Ed Out And About

The Jeep Brothers Go On A Road Trip - Day Four - Last Day

2012-01-18T22:06:00.000-08:00

"Welcome to Salmon Arm" .......... That's what the sign says, and we awoke to a great last day of the road trip in sunny Salmon Arm.

We started off our day of caching at a tiny neighbourhood park at the edge of a suburb looking for a tricky cache. Well, I guess my morning cup of English Breakfast worked just fine, as I walked right over to it and picked it up right away. It's always good to start the day with a "find", makes you feel so much better about yourself. :)

The next couple were just a block or two away near a lake front park. Once cache was tucked away out on the long pier sticking out into the lake. It was a little cool first thing in the morning walking out on the water with a bit of a wind...it cut right through the light weight clothes we had on. Oh well, we considered it invigorating (rather than considering ourselves stupid for not dressing warmly) and we made the best of the lack of pedestrian traffic on the pier. Ed (that's me) was busy taking pictures while Bowser98 and MrTJ diligently found the cache - was again teamwork works well for me..... :)

Next cache was located along an elevated pedestrian walkway over the tidal marsh right in front of a senior citizens complex, and of course all the windows facing the lake are big picture windows, and of course all the senior citizens are up early watching out the windows. Not much to do about that, except ignore any one watching and go find the cache. We needed the ling arms of Bowser98 to ferret out this cache from it's hidey hole, all the while hoping he doesn't drop it....it's a long way down and pretty mucky to retrieve it. :(

Done with the water front, we headed back into town towards a BC Government office located off in another suburb and this cache was a wee bit tricky. You see, the cache is hidden in a 10 foot tall and 80 foot long retaining wall, and...the cache is well camouflaged to fit in with the look of the wall. Once again my morning cup of English Breakfast tea aided my geosenses and after about 20 minutes of looking I spotted the well hidden little bugger. Man, we were happy to find that one!

A few blocks away up on the highway was an easy pick me up cache, but it provided a nice view of the Shuswap Valley and Salmon Arm itself. It's always rewarding to see an area from above, you get such a better idea of the town is like.

The next couple of caches we did were almost right across the street from each other...well, actually they were! The were on the banks of the Salmon River, so named from the salmon that come back to spawn every year. One cache was an earth cache, the other a regular cache located along a shaded part of the river.

ABOVE: tjguy98 holding his GPS at the Salmon River Earth cache

Earth caches are always interesting as you learn so much about the local area both from a geological view, and conversely, a human point of view, as invariably the landscape shapes the history of our forefathers who were in the area. Here's some things I did know about the Salmon River before we discovered the Earth cache: there are 6 rivers in BC named "Salmon River", the one I see the most is the small one that runs past the site of Derby in Langley, the location of the first Fort Langley; the Salmon River arises in the cattle ranching area of the famous Douglas Lake Ranch, the Canada's largest working cattle ranch, a small non-descript Salmon Lake known for good fishing is the head waters of the river that lazily flows past downtown Salmon Arm and into Shuswap Lake miles later.

We poked around the city of Salmon Arm for most of the day, finding a few city caches and the occasional cache on the hills above the city lending good views up and down the lake.

Our last cache in the area was at an urban farm, where they had a small grocery store on site selling local products fresh off the surrounding fields. What we liked about this was the fact the farm had taken the time to collect old farm tractors and turn them into a bit of a showcase of snippets of life on the farm way back when.

Now, not that I'm a great aficionado of farm tractors, but I do appreciate it when someone goes out of their way to preserve a bit of our past for all to enjoy.

And, to ensure we did our part in helping the farm, we popped into the shop and picked up snacks for the road! Hey, it's the least we could do!

OK, it's the end of the caching adventure for this road trip - we've maxed out our daylight of caching in the area, time to hit the road and dead head all the way back to the Lower Mainland on the Coast.
We didn't pick up as many caches as we thought we might; we opted to pass up on quantity in order to maximize our sight seeing in the cities we passed through and in the surrounding lands we passed over. I think we all agreed spending most of the afternoon wandering the forest roads outside of Kamloops was the most scenic and enjoyable for all of us. We could have built up our totals had we skipped the countryside and just concentrated on the densely packed cities, but that wouldn't be keeping with the spirit of a "road trip" now would it? :)

Thanks for reading this 4 parter story of "Jeep Brothers Go On A Road Trip"
All pictures I've taken for all my caching adventures can be found on my Flcikr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjguy98/
Videos I've done can be found on my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/tjguy98
56 wonderful videos await your perusal! LOL

Until next time.....
(tjguy98 rests his pen)

The Jeep Brothers Go On A Road Trip - Day Three

2011-11-06T22:36:00.000-08:00

Click on the pictures to view them full sized; after viewing click on the page to the left or right of the enlarged picture to return to the story

Day three we awoke in sunny Kamloops and began our day of geocaching at a "liar's" cache' this is a cache where everything about this cache is a lie, right from the size of the cache to the location and the finder's entries. These are always fun as they let the finder's imagination run wild, and it's always neat to read what other cachers write in the logs. In this case, the cache was a micro, so everyone wrote that the cache was huge, the location was an abandoned business, so every one wrote how it was tough to find a parking spot, etc. As a finder going looking for the cache with no preconceptions, the "idea" of where the cache will be found was skewed by the untruths written in the logs - makes you second guess yourself as to whether or not you're even in the right area of the cache itself!.

We did a few more caches in the city, some provided historical information from Points of Interest areas, some gave us geology lessons of the Kamloops area, and still some showed us you can put a cache pretty well anywhere!

One of the caches is located on a elevated pedestrian walkway leading up from a riverside pathway to a bridge that crosses the Thompson River. As it was a magnetic cache, you really have to trust your GPS and the cache hider that both sets of co-ordinates are bang-on. As it was, with a clear view to the birds up above, the co-ordinates were pretty darn close, but that still gave us 60 feet left to right of ground zero, and two sets of railings to search. We found it after 10 minutes of looking, which we didn't consider too bad, and for which we were pretty happy about.

Another nearby cache had us looking through three Ponderosa Pine trees, eventually turning up in what is known as a "typical Interior" hiding spot. I won't say what that means for those of you who have not experienced that type of hide - no spoilers here.

We spent most of the day chasing down city caches before we realized the day was slipping away and we needed to get the geo-truck pointed east towards Chase and Salmon Arm, our next stop for the night.

Heading east out of Kamloops we did a few caches here and there just to break up the drive; one of the ones we did was at Ducks, at a historical site that I knew well. Billy Miner, the train robber, committed the first train robbery in BC's history in 1904 near Mission BC. That location in Mission is just a few miles down Hwy #7 from my home base, so there was a bit of local interest for me as well.

If you read the historical marker in the picture above, you'll see that Billy Miner stayed in the Princeton area; as a matter of fact, he spent much time in the Merritt area as well on a friend's ranch, and often appeared at the Quilcheana Hotel for dances on Saturday night. He was known as a U.S. business man with a quiet demeanor and a fondness of dancing with the ladies. Having visited the Quilchena Hotel several times, and seen the old fashion bar in the small saloon with it's bullet hole and all, it was cool to be following in the foot steps of one of the characters from BC's history.

ABOVE: MrTJ at the Billy Miner historical marker just east of Kamloops in Ducks

ABOVE: TGUY98 at the Billy Miner historical marker just east of Kamloops in Ducks

ABOVE: Bowser98 at the Billy Miner historical marker just east of Kamloops in Ducks

Back on the highway we started putting a few more miles under the tires as we continued on heading eastward, picking up caches that were close to the highway or ones a little off the beaten track if they looked like interesting locations or caches. One of those neat places was just on the outside if Chase at a road side rest area that I have used a few times over the years. There is an information sign that informs travellers of the mountain goats that inhabit the steep cliff around the town; it's also right next to a small creek that offers travellers a much needed cool oasis during the hot Interior summers. The find itself was easy, and it gave me a chance to play with the camera a bit on the small waterfalls located here.

We scooted across the highway and took one of the feeder routes into the small town of Chase. We stopped at the 1909 Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, which is now the town museum. Unfortunately an arsonist had a go at the museum and it is now closed while they await funds to restore it. The cache itself was missing, probably as a result of the initial clean up from the fire, but we did get to see a log cabin from the 1800's and a few small steam engines. Sorry to see the aftermath from the fire, although we did enjoy our short visit.

ABOVE: Fire scorched Chase town museum

We zig zagged through the small town of Chase doing a few caches in city parks and along roadways, losing daylight as we went along; we still had another dozen or so caches to pick up before we slid into Salmon Arm, so we skeedaddled back east along the highway knowing for the third night in a row we would be ending the day doing night caching.

