On Saturday I joined three other local geocachers on a day trip to
The Dalles, Oregon
in order to do a series of 12 caches hidden by the
Chamber of Commerce.
Some other local cachers were able to come down to The Dalles yesterday and now it was our turn.
Why travel to The Dalles?
Well, while supplies last, the chamber is giving those who do the series of caches a limited edition “The Dalles Dash Geocoin”.
I have two coins from doing a similar series 2 years ago sponsored by the city of Canby and by the Mt Hood Territory chambers.
I met with
Tumbleweed2,
SproketMan, and
SnowWhite1
and off we went.
It was snowing in the Tri-Cities as we left but the weatherman said it was not going to snow or rain in The Dalles today.
The weatherman was wrong.
It was as if we were dragging the snow with us.
We stopped twice for two geocaches along the way and within minutes, both times, the snow began to fall.
We finally reached The Dalles and were ready to start finding caches.
The first one on our list was
Dam Tree.
The cache had been disabled by the owner because the original container had gone missing (note to self: write article on muggles).
Reading the cache page made it apparent that a new container had been hidden nearby.
Even though the coordinates had not yet been updated, the description and hint on the cache page gave us some good clues on places to look and it was not too long before SnowWhite1 had found the cache.
We all signed the log and were off to the next cache.
The second cache,
10,000 Years of Trade
was located was right in the middle of town among all the murals that depict the history of this area.
The GPS was pointing us to some low evergreen bushes.
I hate evergreen bush caches.
There are 1000 places for a cache to ‘tossed’ into a bush.
You have to lift, sort, and separate through branches that seem to be the world’s best dust collectors.
And they make you itch!
Gloves on, the 4 of us started pawing through 8 feet of bushes.
Do you know how conspicuous you become while doing this?
If we had come prepared we would have been wearing those orange safety vests and carrying black trash bags — the perfect urban camo.
Not today.
On our first pass around the bushes none of us had found the cache.
Time to look again, deeper.
Ah, “I found it” — both Tumbleweed2 and I called out.
But we had found two different containers.
Seems at one time someone thought the cache had gone missing and had replaced the container.
We had found the original rectangular lock&lock container and a round tupperware container.
No reason for there to be 2 containers.
We transferred the contents of the round container to the original container and put the round container in the car (and will use the container a little later).
With this cache out of the way it is time to move on to the next cache.
Under the Weather Vane
was next on the list and the GPS routed us to Old St. Peter’s Landmark, a 110 year old former Catholic church
The church was built in 1897 and is open to the public for free tours as well as being available for weddings, concerts, and memorials.
We searched around and this time I was the lucky one, finding the cache container tucked under a bush.
We traded a couple of items, Tumbleweed2 snapped a few pictures, and we all loaded back into the car and were off for the next cache.
End of Part 1.
