Geocaching – Page 7 – State of Wilderness

Grandfather Caches of Massachusetts

I found myself in Massachusetts over the weekend, and I had some time on my hands to go exploring. What else would I rather do than go find grandfather caches in the woods?

In case you have missed the definition of the term, a “grandfather” cache is one of the active original caches hidden within the first four months of geocaching’s birth. I have a list of them up there on the top called the 100 Oldest Active Geocaches. I try to find them whenever I can, to get them off my “to-do” list before they get archived, although these are truly the ones that have stood the test of time.

When I realized I was able to spend some time caching in this beautiful state, I looked at my list to see which of these grandfather caches were nearby. There were potentially up to four of them in the vicinity of my drive, but I also was doing other things and didn’t have the whole time to cache. On Friday I found Camera Cache, and on Saturday I found Lowell, aka Second Mass. These pictures here are from the latter.

I actually would have found them both Friday, but I had trouble finding the parking spot to Great Brook Farm State Park, where this second cache is located. They posted parking coords on the cache page, but it didn’t help me because my GPS was not working, and I didn’t know how to mark or follow coordinates, and not just waypoints, on my smartphone. I drove down shady lanes trying to find the parking lot according to Google Navigation, but I could not find this elusive spot. That night at the hotel I googled the location of the parking lot, and figured it out, and made the short hike the next day.

The trail starts at the canoe launch in the first picture, then one takes the main trail up about a quarter of a mile before turning off on a side trail. The trail was very reminiscent of the piney woods of Huntsville State Park, except with large boulders. It was essentially also a pine forest that was found here, something that surprised me because I was expecting hardwoods.

The cache itself was a classic large ammo can, tucked into a rock covering near one of the infamous stone walls of New England. In this book I am reading, “The World Without Us”, by Alan Weisman, he talks about how the stone walls of New England cover some 260,000 miles. They were present in all the little nature preserves, arboretums, and parks I visited in my little tour of New England.

J was a little worried about me hiking all by myself in this big ole forest with my recent leg issues, but my leg felt great and there were lots of families out enjoying the nice weather in this park. Apparently during the right time of year, you can follow the trail to the end, where there is a working dairy and ice cream shop. I didn’t know that at the time but next time I go back, I might check it out. I did venture over to the other side of the street from the parking lot, to another trail, where I found little woodcutter’s cabins tucked back next to rolling brooks.

The other grandfather cache, the one I found the day before, Camera Cache, was a lot less exciting but still a cool little classic. For this one, I drove to the back of a sunny park in Shrewsbury, MA and parked my car next to a concrete road block. I walked about 0.13 miles down a little wooded trail that lay between two fields, currently being used for lacrosse practice. Four players ran shoulder to shoulder around the fields to my left, while on the right, the coach gave me the hairy eyeball while two of his players searched for a missing ball in the nearby thicket.

The coords were a little off, but the hint helped me find the ammo box located along, again, the stone wall along the forests edge. As I was signing the log and preparing to put the cache back, a great swarm of lacrosse players spilled out from the tennis courts behind me, and came running alongside me, nary giving me a glance, on their way to join the few already on the practice fields. I had to wait for several minutes for the horde to pass before being able to put the cache back unnoticed.

Shrewsbury on a mild spring day seemed to be a place for boys; all through town, I saw groups of boys jogging, practicing sports, riding in cars, eating ice creams. It was very interesting, and made me wonder where the girls were in this town.

These caches were the 50th and 52nd oldest active caches, according to my list. They were great little adventures, not difficult to get to, yet giving one a perspective of the area they were in. In my next trip to New England, I want to get the other grandfather caches in the area, and do some more exploring of the Great Brook Farm Park. I also want to have other New England adventures, like exploring Walden Pond, the exit for which I saw a few times and was tempted. No matter how much you explore, there is always more to see in this great big land we live in.

