Picket Creek

05/08/2012 By Kabutroid
[Today... was a rather intriguing caching day, to say the least. And at the absolute bare minimum, made... well... basically the entire afternoon a massive double-entendre, but if I bother elaborating, I’ll put it behind a spoiler tag ToungeOut . In either case... quick bit of backstory. My wife and I were spending the weekend at my friend’s parents’ cabin out in Barrier Bay. Basically, all of my close friends are avid non-geocachers, with the single exception of Exousia... the friend whom invited us here. Unfortunately, her having a 3-year old not old enough to start caching, however her mother Kathy was quite receptive to the idea and was always curious about it. She was up for a walk to a cache near the cabin, which basically hooked her in, and hard. Needless to say, the second we got back from that cache, she was talking me into hopping into the car to tackle some of the caches not quite walking distance Hell, don’t have to ask ME twice!]

And that’s how I ended up spending the entire afternoon alone with my friend’s mom ToungeOut .

[We set our sights on this cache, and found parking near the tennis courts mentioned in the description. Evidently, she was quite familiar with the area, and guided me where to turn and where to park. Hopping out of the car, we headed down the trail. Apparently she’s taken this trail a number of times, although usually cross-country skiing in winter, and never in summer strangely enough. Well, we were about to change THAT (at least for part of the trail). While hiking down the trail, we noticed an off-branch path, but decided to keep going in hopes of finding a closer one. Well, that didn’t happen, and when we were approximately as close to the coordinates as possible, we decided to just bushwhack through the least dense section. She didn’t even hesitate when working through the bushes and trees, whereas any of my other friends (with the exception of Exousia perhaps) wouldn’t have even gone down the trail, let alone off of it like this ToungeOut . Having a fellow outdoor enthusiast with you makes caching a lot more fun, gotta say.

After finding the other side of the bushes, we began hiking through an absolutely massive thistle patch, interspersed with raspberry bushes that we snacked on. Mmmm... fresh, wild raspberries... anything in stores simply don’t compare. However, the presence of bear dung nearby had us speed up our travels, since this area would clearly be a popular location for them. So finding the coordinates, we came upon something that just screamed for a cache... and found it completely absent of one Frown . Perplexed, we spread out our hunt a bit more, and slowly expanded our search. Unfortunately, much of the area had very tall grass, making the hunt a bit more difficult. Repeatedly, I kept coming back to what I thought was ground zero, and seeing if I was somehow missing something there. Nnnnnope.

However, on a subsequent expanding search, I stumbled across what could only have been the cache container BigSmile . Looking at my GPS... it was bouncing around at about 4 meters... clearly if I had checked my GPS more often through this, it would have shown my original ground zero to be far further than this spot. Stupid GPS... not like there’s much to get in the way of its signal over here ToungeOut . But in either case, with the cache found we immediately upended it and I signed the logbook for both myself and Kathy. Not sure if I’d call this a ‘regular’ size cache though... the available space falls moreso under ‘small’ in my eyes... but that could just be me. Getting all of the contents back in (a bit damp, so I dried things as best I could), we immediately were able to find a far easier path out of the bushes and back onto the main path.

Thanks for putting the cache here. Loved the raspberry snack we got on the way to it BigSmile .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and micromail ball]