Just before we lost daylight we stopped at one of the more interesting cache locations, this was at the now abandoned Squilax General Store; while it's life as a general store is now over, this building now houses the offices for the Squilax hostel. Just below the hostel are three old fashioned train cabooses that act as dorms for the hostel. The office buildings have been left untouched as there is a colony of Yuma bats that have been roosting here since the 1930's. It was good to see how the local community has supported the bat population in the area - many other peoples would have cared little for such yucky creatures as bats.
Oh, in case you were wondering, "Squilax" means "black bear" in the local First Nation's language.

Almost forgot, we managed to sneak in one more daylight cache worth telling you about; as we cached along the southern shore of the Shuswap Lake's system, we stopped in a small village called Tappen. The cache in mind was located at one of those old time cemeteries where it's beauty is in it's informal nature, unlike the sterilized ones you see in some big cities. The cemetery is located up on the hillside above the lake in the wide broad sweep of the Tappen Valley. It was evident even from our short jaunt here that this was a prime farm country, and the gentle winding country roads just begged for more exploration....sad to say it would have to wait for our next trip this way.

We had been keeping an eye on the time, not wanting to wait till too late at night to find a hotel in Salmon Arm; we also had an ear cocked listening to the local radio. We knew that a major storm system was buffeting the Salmon Arm area and points south and we knew we were heading right into it. My daughter and her fiance were holidaying in Kamloops that day and text messages from them indicated that this was a major lightning and rain storm causing wide spread flooding accompanied by power outages due to lightning strikes. We had actually been skirting the storm since dinner time when we pulled out of Kamloops; occasional bouts of rain told us we were just on the edge of the storm.

Not wanting to risk caught out in the inclement weather, we packed it in for the night and headed south the last few miles to Salmon Arm. Well, talk about good timing! About 2 minutes down the road we ran into the wall of the storm and were instantly driving through a heavy rain storm; to add to the poor visibility, we were driving through a few miles of freshly paved highway that was black as the night with no markings on the road way as of yet. All three pairs of eyes were glued to the roadway in case we drifted too far right and went off the shoulder of the pitch black road.

Soon enough we were in the growing town of Salmon Arm and starting the time honoured traveller's tradition of scoring a motel room for the night. That's a story unto itself, but we'll save that for another time.Suffice to say we managed to score a pretty nice suite at the Podollan Inn and Spas thanks to a free upgrade from the desk clerk, one that we very much appreciated and I don't mind putting a plug in for them. Two king size beds and a third queen size sofa bed with a large sitting area and a well laid out large bathroom with separate shower and tub was way more than these weary cachers expected, all at a reasonable price.

Time for another 10.00 PM dinner, then head back to the hotel and sort through today's cache finds and scan tomorrow's route, then hit the comfy beds for a well earned sleep!
Tomorrow would be Day 4 and the last day of the road trip for the Jeep Brothers.........
To see the complete set of pictures from the trip, click here to go to my Flickr site.

The Jeep Brothers Go On A Road Trip - Day Two

2011-10-25T22:07:00.000-07:00

Ashcroft was founded in the 1860's by the two English brothers Clement and Henry Cornwall. They originally came to BC to be part of the Gold Rush but on hearing stories of failed gold searches, decided to found the town to give future gold searchers a place to saddle their horses. The village of Ashcroft and it's 1600 citizens remain, as does Ashcroft House, a station house for the Cariboo wagon trains.

Click on the pictures to see the full size version

Like every small town, the original train station building stood in the centre of town, and knowing this, you can usually figure out where the first buildings in any town were located if you look for the train station. Here in Ashcroft it was still at the centre of town, and again, like most towns, the station has been refurbished to it's original glory. Only Ashcroft did it one better - they developed a block long park around the station with panoramic heritage displays of the history of the area, along with an old shack and a working water wheel.

A block down the street was the pioneer cemetery where our first cache was near; always neat to walk among the headstones and read the ages of those who worked this land before we came along doing frivolous things like geocaching. So many died young, and so many were from countries far away, lured to the new country by the promise of riches.

In the pioneer park with the train station was a short multi-cache that had you walking around exploring the history of the town via the displays in the park. This was an enjoyable multi-cache as it managed to casually get us into fine "geocaching form" for the day. We did a few more in-town caches which included some more of the Gold Rush caches - St. Albans The Martyr Anglican Church built in 1891, Harper's Grist Mill from 1878, and The Butte Ranch Site, circa 1860. We especially liked the last site, as this site was the location of a bustling ranch "town", complete with it's own school.

The Butte Ranch site also provided fantastic views of the sand bluffs created as the Thompson River cut through the glacial till formed when the last of the Ice Age glaciers were melting. The various coloured layers of sediment provided a natural canvas for nature to draw on.

We wrapped up the Ashcroft area, headed north the few miles back to Cache Creek, then headed east on the Trans Canada Highway aiming for Kamloops. We stopped at the earth cache called "A Burp in Time", located right on the highway. The McAbee Fossil Beds are the remnants of 50.2 million year old lake sediment; back then the area was not dry arid land like now. Instead it was subtropical, and a large lake existed here. Diverse fish and reptiles species swam here, many a precursor to today's existing species. The fossil beds originate in the Early Eocene period, where moon eyed fish, eosalmo (ancient salmon), and zeolites (microsporous crystalline solids) abound.

The area also has a great collection of hoodoos, pillars of rock with harder rock caps. The harder rock protects the softer composite rocks below them, leaving fields of vertical stack rocks which gave life to First Nations folk lore explaining hoodoos were invading warriors who broke a promise and were turned into stone.

Next stop was Juniper Beach, a small provincial park that allowed the public to get down to river level and camp among the cacti and juniper bushes along the cool river. The cache itself was a quick find, as long as you were watching where you stepped and where you reached - too quick and you had a hand full of cactus needles! The small park was a bit of an oasis on a hot day - shaded by the opposite river bluffs and cooled by the breeze off the river - probably like heaven on a scorching day.

Another few miles east on the Trans Canada Hwy brought us to the turn off for Wallichin - now all but a ghost town with only a few residents.

In 1907 it was an American's vision of grandeur along this section of river that gave rise to the current name. Charles Barnes envisioned the rich fertile ground providing scores of produce and fruit for the elite British society he planned to attract from Britain. In 1908 the families began to arrive, elegant homes and businesses where established, ground broken and subdivision parcels sold.

Chinese workers were hired to tend the fields and orchards, allowing the upper class British to live the life of leisure and luxury. By 1912 the town was well established with a bakery, a general store, barber, butcher, dairy, livery stables, ladies stores, two insurance offices, three laundries, post office and hotel.

Water for the orchards was brought via water flumes from 20 miles away from Snohoosh creek in the Deadman Valley. This was an engineering feat in its day but took a lot of maintenance but time was not on the community's side. World War 1 called back many of the British men to serve their country and the flumes fell into poor repair. With no water source for the fruits and orchards, the town soon died. On the bluffs to the north of the river still stand remnants of those very flumes - something to look at and wonder at the ingenuity of the people in their day.

A half hours drive brought us to Savona, a small community of the west end of Kamloops Lake. We did a few caches in the area but for me the prime cache was another Gold Rush cache called "Savona's Ferry". Francois Saveneux built a small one horse cable ferry to cross the narrow outlet of the lake as the trail to Cache Creek was so far just that, a trail. It wasn't until the Royal Engineers completed the construction of a Wagon Road in 1866 that a larger vessel was required. Over the years it had it's share of problems, with broken cables during spring melt causing the most problems.More than once the scow was washed downstream putting the ferry out of commission to the following year.

We hugged the south side of the lake as we picked up a few caches here and there in Savona both in the town area and along the lake shore. We kept up the pace as the day was getting on and we still had another 20 or so caches to pick up before we stopped for the night. A couple more hours of daylight would get us through some forest roads and back onto main roads before we ended our day night caching.

We were still west of Kamloops and west of the Coquihalla when we decided to do some scenic caching by taking a few of the Forest Service Roads in the area. The roads were all good graded roads and we passed a few cars here and there as they went to the more remote houses or farms in the area. Nothing memorable here, other than the enjoyment that back roads always bring - a hidden lake around the next corner, a herd of range land cows, the occasional deer just as surprised to see you as you are it!

We picked up a few caches with out going too far down the FSR, then turned around, went back along the Trans Canada and headed south on the Coquihalla for a few miles. There we took the Inks Lake Road turnoff and headed east along the road, actually another well graded FSR, and picked up a few more caches in this new area.