Mono Lake MonoMyth, Episode 3

A Claustrophobic’s Nightmare/Just Say NO to Crack
Black Point, Lee Vining CA
This was the scene of our next adventure. One of our friends placed this cache back in 2004, and we had heard a lot about it since. We had to give it a try, so we drove our rental vehicle as far as we could along the dirt road out near the Mono Lake County Park. At some point the road becomes impassable for 2WD vehicles, and we had to stop to park and then hike the rest of the way out to the lava fissures. It was a longer, warmer walk than expected – you can see me and the youngest in this picture above, from Jason’s vantage point ahead of us on the trail.

These fissures exist because of the tremors of an underground volcano 13,000 years ago. The volcano in the area is still active, and every 250-700 years the geology shifts a little as a result. The last time there were such shifts was around 1980.

You can walk among the cracks in the wall, as you see above, and in this case, there is a small geocache hidden within the crevices.

It took teamwork to find this little bugger; Jason spied from above as I tried to both make sure the kids were being safe (ha! impossible! they were trying to jump around like goats and see if they could scale the walls) and look for the cache. Jason’s sharp eye spied the cache before I did – a small lockbox – and threw a small pebble to the area to let me know where to look. I had actually already looked there! But I didn’t reach in deep enough. We also looked for the answer to the questions for the nearby earthcache.

The walk back to the car seemed more arduous due to the heat, even though it was only the beginning of July and mid-morning; probably was not even that hot but we felt closer to the sun here in the high desert. We drank a bottle of water each, and I remember being annoyed at the youngest for wasting a fifth bottle – he had either dropped the bottle, lost it, or poured out what was left because he wasn’t thirsty anymore.

After returning to the car, we drove back out on the rough dirt road we came in on, and then decided to find some more caches in and around Lee Vining. We had eaten breakfast before our hike at the only restaurant open in town – Nicely’s – which was a bit of a misnomer because the service was almost as bad as the food there. It was pretty terrible. We should have drank more water there, though, or brought more with us, because we felt pretty dehydrated and only searched for two caches (also hidden by our friend Snoogans) before stopping back at the Whoa Nellie Deli to gas up the vehicle, and sit in the AC with drinks and snacks to recharge before we headed back out on the open road.

Mono Lake MonoMyth, Episode 1

Departure

After a couple of hours at my former in-laws – visiting, packing up things the kids had forgotten, and repairing the small dent we put in the front bumper of the rental SUV, we were ready to leave for our next adventure.

The Call to Adventure

This one had us traveling south on US-395, all day long. We were in high desert country now. We were also chasing daylight to our next camping spot, so we couldn’t stop at every geocache along the way in the interest of time. We couldn’t resist this one, though (above picture), that almost turned out to be more than we bargained for. The SUV was not four wheel drive and the road weaved up a small mountain before we were forced to stop driving – so the youngest one and I made the hike the rest of the way in the hot high desert sun to find an ammo can on the top of a ridge overlooking the valley – it was actually pretty awesome. We limited ourselves to only five caches in about five hours, though, before we made it to the area we planned to spend the night.

Mono Vista

Refusal of the Call

So, we finally made it down into the Mono Valley and we need to find a place to bed down for the night. I had kept this night free of reservations, partially because I wasn’t sure how far down the road we would make it that night.

Oh…wait…back up…see, this is why I write this stuff down in here- because I forget the details and sometimes, the details ARE important. No, we didn’t actually make it to Mono Valley that night. Camping plans were derailed in favor of a Best Western in Susanville, California. We were too tired to make it all the way – and to tell you the truth, it was really nice to spread our things out and reorganize, to order pizza and watch TV and relax, to take the boys down to the little pool which was a little too chilly still on this mid-summer night for comfortable swimming, but it was fun to shiver together, to play water games, catch up on their stories of the past week, and whisper about the teenage girls on the other side of the pool from us.

And this is the thing about Susanville: I never went there with my ex-husband, even though it was close to where we used to live, and a place we drove through sometimes AND where he spent a year going to college. He only ever pointed out the women’s penitentiary to me. But I kind of liked this town, and I really want to go back now, after spending some time there in the hotel room reading about what Lassen National Park has to offer. Guided horseback rides that offer opportunities for viewing wild horses was most intriguing activity I saw advertised. Maybe someday when I am healed and back to riding horses we can look into that.

