Dot 5 km Letterbox Hybrid
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This road you have just driven on is a primarily a resource road that may see logging trucks or mining trucks travelling along it. It was first constructed in the mid 1980’s by Roy H. Doyle and Sons Ltd., logging contractors, to connect with their road across the Sechelt Peninsula that went down to their log dump near Carlson Point.
There is a small rubber stamp (red star) in the cache. Please leave it there as one is required for Letterbox Hybrid geocaches. Thank you.
Their road across the Peninsula was built in the early 1980’s and came from what we old-er timers still call Doyle’s Road although the Forest Service has a different name for it now. Doyle’s Road started on Trout Lake Road in Halfmoon Bay and went up the mountain toward Lyon Lake and Mount Helliwell.
A few years later, this same road also served as access to a dolomite mine owned by Rudy Riepe and Tri-Sil Minerals Inc. of Sechelt. According to wikipedia, dolomite is used as an ornamental stone, a concrete aggregate, a flux for the smelting of iron and steel, and also in horticulture, where it is added to soils and soil less potting mixes to lower their acidity. It is also used as the substrate in marine (saltwater) aquariums to help buffer changes in the pH of the water. Dolomite forms white or grey to pink commonly curved (saddle shape) crystals, although they are usually quite large. There are some larger pieces of dolomite surrounding the cache and if you drive another kilometre up the road, you will arrive at a site where some dolomite ‘boulders’ have been stored.
The roads are now mainly used by outdoor adventurers and mountain bikers but there is still the possibility of resource vehicles using it as well. In order to hopefully reduce accidents on this and other resource roads, they are radio controlled and there are markers every kilometre and at other potentially hazardous locations. Logging trucks will usually call out as being loaded (heading down and towards the log dump) or empty (heading back up the hill to the cut block) and all other vehicles will usually call out as going up or down. I say “usually” because each company may have a different protocol. The VHF radio frequency being used is supposed to be posted at the beginning of the road but there is no radio frequency posted there now so that should indicate that the road is not being used for any resource extraction. However extreme caution must be taken when travelling the road.
If you have a VHF radio dialled into the correct frequency and you are going up the road at kilometre 8 and you hear “loaded at 9”, you’d best be looking for a place to pull safely off the road, and in a hurry! Loaded logging trucks can’t stop on a dime and they take up most of the road and they have the right of way. This all sounds simple but getting a programmable radio with VHF frequencies in it is not that easy. If you must travel on these resource roads, you’d be best to check with the resource company using the road to find out when the road is not being used or wait until one of their trucks is going the direction you want to go and stay right behind them.
Enjoy your trip up these roads and if you are careful and if you take the right turns, you will end up in Halfmoon Bay.
The gate is permanently open.
The letterbox clues are:
1. Drive to the north end of the pavement on Mason Road to 49* 29.956’ / 123* 48.171’.
2. Drive carefully and safely in a northerly direction on the gravel road 0.5 km.
3. Walk 10 metres south westerly and look behind the large douglas fir tree.
I placed an unregistered geocoin in the cache for the FTF prize and I left a FTF Frog geocoin with the hopes that whoever picks it up will in turn place it in a new geocache that they create.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Vg’f va gur anzr bs gur pnpur.
Treasures
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