The one we all liked the best was at the site of an old log cabin; the cabin itself was situated in a clearing guarded by a swampy-when-wet area full of hungry skeeters just waiting for a meal. We picked our way through the soft wet ground, getting only slightly damp feet in the process, and walked into the clearing towards the cabin. This was one of those great scenic moments; the setting sun was low in the sky but still shining bright on the cabin, the grounds of the clearing sparkled with wetness and the cabin stood alone amongst the grass. I fired off a few shots from the camera, at this moment savouring the setting and the touch of history much more than the cache. But wasn't that the whole point of the cache being here....to bring fellow cachers to a scenic place to enjoy it as much as the cache owners does...

We continued picking up a few more caches and worked our way out to Lac Le Jeune Road and then headed north towards Kamloops. Night had now falling and I was feeling pretty good, actually kinda smug, about my route planning for the day. I figured we would have just enough time to pick up the last of the caches along the FSRs before night fell, and knowing that we would be doing our last caches in the dark I planned a route that would leave us doing caches close to the highways and a mile or two outside of Kamloops itself.

Our last cache had us doing a bit of circling back to be alongside the Coquihalla Highway again, only now we were on Sugarloaf Road travelling parallel to the Coquihalla Highway.As a matter of fact, our last cache was amongst the sage bush just a 100 feet from the busy highway. This was one of those caches that really made sure you know you were there....bits of spurs from the low ground plants blended with the sweet smell of sage on our pant legs and shoes, all under the light of a couple of flashlights and a BFL.
With the last cache of the day under our belt and the toll bells ringing 10.00 PM, we traced our steps back along Sugarloaf Road and headed along the freeway into Kamloops to score a nice warm dinner for our hungry tummies and pick out a hotel with a nice warm bed for our tired bodies.

To see the complete set of pictures from the trip, click here to go to my Flickr site to view the entire album.

The Jeep Brothers Go On A Road Trip - Day One

2011-09-28T23:53:00.000-07:00

"Summer time.....and the living is easy....." so goes the song.....a time when all is mellow and right in your world, at least for a few moments. But those moments live on fondly in your memories for years to come.

Such was a few moments in my life when my brothers Alan and Ken, AKA Bowser98 and MrTJ, decided that it was time to pack up just the three of us into one of the trucks and spend a few days doing a caching run up to the Interior of BC. We had done a similar trip a couple of years ago, and I for one couldn't wait to do another.

I have a Jeep TJ, Alan has a Jeep Liberty, and up until recently MrTJ also had a TJ, hence the moniker of "The Jeep Brothers" that some of our caching friends have bestowed on us. Well, I guess I've been called a lot worse!

So here was the plan; start the serious caching in Hope, cruise up the Fraser Canyon and finish off the day in Cache Creek. From there we would head over to Kamloops for the night, then on to Salmon Arm for the last night, and head back home from there. Well, we did pretty well just that, with lots of caching in between.

Now here's the problem....MrTJ and myself travel and cache quite a bit, so I've done lots of the ones up the Fraser Canyon. MrTJ and Bowser98 have done a bunch of the ones in Hope from a previous trip to the Interior, so now matter how we sliced it there was going to be some repetition of cache visits for one of us. Oh well, just do it and soon enough we'll be on to virgin territory.

We did most of the caches around town and the ones we liked the most were the ones along the old Kettle Valley Railroad right of way in the Suckers Creek area, a small marshland that lies between Kawkawa Lake and the Coquihalla River. The rail right of way is a smooth slightly graded walk about a kilometre long, which gave us plenty of time to chat in between spaced out caches. The history of the area was a big pull for us, to be able to walk in the footsteps of our heritage is always neat.

We especially liked the cache that was located at the heritage 1861 Anglican Christ Church; this gothic revival design building was built at the height of the gold rush in the area by the Sappers, as the British Royal Engineers were known. Besides administering to the hordes that came this way, it was also a strong reminder of the British presences in the area.

After grabbing lunch at one of the fine eateries in town, we began our northen journey up the Fraser Canyon. A couple of caches close to each other gave us a bit of a charge, each in their own way. The first was at the intersection of the highway and Nickel Mine Road. The cache was located just outside a private residence, one with an acre or two of wooded property; the cool part was the owner had salvaged many articles from the abandoned mine up the road for his house. Items like old bed frames, miner's picks and axes, mine helmets, lanterns and even a couple of old tractors gave the yard a great nostalgic feel...we would have loved to wander around his yard.

The other cache we liked was back across the highway and down at the edge of the Fraser River. One of the old time residents had left his property to the government, and the parks board has granted public access down to the rivers edge. I have to admit, this was a bit of a different view of the river for me; for most of the Canyon's length, travellers are high above the river looking down at it. At this new park we could walk down to a small sandy beach area and be at river's level. Oh yeah, there was a cache there too!

We headed on up to Emory Creek Provincial Park, where a campground was located on an old miner's camp. In 1858 the area was one of tents and miner shacks; When the gold just wasn't present in numbers they thought, many miners moved north up the Canyon looking for better pickings. After changing hands a few times, the CPR decided to make Emory City as the western terminus of the railroad; with this proclamation the town grew swiftly, counting thirteen streets, it's own newspaper, various shops, a brewery, nine saloons and a sawmill. When Yale was made the terminus instead of Emory City, the town died; just a few short years later by 1885, the town was all but abandoned.

I have to say, of the two caches we were looking for here we failed miserably! We couldn't even get close to one in the park above the camping area, and the other one by the river we thought must be missing. No one else has found it since, so we're sticking to that story. While thrashing around in the bush, on top of the hill above the river, MrTJ made a neat discovery; two wide rows of boulder size rocks neatly stacked up, the rows being approx 80 feet long each and about 4 feet high.

My first thought was we had wandered into one of the Native Indian fortification areas along the river used to repel raiding parties of other First Nations groups. Upon looking at the lay of the land, and realizing that these stacks ran perpendicular to the river, not parallel, I realized these were probably remnants of placer mining done by the Chinese miners; I've seen stacks like this in other areas, such as in Lillooet not far from where the Hanging Tree is located. For me, this was major cool - stumbling into a piece of hidden history was a great surprise!

We continued northward, stopping only occasionally to do a cache as MrTJ and I had already done all the caches in the Canyon, so we stopped for the benefit of Bowser98 to find the odd cache. In Boston Bar we stopped in town at a cache called "Cache, Cables, and Cars"; this one was a micro cache located on one of the old aerial trams that used to transport cars and people across the Fraser River from the Boston bar side to the North Bend side. Not so long ago the tram was still in use, until they finally built a bridge across the river.

We got into Lytton and started doing a few more caches, especially the Gold Rush caches put out by some of the small towns in the Gold Rush area. These caches are found in a geo-tourist book, each page giving a full historical recount of the area where the cache is located; collect 24 stickers from the caches and you can send away for a geocoin in the shape of a gold bar.

We hit the cemetery caches and showed Bowser98 around the small town, stopping for the always great view of where the blue water of the Thompson River meets with the muddy brown of the Fraser River. The Thompson water resists merging for a few hundred yards, but can't resist the influx of the mud bearing Fraser for long.

Off we went, the next neat stop being Nicomen Falls - if you haven't seen these falls before, they are spectacular. This 272 foot two step waterfall plunges out of an extremely narrow basalt gorge into a 400 foot amphitheatre gorge. The water flow is not great, but it is enough to have carved a sinuous, twisting slot through the basaltic rock formation, making the falls appear to spring from a cave in the middle of the rock wall. The best picture I have ever seen is from high above the fall's level; there you can actually see further back into the gorge from whence the waterfall springs.

We mosied on further up the highway; at Lytton we had left the Fraser Canyon and were now following the Thompson River as it travelled through the Thompson Canyon. In places the road was down almost at river level; here the road was carved out of the side of the cliff were normally the river would roar through at the height of the spring freshet. It is quite a sight to see, and can be slightly unnerving to see the wide raging river almost even with your car!

Spences Bridge brought us to a small community on the banks of the Thompson River before it heads south into the canyon. Here the river was slower, and prime steelhead fishing grounds. We stopped at a cache in a small rec type camping area that I'm sure exists solely for fishermen to camp and fish the river for steelhead. While here, Bowser98 noticed an old truck in the campsite that had been refurbished and was being used to haul a trailer. Bowser98 meandered over to have a conversation with them about the truck and to grab a couple of pictures for his Flickr albums; check out BC Road Relics for photos of old working trucks.

Anyways, after a few minutes of chatting turns out the owner is a fellow geocacher named tedylok; we've been chasing him up the canyon all day! We had a good conversation about geocaching and old trucks and life in general before we realized that, with night fall it wasn't getting any brighter, and we still had a bunch of miles to put under our caching belts before we made it to Cache Creek.

