This to me is what I love about geocaching! I felt exhilarated and joy filled me inside, although the previous resident was Taco Time, a rare pacific northwest treat, which grumbled about being asked to vacate the premises. I was trying to find a bathroom, but no dice at this little “Annie’s Cabin”, which is about halfway up the trail. I loved the hitching posts outside of it (which you can’t see in this picture..but we did take some photos that maybe I will post later of the hoofprints of horses leading up the trail to).

Once we got closer, we had to take a smaller trail off to the side of the main one, and then I think another smaller trail after that. The cache was a nice, big awesome find. I logged the cache while J took some photos. I left a travel bug I had brought in my bag with me, taking nothing else. Then we hiked back down, finding the cache across the road that was near our parking spot, and taking a picture of the river that roared by down here. There were not many people taking advantage of the beautiful wilderness out here, with shady little picnic spots tucked in off the road by the river, which was kind of surprising but I guess if you live by such beauty every day, you eventually become blind to it.

Big fun in the soft green Oregon mountain area. Now it was time to see if we could make it to GC12 and 17 before dark.
Delay in the stories = life keeps getting in the way. But I will try to keep them coming faster, there was a lot of cool places we saw in our break from the Texas heat!