Anyways so we finally got out of town the next morning and were NOW headed to Mono County, with a few stops along the way (like an irritating search for DVD player chargers in Reno, Nevada, and a random sampling of meatball panini sandwiches at a pizza place somewhere north of Carson City). So after all that, and not much geocaching, it took us almost to the end of day before we were fiddling around trying to decide on a campsite for the night.

(tune in for Episode 2 later, after we try out our new Blu-Ray system and get some sleep)

Fremont National Forest Fun

Tumalo State Park has a few caches in it, but we left without finding any, mostly because we wasted some time on a bad hint on one and another looked like it was going to be a longer walk than we had time for. We did have time for breakfast at Shari’s Restaurant before leaving town; warm comfort food washed down with hot coffee.
It was slightly misty outside, which suited my mood and memory. The Shari’s is right across the street from the Shiloh Inn that my ex husband and I stayed at a few times. He had always wanted to move to Bend, and we had gone as far as to meet with a realtor and consider houses and jobs in town, but ultimately we stayed in Texas. If we had gone then, we might have stayed together, it is possible. Part of what drove our misery together was his misery over living in Texas, or not living in Oregon, or sacrificing his dream of Bend, although to be fair, he never made any efforts to make it happen. I felt like he wanted me to make it happen for him, although it wasn’t my dream, per se. I did always like Bend, though, and we spent quite a few weekends here both when we lived in Oregon, and when we visited later.
These are the things I remembered as we left town: the store where we bought presents for an impromptu third birthday for our oldest son during a break from deployments, a restaurant, a bar, a hotel we visited during our weekends there, a turn off even for caches we found later on. I was surprised at both how much I remembered, and the details I couldn’t conjure up.

And soon, we were on the road, this time heading down a road familiar to me – to his parent’s house, a few hours drive from here. My kids were there, they had been spending a week with their grandparents in Oregon that they hardly ever get to see. Part of the reason I chose the West for our vacation was to give them a chance to have this visit this summer, since their dad wasn’t able to take them. They had been there a week, since I had handed the kids over to my ex’s aunt in Ashland, Oregon the following Friday. This was the first time I had seen my ex’s parents since the divorce, and indeed it was the summer before that happened that I had last seen them, so three years had gone by now since I had pulled up at their drive. They had also never met Jason, who took the place of their son in my life, so all this has me a little nervous.
I knew the way to their home, still, and remembered some of the landscape, although this day, due to our explorative nature, Jason and I saw parts of the wilderness along the drive that I had never seen before.
We spent quite a bit of time at this rock formation in the above picture. Although we never did find the cache that was our incentive for getting out of the car there (coordinates were like 50-70 ft off and the hint was bad), we had a really good time walking around out there, feeling the cool Oregon air and listening to the wind blow the trees around.

We pulled off several times along the way to drive down forest roads in the Fremont National Forest. These roads appear on the map something like, “200” or “260”, but in reality are just dirt roads with no signs used by loggers or wilderness enthusiasts, hunters maybe. A few times we weren’t sure we were on the right road – in fact we probably wasted half an hour or more than morning on wrong roads – but we did find some cool places.

This is one of those cool places – aptly named “Hole-in-the-Ground”. This is an area known to geologists as a “maar”, formed by a series of eruptions that caused magma to come into contact with ground water, forming a crater in the ground. The road around the rim is 3 miles long, and we made it all the way around, but not without crashing into a rock and causing the bumper of our rental car to get pushed out of place in an area, which Jason fixed when we got to my former in-laws, having to borrow some tools to my ex-stepfather-in–law. It was interesting….but we had a fun adventure tale to tell, which took some awkwardness of the moment away.

When we got to their house, we were literally at the border of Oregon and California. We had stopped at the Burger Queen for lunch before their house (my favorite place to eat in the Lakeview, Oregon area, reminiscent of former visits), and when we left their house, it was mid-afternoon, and time to get a move on to get to the next leg of our journey – Mono Lake, CA, which deserves its own entry.