We found a few more caches in Spences Bridge in the dark, then started spinning the wheels on the F150 to get on our way to our final stop of the night. It was a shame really, as there are quite a few neat places to cache along this route but the night time made the locations "ordinary" and there were just too many caches still to do before we touched down for the night.

We bypassed the turnoff for Ashcroft and all it's caches, we would get to them in the morning. We headed on up the road a few more miles till we pulled into Cache Creek and picked off a few caches in the dark around town. Finally, around 10.00 PM, after being on the road and caching for 14 hours, we decided to call it quits for the night. We grabbed a really late dinner at the 24 hour A&W in town, then went in search of a hotel room where we could crash for the night.

Whew! Lots of story telling and it's only day one!! Man, I sure can spin a yarn! LOL

All pictures from the trip can be seen on my Flickr page here TIP - right click on link to open new web page

Decadent Day of Shopping

2011-07-30T23:17:00.000-07:00

What a wonderful way to start my holidays - a hot summer day and a nice drive into Vancouver to have brunch and pick up some pastries, but not just any pastries.

Having been in Belgium a few weeks ago and being bowled over by the wonderful goodness of _real_ Belgium waffles served with a topping of whipped cream, chocolate and strawberries, we swore that if we ever found a place with real Belgium waffles in the Vancouver area we'd go there for sure.

Well, a month ago Annette does The Ride To Conquer Cancer from Vancouver to Seattle, and one of the food sponsors was a company called Patisserie Lebeau; they supplied waffles at the food stops during the day. Annette had them and said "these are real Belgium waffles"...luckily her friend Connie found the wrappings from a waffle and on there was the company name, address, web site...woo woo!

Annette looks them up and finds out they are in the Kitsalano area near the Burrard Street bridge. In the mean time Alan, one of my brothers, has been raving about this Danish bakery in Burnaby at Royal Oak and Rumble that have great pastries and have something called a Kringle. Well, we were also in Denmark, birthplace of the Pedersen clan, and we loved the pastries there....why not drive into town and make a day out of picking up some decadent treats that will help us relive our recent European trip by tantalizing our taste buds!

So, we set off from Maple Ridge into Vancouver and arrive at the Patisserie Lebeau just after lunch - a perfect time to have a late brunch and pick up some goodies to go. Annette ordered a plain waffle (are you kidding me!) and I ordered a waffle topped with whipped cream, fresh strawberries and fresh blueberries.....in a word - "AMAZING". Annette even helped me with my lunch by picking away at the fresh fruit so I wouldn't have to eat so much.

I was down to the last few bites when I thought "crap, I should have taken a picture"! Oh well, what can you do...it was hard to think with what was on the plate just begging me to dig in.

We finished up our waffles, licked the last of the whipping cream off my fingers, and stood in line to buy a couple boxes of frozen waffles, as well as a small crumb style banana cake and some cookies.
Now, on into Burnaby for the Danish pastries....

At Royal Oak and Rumble is The Elite Bakery, specializing in Danish pastries - this is where we came for the Kringle. It's a large pastry, kinda looks like a cinnamon bun only it's about 5 times as big. Lots of flaky pastry topped with sugar and thinly sliced walnuts. It's thin, not thick like a bun, and very easy to break off a section and wolf it down.....I mean delicately snack on a little bit of it at a time...

We made the run home in the car with the air conditioning up high trying to keep the frozen waffles and other pastries cool....I think it worked...I plan on having a pretty good waffle breakfast tomorrow morning and a great after dinner dessert.

Here are the links to the two yummy places: next time you're in town check them out. Annette's already stated that they are a "must" stop whenever we head into town in the future!

Patisserie Lebeau http://www.grababetterwaffle.com/
Elite Bakery http://www.elitebakery.ca/

Ride to Conquer Cancer - Vancouver to Seattle

2011-06-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

June 18 and 19 was the "Bike Ride to Conquer Cancer" - a 240 K trek starting in Surrey BC and ending near Seattle Washington. This is only the 3rd year for this event but it is fast picking up participants and status as a premier fund raiser: 2900 riders raised 11.1 million dollars! Not bad for the third year of a new event.......

The first year it was held, my darling wife Annette was planning on participating but she took ill with the very thing the fund raiser is for. Last year she was training for the ride although she was still suffering the effects of the treatments, and she had a nasty tumble off her bike and broke her wrist just weeks before the ride. As she had already raised all the funds for her entry fee, and as her friend Connie was going to ride with her, Annette decided to help out in other ways and went as a crew member. Needless to say, after missing the event for two years in a row she was rather disappointed.

Annette promised she would go this year no matter what, a bold statement as she is suffering still from the treatments. Many of you know that, as much good as the treatments do, you can't bombard the human body with that kind of abuse with out something being affected. In Annette's case it was her ability to walk properly; you gotta wonder if she can't walk with out pain, how is she going to ride 240k?

Well, as luck would have it, riding is a bit easier on the body than walking, so it was possible providing she could handle the pain. Annette and some of her lady friends from the gym got together, added a gentleman co-worker of one of the ladies, and Connie's husband Larry opted to ride unofficially again this year, same as he did last year when Annette was unable to ride. Me, I was the official shadow; I followed along in the truck and took video when I could to record their achievment. Hey, somebody had to take the video and I was the only person who owned a camcorder! :)

They fund raised the necessary monies and trained when they could on weekends and nights; the final ride they did was 70 miles, about the same distance as the days of the ride itself.

So, fast forward to Saturday June 18, and after a nice week of sunshine, they assembled in Cloverdale in the pouring rain! Not a nice way to start the ride ...they were cold and wet before the ride even started.
But full of enthusiasm, off they went on their great endeavour.

The first night's stop was in Mt. Vernon, the riverside park was full of blue tents for those that opted to spend the night on site. Many more, us included, choice to get a good nights sleep and camped out in one of the local hotels where the riders could at least try to dry out their gear overnight.

Sunday morning was marginally better than Saturday morning - instead of pouring rain it was a steady drizzle that got you just as wet. Still, the riders would not be deterred and off they went aiming for the finish line in Redmond. Another long day of country roads and hills...big hills.....more hills than the first day....and the end was within reach before you knew it!

I raced ahead of Annette and her team members and managed to catch Annette, Connie, and Larry as they came across the finish line. Annette was overcome with emotion and shed a few tears - so did I. Annette was so happy to be able to do the ride to not only raise funds for others, but to attain her goal of completing the arduous task of riding all that way. I am so proud of her, the determination and guts she showed to make it to the finish knowing all the time that she'll pay for it for days.....it just blows me away.

Here's a video I made of the ride - you can also view it on my YouTube channel by clicking on the link at the bottom of the left column on the page.

Aeroskobing in Denmark

2011-06-07T01:44:00.000-07:00

Where the heck has Ed been? No activity on his blog for a long time.....well, the answer is.....Europe! Just got back a few days ago from a combination holiday of one week driving from Belgium to Denmark, and then a second week of cruising in the Baltic Sea visiting Talin, Estonia; St. Petersberg, Russia; Stockholm, Sweden; Helsinki, Finland: and Copenhagen, Denmark. I'll have a lot more to write about later.

In the meantime, here is a short video I threw together of our visit to the Island of Aeros in Denmark, and the city of Aeroskobing on the island where our Father's father lived. The hamlet of Dunkaer, the church and graveyard at Risemark, and the area around Little Rise all are pictured here, as is the town of Aeroskobing. All are touchstones in our family's heritage, especially Aeroskobing; I was able to stand in the doorway of 18 Vestergarde, where my grandfather lived, and walked down the same cobblestone lined streets that my relatives did. That was pretty cool!

Looking Out The Back Window

2011-03-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

Haven't been out caching or back road touring much due to winter time, only managed to get out a couple of times past few weeks, so I thought I would look backwards and see where I've been.

I have been doing back road and forest road driving for close to 35 years, needless to say my knowledge of the South West corner of British Columbia is pretty extensive. On Jan 9 2005 I added geocaching to one of my hobbies, which dove tails nicely with my love of exploring the countryside and poking around little corners of the Vancouver suburbs and the Fraser Valley. Looking for geocaches is a good way of finding those hidden gems of parks, ocean vistas and high mountain views. Add in my love of photography and story telling, well, you have all the makings of a guy who goes every where and wants to tell every one about it! :)

I've expanded my way of getting my travelogues out as the years went by; starting with simple emails, then to writing trip reports for web site forums, to posting pictures on Flickr.com, then getting my own web space in the form of this blog, and finally adding videography to my story telling repertoire.

