In a couple weeks we are heading out west to Snohomish, WA to visit Donna’s brother and his family. We are spending a little more than 2 days with them before we go on a road trip that will include western Washington, western Oregon, the tip of coastal California and back up the Oregon coast before flying home out of Seattle.
We will, of course, be doing some geocaching. The Seattle area is the birthplace of geocaching which means that there are more caches out there than you can shake a GPSr at. Our first day of traveling is from Snohomish to White Salmon, WA on the Hood River. As we are prone to do, we are not taking the most direct route, but the scenic one by going through Steven’s Pass before heading south. Google maps says it is 300 miles and that is the upper limit of what we like to drive in a day, so there is not going to be a lot of time for geocaching.
I did a Pocket Query of caches along the middle 230 miles of our route, extending to a maximum of one mile either side and it returned 334 finds! Donna and I have been taking turns trying to whittle that number of caches down, with our criteria being: convenient to the direction of travel on the route, not too difficult and be somewhat scenic. So far we have managed to get it down to 217 and it really needs to be more in the neighborhood of 30. We are obviously going to be leaving a ton of terrific hides off our To Do List and from the descriptions I’ve been reading we could spend our entire week and a half out ther just hiking the trails and geocaching along this one day’s drive. We are not too saddened by this development, as the journey is always the reason, any geocaching is just a bonus.
Closer to home, there is a new cache in Hitchcock Woods, the replacement for our just archived cache “The Birds”, called “North by Northwest” that we will probably go hunting for tomorrow.