The Dalles Dash — Will Cache for geoCoin (part 2)

(Continuing from part 1)

End of the Rut was next on our list. The GPS brought us to bolder inside a nice little park. In 1906 Ezra Meeker had the words “End of the Old Oregon Trail 1843 - 1906″ cut into its face. The cache page said that we needed to follow the wall made by hands to where we would find a wall made with no mans hands. Following these instructions we were led to the corner of the park where a natural stone wall rose up 10 or 12 feet. Searching through the ivy we found a zip lock bag containing the cache contents. Seems that the original container was ‘muggled’ and some cachers had collected the remnants of the cache and placed them in the zip lock bag. I see that the cache page now has new instructions to a different location. Hopefully this new location will not be tampered with.

We noticed on our GPS that there was another cache nearby, The Crucifix, and decided to go after it even though it was not one of the 12 needed. Sometimes geocaching becomes an obsessive compulsive behavior. We followed the GPS to the front of First Christian Church. We looked in all the obvious places in the rhododendron bushes up against the building with no luck. I checked the hint: “one of three of a kind”. Hmmm. There were 3 brick protrusions from on the building, but we had checked there. So we checked again. Still nothing. I stepped back from the building to see if I could get a better perspective. “What’s this? Hey guys, here it is!” Coordinates need to be fine tuned to place the location 30 or 40 feet from the front of the building but that is what you have to deal with when geocaching.

One of the reasons the Chamber of Commerce created this cache series was to get folks off the highway and into town. According to Dana Schmidling, Executive Director of The Dalles Area Chamber of Commerce,

When we started The Dalles Dash, our goal was to get travelers off of the highway and into our town. Since the view of The Dalles from the highway is not particularly appealing, we wanted to do something to get people into town to see our “hidden gems”. When we decided to do The Dalles Dash we selected our historic sites and locations with great views. It seems to have worked. People are always saying “I didn’t know that was there.”

So far, I would have to agree. I am seeing a lot of the area and we are not even 1/2 way done with the caches. My family has driven by The Dalles numerous times. Except for a quick stop years back for a couple caches in town, our only other stops have been after 10pm at night when we would pull into K-Mart to Boondock with our travel trailer on our way to Ocean Park on the Long Beach Peninsula.

It was now time for us to support the economy of The Dalles. With the 3 caches we did on our way to The Dalles Dash and the 5 caches done so far, we were hungry! One of our foursome suggested Burgerville which we easily found 2 blocks away (but only with the help of our GPS). Lunch was great but was cutting in to our caching time and the weather looked like it was going to start getting nasty.

Looking forward to Part 3 … the long walk

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