Let's see where I've been, stories I've told, and who's seen me......(I know, rather self-aggrandizing but there you are) LOL

Starting with this blog, which began on Oct 2 2006;
16,642 visitors have viewed 24,412 pages worth of 90 trip reports and blog write ups. Guests have come from dozens of countries, every where from Canada to the U.S., China, Argentina, the U.K., France, Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Israel, Russia, Austria, Columbia, Denmark, and dozens more countries.

My Flickr account consists of 1,959 pictures which have been viewed 30,154 times

My YouTube channel contains 52 videos I have uploaded which have been watched a combined total of 7100 times, give or take a few times.

On the geocaching front I have found 2,366 geocaches in 3 provinces, 8 U.S. states and two countries in Europe. Doing so I have logged 36,190 miles between caches.....thankfully I didn't walk it all! :)
As a way of saying thanks to the geocaching community, I have hidden 54 various geocaches. My cache hides are in such diverse places as your run of the mill shopping mall parking lot, where the busy area makes it difficult to retrieve the cache unobserved, to local suburban parks, to forest mountain roads treating the finder to fantastic lake views, west coast rain forests, and beaver ponds.

A lot of time has gone into documenting and recording my activities to share with my family, friends and colleagues, but that same type of force that drives my wanderlust also drives my story telling...I've had such a great time and seen some fantastic places that I just have to show and tell every one where I've been, whether they want to hear it or not! LOL

I hope you didn't nod off reading the stats, but when I look back on the journey so far, I'm amazed at the territory I've covered doing what I love - exploring BC and beyond!

Bring on the nicer weather and melt that snow in the mountains, me and the Jeep are ready to hit the road again!

Vancouver Island Trip

2011-02-01T00:04:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of our two week holiday was spent on a leisure visit of the southern section of Vancouver Island. We caught the ferry around dinner time on the Monday, which put us in Victoria around 9.00 PM. We cruised around till we found a hotel with wifi available (you old geeks in the crowd would call it "war driving"), then searched out the local phone number for a hotel right downtown that Annette had in mind. And a good score it was...

This time of year Victoria is a quiet town, most of the tourists have disappeared, the tree huggers don't like protesting in the cold and the rain, so we had our pick of hotels at prime spots. Annette got a sweet deal at a hotel a block away from the Parliament Buildings, and a short block away from where the Blackball ferry from Washington docks. A charming smile from myself got us upgraded N/C to a room overlooking the Inner Harbour, with a fantastic view out our balcony of the harbour. At least it would be come sunrise...

We went for a short walk around 10.00 PM in a lite rain on deserted streets near the Parliament Buildings and popped into a corner store for some cool drinks. We meandered back to our room at a leisurely pace just enjoying the quietness of a normally busy street, with no place to go and no hurry to get there. It was a good moment, walking hand in hand under the umbrella, with all our cares many miles away.

We had a lazy wake up, no rush to start the day as we were officially on "Island Time". I was still half asleep when Annette said "have you looked out at the view yet"? Well, no....I was still in bed! But, oh yeah, this will be a great view, with excellent shots for the video. Annette stands back, and lets me peek out the curtains....I rub my eyes as there's too much sleep still and I can't focus...then she starts laughing....I couldn't see a darn thing cause it was foggy as hell! Well, I started laughing too...best room I've had for a while in Victoria, good price with a great view...LOL

Oh well, whaddaya going to do, other than pack up and head on out towards Sooke, someplace I had yet to be. The fog slowly lifted and the sun came out to make it a great day for the start of November - it was so warm that we had to take our coats off in the car, and the outside temperature hovered between coat or no-coat.

We grabbed a bite to eat at Timmy's in Colwood and wandered up Metchosin Road as it followed the coast line. I sure like these drives a lot better than the main highways - there is much more to see and more opportunities to pull over when ever something sparks your interest. We went past the town of Sooke for a few more miles, and picked a random place to stop where the highway touched the water...somewhere along the length of Sooke Bay.

The sun was fully out now, doing it's best to warm our hearts, and the shoreline did it's best as well. We walked the few yards to the beach, sat on a log and just enjoyed the sights and sounds for a few minutes. The place was enchanting, so much so that a brief stop turned into a couple of hours spent sitting on the beach acting like boyfriend and girlfriend again...in a good way! LOL

The beach here was full of small pebbles, and the shoreline short and steep; when the tide pulled out, it pulled all the small pebbles with it. Under the quiet roar of the undertow, was the unmistakable sound of pebbles tumbling over themselves.

Sadly, we knew there was more to see, so we trudged back to the car and turned the car back towards Sooke. I wanted to find at least a few geocaches while we were on the Island, so I had several picked out close to the road as we travelled the Island. The first one on my list was in Sooke, on a quiet back road.

So, picture this....we've been on holidays for a week already, we are on Island time with no rush to do anything or go anywhere, and I have only one thing "I" _want_ to do today...that's to find a cache. So, funny enough, the missus, who shall remain nameless, immediately starts by saying "how far down this road do we have to go", "we don't have all day to waste caching"! Excuse me? I thought we were in "relax" mode...apparently not when it comes to something she has no interest in....so we go about 6 blocks down this road (that's not really far is it?) and we pass a small trail into the bush...GPS says 130 feet to the cache. I park on the side of the road, GPS says 86 feet to the cache...I have one foot out the door and someone in the car, who shall remain nameless, says "hurry up"! I say "shut up, I haven't even gotten out of the car yet and I only have to go 80 feet" ! Sheesh! Isn't this the same person just a few days ago had me sitting on a bench guarding her purchases for 3 hours as she power shopped at the Outlet mall in Portland? Hurry up my ass!

With that little incident out the way, the drive went without further excitement as we went back through Sooke and caught the Inner Island Highway up island. We cruised up the Malahat Highway stopping at the viewpoint to take some pictures and video, and just enjoy a few moments out of the car. We continued north, getting off the main highway where we could to drive the old roads along the waterfront. This was way more funner! :) We drove through small towns like Mill Bay that displayed its rich fishing heritage for all to see. Fishing nets hung off the side of small houses pushed right against the old road, with pylons for footings to hold the house over top of the shoreline. Where space permitted, boats big and small were tucked between neighbour and house.

We got off the main highway again at Cobble Hill Road and took the old road down into the old town of Cowichan Bay right on the waterfront in, what else, but Cowichan Bay! There is a lot of First Nations history here, as it is one of the main First Nations settlements on the Island pre-European contact. For thousands of years, the people harvested salmon from the rivers and shellfish from the tidal flats. Warm winters and plenty of wildlife made this an ideal place to live.....and still does.

We ended the day's drive in Chemainus, another bright tourist stop during summer months but quiet on this Autumn day. Chemainus was an old logging town that was dying like most logging towns did in the 1980's. From it's inception as a First Nations village, to it's dynamic times of logging, mining, and fishing, the town was all but dead when the last lumber mill was scheduled to close in 1983. In 1981 the town decided to beautify itself and at the same time attract tourism, by painting murals on the sides of businesses. They started with 5 murals, today they sport 41 murals, plus a scenic little old fashioned, downtown section. It has now become a main tourist draw on the Island itself, and the little town is choked with tourist cars, RVs, and tour buses in summer.

Being here in Autumn, gave us the town pretty well to ourselves; and, as we discovered, there was a new Best Western hotel in town, only a year or two old. It looked like the only people staying there were a few blue collar workers and a few old tourists also enjoying the off season. Again, my charming smile along with a casual request for some kind of "free" upgrade brought us to the top floor in a corner suite. And what a great little room it was...you walk in, bathroom by the door, walk down a short hall, bedroom is on the right hidden behind double doors, a full kitchenette tucked off to the side of the spacious living area, and a large walk out balcony where you could sit out in the morning and enjoy your eggs and orange juice on a warm day! I definitely made a point of saying "thank you" to the young lady at the reception desk - that was a great gift from the hotel!

In the morning we had a lite breakfast at the hotel, then wandered around the streets taking in the murals and popping into the small shops advertising some typical touristy stuff, and some fine crafts made by local artists. We even went into the theatre they had, not so much to see the theatre, but the higher end gift shop stocked by local artists with small items like jewelery, up to paintings and metal work. Hmmm, that place wasn't quite for us....some prices seemed way over our heads. Still, I'm sure the workmanship was worth the dollars they were asking.

