After a few weeks of planning we're First To Find!
I spent this morning busy with appointments, but ended up being done early (about 12:15), so I thought I'd go caching. Ran home and did a quick peptalk to Mrs. Cache Us, telling her it would be easy. I knew where it was. I saw it with Mr. K on Sunday. "We can do it, Baby!"
"Fine, I guess we can go," was her not so joyful reply. So we hit the road. It was almost 1:30 leaving Redding.
We made quick time to Red Bluff and then not so quick of time to the area around the cache. Mile after mile we twisted around and around on dirt road after dirt road, watching the counter on the GPS slowly click down the milage, a 10th at a time. Soon we came to a point where we stopped, but the road, too much for our Jeep to take on, kept going. Easy, we'll walk in from here! It's only 1.99 miles away.... That's not even 2 miles! We can do it! So we set off on foot. By this time it was 4pm.
That first 1/2 mile was hot and the "road" was so loose that it was slippery. But we managed it. We soon found ourselves going through a beautiful deep canyon, very much like the Grand Canyon. This wasn't so bad... we might even make it to the cache in good time. Then I looked at the GPS. It said we were still about a mile from the cache... and quite a few hundred feet below it! Oh, well. I asked Mrs. Cache Us if she wanted to go back. "Are you kidding? I'm not hiking this far for nothing. And we're going to find this one before Kokopeli, Faunafarm or the Desert(B)Rats one way or another!" So onward we went.
In time we found our way to the top of the canyon, about 2/3 of a mile from the cache. A few wrong turns, and some corrections (and a few choice words) found us high on a rocky hillside, in the shade filling out the log book as FTF and leaving the one Jeep that could make it (a little YJTB). As we left I looked at the time: 5:45pm. Not much light left.... Time to go.
Going back took just as long. We made a bee line for the canyon below us, making good time all the way down. We made a false turn in the maze of old roads and trails down there and ended up at a dead end. A little back tracking and a lot of brush crashing got us back on to our road and 1/2 a mile from the car. What felt like a slow moving death march found us back at the car at about 7:45; much too dark for my taste.
We turned the Jeep a round and were soon rock crawling our way home. A tempting "shortcut" got the better of us and we attempted a quick exit, only to find that road "not maintained" in the most extreme way. So back out the very long way... the rock crawling, stream crossing, twisting unmarked roads in the dark route. Not my wife's idea of "fun."
But it's ok. We were FTF. And we made it out ok (thanks to a great Jeep). And it was only a 6 mile hike. And it was only 11:40 when we got home. And she's sleeping like a log
[This entry was edited by cache_us_if_you_can on Thursday, August 26, 2004 at 9:40:11 PM.]