The day was getting on, and we had to start getting on as well, so we did get on up the highway, next stop, petroglyphs! I had gotten my eye on a small park advertised in the local Parks map and wanted to see in real life some petroglyphs..had only seen a few to date. Just a couple miles south of Nanaimo is Petroglyph Park, a 2 hectare park right at the side of the main highway overlooking the Nanaimo Harbour. The earth here is mostly exposed smooth rock, perfect for First Nations to use as a tablet to tell their stories.

First question I had - what's the difference between pictographs and petroglyphs? Well, I had to look that up, as they seemed the same to mean...here's the difference.
Rock paintings are called pictographs - rock carvings are called petroglyphs. Now you know!

I pulled off into the small parking area looking forward to the rock carvings; Annette chose to stay with the car, partly as she wasn't as interested as I was, and partly due to the local crime fighting sign that stated "Thieves work here". As it was, it was a very short walk up to the top of the large boulders above the car, and there I could see the rock carvings. The Park has done a good job of highlighting the carvings, and interpretation signs help the visitors. What I was disappointed in, was the fact there had not been any maintenance done in the park for some time. Fallen leaves and moss obscured the petroglyphs - I guess this was one down side in coming out of season - no work was done for the visitors sake.

Back on the road, we took the Old Island Highway north and stayed near the water again, this time passing through Lantzville, Parksville and stopping in Qualicum Beach for lunch. We headed up the hill away from the water into town and found a trendy tapas bar restaurant with good sandwiches. A nice lunch in our bellies, we headed back down the hill to the water, and continued our sojourn at waters edge.

Through Fanny bay and Oyster Bay, with their oyster operations creating mountains of white shells besides their buildings, and the strong smell of seawater from the concentrated operations, we marched on up island, until we got to the turn of for Cumberland.

Cumberland is an old coal mining town that has been nearly dead for as many years as I've been coming to the Island. Annette use to visit a good friend here back when they were both young girls, and she always wants to poke around town to see how it's changed. Well, if any thing, it's deader now then back then...although there is the odd sign of new life here and there as the town becomes an alternative place to live for the folks from the bigger towns of Courtenay and Comox as they look for cheaper housing.

We did a quick tour of the town, all 8 blocks of it, then headed back to the ocean to have a look-see around Courtenay. Like many parts of the Island, new shopping malls on the outskirts of town indicated a growth spurt that we hadn't seen before. But the downtown core remained pretty well the same, as many towns do.

We crossed the bridge out of Courtenay and drove the couple of miles to Comox, sister town of Courtenay and home of the large CFB Comox at the Comox airport. We looked around the air force base, taking pictures of some of the old planes on display in a museum area. Problem was, we couldn't get in to tour them...end of tourist season....bah!

We meandered over to the museum itself and spent a couple of hours looking at the vintage air force equipment, from the WW1 goggles worn by pilots in open cockpits, to the radar set ups of yesteryear, to the plane-dropped torpedoes on display....which Annette wouldn't let Ed kick to see if they were real!
If you are in the area, check it out; entry is by donation and I bought a CFB Comox golf shirt to help the cause.

Another must do in the area is the Courtenay Museum and Paleontology Centre. For many years the museum was a typical small town museum, doing it's best to preserve local history. The history of the Courtenay-Comox area goes back many years - the latest event for mankind was the visit by Captain George Vancouver in 1792 aboard the HMCS Discovery. Recent findings suggest that an even earlier visit by Sir Frances Drake in 1579 was the first real European contact for the First Nations people. Thousands of years before a sail ship entered Comox harbour, the People lived well off the abundance of deer, bear, beaver, salmon, whales, and shell fish.

And, millions of years before the People came, dinosaurs roamed Courtenay. Not too many years ago, a startling find on the Puntledge River led to a boon in fossil hunting. An elasmosuar skeleton was found by the river; this set off a boon and many more fossils were discovered, from the smallest of creatures called trilobites, to gastropods and bivalves, all the way up to the giant elasmosaur. Courteany had it's calling card, and another tourist draw to help the town.

For Annette and I, Courtenay held another treasure for us...our old friends Ron and Donna Mae had moved here from Maple Ridge a few years back, and no trip to the Island would be complete with out a visit. I worked with Ron back in the old Westinghouse days in 1976, and it was clear even back then that Donna Mae was the smart one in the family...so naturally I hung around with Ron as he was more my speed! :) Ron use to be my shotgun partner back in the days when a Sunday drive with Ed meant you never knew where the hell you where going or when you would come back. Our wives received more than a few calls at dinner time from us to say something like "we're in Ashcroft but will be home soon". The response was always "what the heck are you doing way up there"?

Ron is fond of telling a story of spending a day with Ed in the Jeep going into the mountains along Harrison Lake and driving for miles and miles on forest service roads only to have Ed ask him "want to stop for coffee"? Ron thought "where the hell are you going to stop for coffee in the middle of the bush"? Ed says, "wait 10 minutes". A few miles down the road the Fraser River running through the wild and dangerous Fraser Canyon came into view and Ron said "where the hell are we"? We had crossed over from Harrison Lake to Big Silver Valley, passed through the Kookipi Canyon and entered into the Nahalatch River system through the back door, getting deposited on the banks of the Fraser River at Boston Bar. I think that trip really blew Ron's mind...the fact that you could go into the Coast Mountains near Vancouver, leave one biogeoclimate zone, cross the Coast Mountain Range, and come out into the Interior Desert biogeoclimate on the back end of the Interior Mountain range. Or he could have just been amazed I knew where the hell I was! LOL

We had a great visit with our old friends, they are the type of people that even though you haven't seen each other for a few years, it's like you never left each others company. A nice cup of after dinner tea at their house, followed up by a lunch at the White Spot the next day helped us catch up on each others lives and what "the kids" where doing.

All too soon, we had to say goodbye to our friends, (definitely the hardest part of the trip) and goodbye to the Island as we were running out of days. We took the new Inner Island Highway from Courtenay to Nanaimo in a bid to catch one of the late ferriesback to the mainland. Let me tell you, the new highway is just like driving the Coquihalla - the same people who made the Coq must have had a hand in the Island highway. It's 4 lanes, it's mostly straight, and it's fast. A 2 1/2 hour trip now took only 90 minutes if that, and we couldn't believe how fast we got down island.

Well, a late ferry out of Nanaimo let us get back home in Maple Ridge around 10.00 PM, just enough time to play with the cat and enjoy our own bed.... ahhhh....

If the video is too wide for your screen, view it here on my YouTube channel

Seaside Washington to Salem Oregon

2010-11-06T19:12:00.000-07:00

Had two weeks of holidays to use up before the end of the year so we decided to do a couple of driving trips broken up by the Halloween weekend. The first week we crossed the 49th parallel and went south though Olympia Washington, then cut west heading for the Pacific Ocean with no clear destination in mind. That was what this whole week was planned to be, "no plans"; just drive taking side trips and stopping when we came across interesting things.

We continued west with the intent of going to Aberdeen, well, just because we hadn't been there before....
We arrived at Aberdeen late in the afternoon, had a look around the town and surrounding areas, then began to think of where we wanted to end up for the night. Annette used her I-Touch to jump on a local wi-fi hotspot and found out about some resorts in the seaside town of Ocean Shores about 30 miles away.

"Want to go there I ask"? "Annette says "sure, why not"! So off we go with no idea of what we will find.
Well, what we did find was a ocean front resort based on sand dunes with hotels right on the beach. It was quiet and not very busy this late in the year, one could see how this would be crazy with tourists in the summer. We picked one of the best looking hotels and enquired about a room. We ended up getting a suite on the 5th floor overlooking the ocean for a very low price - it was a great bargain!

One of the best things about travelling after season are the hotel rates; for a room that was probably around $200.00 a night, we got it for half price. The other good thing - no people! We pretty well had the beach to ourselves and hotel to ourselves; I would guess the hotel was barely a quarter full. This was great as we were sure there was no one near us on our floor and everything was quiet at night. Only the ocean sounding like a freight train whipped by the winds disturbed our space, and that's only if we opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony.

The beach reminded me of California beaches; rolling surf a ways out, long runs of sand out to the water line, and the beach itself went for several miles in either direction. And, as it was after season, you were allowed to drive on the beach! What a cool feeling! Driving out onto the hard packed sand, with only another car or two in sight made for a feeling that we were privileged.

If you have issues viewing the videos due to the blog page format, go to my Youtube channel to view them.

http://www.youtube.com/user/tjguy98

ABOVE Video: Views of Ocean Shores down to Astoria Oregon

We stayed the night in Ocean Shores, then in the morning after having explored the surrounding area, we continued south along the coast highway. This was one of our goals - to take the Coast Highway from Washington to Oregon as long as time would allow. The highway offered spectacular views of long sandy beaches and broad expanses of the Pacific Ocean. As we were south of Vancouver Island, the shoreline was exposed to the raw strength of the ocean, and the beaches all showed signs of how high the storm surges would get on the shore.

After cruising down the coast we came to the Columbia River and one of the long bridges that crossed the river. This one had a span on either side, with a long floating section in the middle. It took a good few minutes to cross the bridge, such was it's length. Now in Astoria Oregon, we again had a look around town and stopped for pictures where things looked interesting. They have a Maritime Museum that highlights the maritime heritage of Astoria, as well as showing the fury of the Columbia River as it empties into the Pacific Ocean.

Pictures taken and interest fulfilled, we continued south heading for our next night stop, which we decided would be Seaside. I have never been there, and have vaguely heard of it, but I can see why people love it.
The town has history - it was the end of the trail for the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1805. Here is where the met the Pacific Ocean on their westward journey; there is a statue and plaque in the roundabout right outside our hotel where they stood as they realized their journey was over.

The town of Seaside had it's origins in fishing and forestry - two natural resources exploited in all settler towns on the coast. We did some exploiting of our, again getting a hotel room on the 4th floor overlooking the beach at a bargain basement price. We carted our bags up to the room, then just stood on the balcony for a while enjoying the sounds and view of the ocean. We walked around town for a while, then decided on one of the better restaurants for dinner. We walked off dinner as we again toured the compact town, again thinking this place must be a mad house in summer time. Today fellow tourists were few, and most of them were the older set. Matter of fact, in many places on our trip, we were the youngest tourists in the crowd!

In the morning we walked along the beach for a ways hand in hand, snapping pictures and taking video to help preserve the memories. Didn't need them really, the good feelings we had will last a lifetime with out any help. Back in town we walked the main drag and sauntered into a candy shop, one of the main ones in town. This place had all kinds of candy you've never heard of, as well as candy you thought they didn't make any more. The walls were adorned with old boxes of chocolates that you or your parents will recognize; it was like looking at a candy museum pinned to the wall.

ABOVE VIDEO: Seaside Oregon
From Seaside we headed south again with Tillamook our next firm destination. The Tillamook Valley is famous for it's cheese and dairy products which are shipped all over the NorthWest. The valley reminds me of the Cloverdale Valley, gentle hills ring the valley with it's rich soil supporting a legion of dairy farms.

We just had to stop and tour the Tillamook cheese plant - it's such a touristy thing to do we couldn't pass it up! :)
They have done a great job of turning a common dairy plant into a main tourist stop complete with large gift shop where they sell all kinds of Tillamook cheese and Tillamook ice cream - yum!
The plant has made an upper floor viewing area that over looks the vats on one side where the milk is turned into cheese, and on the other side overlooks the large assembly line where they cut the large blocks of cheese and then package the smaller sizes for shipment to stores.

We spent a pleasant hour or so looking around the plant and gift store..well it did take a while to finish my ice cream! I even picked up a coffee mug with dairy setting as background on the cup, as well as a personalized "Ed" on the cup so my co-workers will know to leave my prize mug alone....  :)

ABOVE VIDEO: Canon Beach to Tillamook
After Tillamook we thought it was time to head for Portland, which was our most southerly point on this trip. Annette punches Portland into the car GPS, then for kicks punches in Salem as well. Turns out Salem is only an 20 minutes in arrival time from Portland - "well then, let's go to Salem"!

So off we go heading for a yet another city we had never been to but always wanted to. We left the coast on a windy two lane highway that ran along side a small river; you could have taken this scene directly from any place in BC, such is the common looks of Cascadia as it crosses the arbitrary man-made border into Canada.

I think my love for twisting highways was getting the best of me, as several times Annette suggested I might want to slow down so I could enjoy the view and she could live through the drive.  <:)
The highway took us inland and dropped us into the Williamete Valley; again I was reminded of how much this area reminded me of sections of BC. The closest to home would be the Cloverdale Prairie as it runs along the tops of the ridges over looking the farm fields below.

As it was getting late in the afternoon, we started running into traffic heading out of Salem for their suburban homes. Still, this didn't present any problems for us as we were going in the opposite direction.
We arrived in Salem at dinner time and after searching for a local wi-fi spot, we found out where our hotel of choice was located and cruised over to grab a room. Again a good deal was had, the cheapest so far for another suite. A late dinner capped of our night and we returned to our hotel to peruse our tourist books.

Annette wanted to hit some of the local craft and bead stores, which we did. We then headed into the downtown area looking for the old section of town and any historic sites. We drove around the area a while but to be honest, besides the Capitol buildings, the town looked just like any other town you would see.
We left town and headed north to the outskirts where one of the biggest malls in the North West lay waiting for us. As there is no sales tax in Oregon, Annette broke out the credit card and did her best to stock up on "stuff" she needed. Meanwhile, I sat on the closest bench I could find to each store and guarded her purchases........

Trunk full of souvenirs we headed north to Portland which is only 30 minutes or so away. We arrived late in the afternoon, just as people were getting off work. As it was the last work day before Halloween, we seen a few downtown workers dressed up in costumes, so of which gave us a good chuckle. We did a good driving tour of Portland and suburbs but again was tempted to say "nice town but nothing special to see", but if I did I'm sure I would be labelled as "boring".

As none of the town highlights grabbed our fancy, we headed out of town along with the rush hour crowd and soon crossed the river over into Vancouver Washington. We continue on with the flow of traffic and were soon on our way to Seattle. We ate up the miles on the freeway and in a couple of hours were in Seattle. We talked about stopping for the night in Tukwila, right across the street from South Center mall, but Annette said she had done her shopping, and in another 90 minutes we could be at the border.

We decide to push on towards home, crossed over the border in five minutes, (a nice change indeed) and we were home at midnight. For a couple more hours of driving we saved the price of a hotel room that we would put towards our next week's trip to Vancouver Island.

Squamish to Whistler to Lillooett - A Geocaching Road Trip

2010-10-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

Video at the end of the report

A while back Cookie Cacher (Jeannine) and I did another of my much loved road trips that seem to take up all day and half the night. This one wasn't quite so bad, left town at 7.00 AM and back home at 12.30 AM.

As I have done several previous reports on this route I won't go into a lot of detail here, but will state that the video is great, as usual! :)

Jeannine met me in Maple Ridge, parked her car, jumped in the Jeep and off we went aiming for the first of our caches along the Sea To Sky Highway. We began at Porteau Cove, where Jeannine set about finding the caches and I set about filming....(this seemed to be the way it went all day), and we continued on through Squamish and Whistler finding a few caches on our way either in town or at scenic places like Nairn Falls and Murrin Lake.

Pemberton was the turning point in our day; that is, we turned away from our northerly path and began heading east towards Lillooet, and beyond Lillooet, Lytton and the Fraser Canyon. A few miles east of Pemberton is Joffre Park, well know for it's jewel like lake and challenging climb up Joffre Peak where you can obtain an excellent view of the glacier nestled in it's crook. Even the view from ground level is phenomenal, a little taste of the mountainous back country while standing a few hundred feet from your car.

We continued along through The Pemberton Pass as we crested the Coast Mountains on our way to the Gold Rush town of Lillooet. Much history and many ghosts linger in this sleepy town; Lillooet is Mile Zero on the Gold Rush route, all Road Houses where named from their distance to Lillooet. 100 Mile House, 108 mile House, all came into existence as road houses along the Gold Rush route from Lillooet to Barkerville. Frontier justice was served out by judge Mathew Begbie, where it's reported that several men lost their life at The Hanging Tree on an old river bench of the Fraser River just above town. A more colourful Gold Rush fact is that a local entrepreneur brought over 23 camels to serve as pack animals on the Gold Rush route. Well, they didn't last long; the other pack horses and mules were afraid of them, they smelled terrible, and the rough rocky terrain of the BC mountains was hell on their tender hoofs. If you drive through Lillooet you'll marvel at the wide main street of downtown; this was so a stage coach with a full team of horses could turn around in the street.

From Lillooet we headed along the same path as previous explorers, from First nations trading goods, to Simon Fraser following the Fraser River to it's end, to Gold Rush miners following it upstream to it's start, we took the same route as we began our slow turn southward towards home. Lytton is a small town, much smaller than Lillooet, but where Lillooet has much of it's history in the White world, Lytton is an ancient town for First Nations. For thousands of years and many generations, this has been a home to our lands first peoples.

The clean blue Thompson River meets the muddy Fraser River and is swallowed up by it's larger and dirtier cousin. It's quite amazing to see the dual colours of the waters when the two rivers first join, it's almost sad to see the Thompson waters be dissipated by the Fraser.

From Lytton it was a straight south bound night time drive down the Fraser Canyon to the cross roads town of Hope, then 70 miles of freeway travelling back to Maple Ridge. We picked up about 25 caches, an hours worth of video, and a life time of memories.

If the video is too wide for your screen, go to my YouTube channel and watch it there..
http://www.youtube.com/user/tjguy98

Ed's Oasis

2010-09-14T22:15:00.000-07:00

OK, what does that guy we all know as "tjguy98" not doing when he's not geocaching or Jeepin' or working? Well, mostly just trying to enjoy life at a nice slow pace; a chance to have some quiet down time snatched between "having to be some where" and "wanting to be somewhere".

To accomplish that, Annette and I have turned our small back yard into a free style garden that's fits some where between the mess of an English garden and the resemblance of a West Coast environment. I've lost track of how much material we brought into the yard and how much clay we took out. The figures are something like over a ton of clay removed, 20 yards of top soil brought in, 3 yards of pea gravel, 8 yards of crushed rock, 10 yards of sand, a few pick up trucks of large boulders scrounged from the Stave Lake area to make natural retaining walls and the borders for the faux creek bed that cuts through the yard, 3 yards of river rock, 3 pumps and 3 revisions of a fountain and creek set up, more plants than I can remember...well, you get the idea.

Every year there is something more to do, or fix, or change, or change around just cause it's time for a change. This year it was the sun deck; the deck covering was wearing prematurely and if left for another year, the plywood deck would have started to rot as well. We knew it would be a few bucks to get the deck redone, and to avoid it wearing out again before it's time, we decided to bite the bullet and get a roof for the sun deck. This would also help with the heat in the south facing kitchen, plus make the sun deck usable in the heat of the summer.

A couple of days ago, in the waning of a late summer sun, I took a few pictures of our new deck, sunroof, and back yard. The pictures are not as brilliant as you might think they should be; keep in mind it's mid September and the yard is reflecting the approach of Autumn.

Nice place to sit and enjoy a cool drink and listen to the fountains

3 types of Clematis climb the arbour over the path. White mini Christmas lights on the arbour help light up the yard at night, as does rock lights in either back corner of the yard. Small star shaped solar lights twinkle through out the yard in different colours. A couple of small solar pagodas add a soft light amongst the back and side gardens.

Molly the kitty loves to race around chasing bugs in the back yard. Molly was a rescue cat; some one dumped her on the side of road in Dewdney at our son-in-laws farm thinking she could be a barn cat or something. Poor little thing, only 8 months old, was no match for the barn cats, so we brought her home with us. She now has the run of the yard and house, she sure knows whose boss and it ain't us!

Back patio deck..yes, we built this ourselves. Two pick up truck fulls of clay dug out and 3 yards of crushed rock, and over 5 yards of sand, all tamped down with a portable tamper and covered in 2 truck loads of Old English Bricks to match the English style brick retaining wall. Yes, we even rented a water cooled cutting saw to cut the bricks ourselves. With the exception of the sun deck and roof, everything in the back yard was built, dug or planted by Annette and I.

Another view of the back patio; note the second fountain in the left of the picture under the second arbour where we have climbing roses.

Tufta rock burbling fountain has the water disappearing into the rocks around it. Large tub like container hidden beneath the surrounding river rock contains a pump that cycles the water back up the lava-like rock to mysteriously appear at the top of the rock. Notches on the sides of the rock maximize the splashing sound of the water as it cascades over the edges.

So, now you know another of my favourite past times, one where I can go to put my feet up and relax, or putter away at something that "seems to need doing". A cool drink, a good book, burbling fountains and a kitty chasing butterflies in the garden makes for a pretty nice retreat indeed!

More back yard pictures can be seen here (use the right click method on the link to go to the picture site). Click on SLIDESHOW in the upper right to see the pictures full size as they play through. Click here to go to the home page of my Flickr site to see ALL my pictures - ensure you have a full cup of coffee before you start! :)

The Great Copper Rush - A Geocaching Event

2010-08-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

Last year the Tulameen Turtles, AKA Kris Wheeler and Jordy Nielsen, hosted a weekend geocaching event in their hometown of Tulameen. The event highlighted the coal mining history of the area and how mining aided the development of the present towns, as well as towns that have faded away.

Video link at end of write up

That event was known as the Great Coal Rush; 80 geocaching addicts showed up for a fun filled weekend of searching for geocaches at historical areas from in-town places, to ghost towns up in the hills, and even on top of mountains. The event was such a hit that every one talked about it for months; those that couldn't make it to the event were sorry they missed out and promised them selves they would be at the next years.

Well, it just happened - The Great Copper Rush was held in the Princeton area spotlighting the contributions of copper mining to the Princeton region. 240 fellow geocachers showed up on the Aug 1 long weekend for a smorgasbord of caches accessible by either car, truck, 4x4, and ATV. If you felt up for it, there were even hiking caches that taxed your body but rewarded you with breath taking views and put you right in the middle of history.

Ken and I only made it up for one day of caching, but we picked the best day - Sunday was the day that Kris and Jordy chose to get married while they had all of their caching friends in town. We just had to be there for that!

We arrived late at the Princeton Fairgrounds which was HQ for the weekend; the Turtles had arranged for the use of the fairgrounds which allowed the out of towners to camp in the in-field to save on costs. Tents, trailers, and the odd camper were set up around the grounds giving every one lots of elbow room. The fairgrounds also included a covered area that was used as the meeting area at night, as well as hosting a large pot luck dinner on the Sunday night.

Catapult Jeff and Iron Maiden were on hand to help distribute the event book, geocoins, t-shirts, and other trinkets that were pre-ordered by the cachers. We got our book and meandered outside looking to get our bearings to the closest cache. Well, just down the dirt road, about 800 feet away was the first cache; that was handy! We had no sooner pulled over and found the cache when we heard an SUV rushing up the dirt road and the driver began to lean on the horn - Teddy2K and crowd had arrived on scene!

We said our hellos to the group, and quickly realized that, as unprepared as we were to find the local caches, Teddy2K and group were fully prepared and in the groove. Well, being no fools, we decided to hitch our wagons with our fellow cachers and let them take the lead as we headed out as a group for a day of caching.

As the T2K group had done a lot of the out of town caches already, they worked in town finding the closer caches. That suited us perfectly as we only had a few hours to cache before it would be evening and the after dinner nuptials would begin. We spent the afternoon enjoying the company of our fellow cachers as we did some in-town caches and some caches on Forest Service Roads on the out skirts of town. Before we knew it, time was up and we had to return to the fairgrounds.

Awards were presented for categories such as "most FTFs", "most hiked caches", "most caches overall", etc. There were door prizes by ticket, and a prize for the geocachers who travelled the furthest to attend. But the highlight of the weekend was the marriage ceremony.

Kris and Jordy are pretty laid back folks, and their wedding ceremony was just as low keyed and sweet as they are. An informal wedding with family and 240 geocachers was right on the mark for them - Jordy was dressed out as Indiana Jones, which fit his love of the outdoors, and Kris sported fairy wings to show off her whimsical side. AND, she wore a dress! OMG! :) Most of us only see Kris and Jordy out on the trails getting gritty while they search out the elusive ammo cans, to see Kris in a dress was a rarity for our group. Makes us remember that people have real lives outside of the settings we usually see them in.

The handsome groom and beautiful bride beamed at each other during the ceremony, and had the biggest smiles on their faces the whole time - it looked good on them! And they were duly moved when one of their wedding gifts was a high end Garmin GPS purchased with contributions from the weekend attendees. Plus they had a small nest egg to help celebrate their honeymoon

All in all in was a great weekend - all kinds of caching to fit each cachers taste and skill levels, complete with a Root Beer saloon, a kids movie at night on the big out door screen, and a poker game for the adults.

If that wasn't enough to wear them out, it's only been two weeks and already the Tulameen Turtles have let it drop that there will be another event next year, sure to be bigger and better than this year. A tall order indeed!

Many thanks to Kris and Jordy for countless hours of preparation time for the event. And thanks to their helpers, of which I know they worked just as hard.....to make a very enjoyable weekend for their fellow cachers.

Click here to view the video

Bike Ride To Conquer Cancer 2010 - Surrey BC to Redmond Wa

2010-07-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

One of the many fund raisers for cancer is the Bike Ride to Conquer Cancer; the Vancouver ride goes from Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver, south into Washington state ending at Redmond Wa.

The riders cover 250Ks in 2 days, with the first night's camp is Mt. Vernon. The ride is very well organized, with many "sweeper" teams follwing along with the riders in case some one is unable to finish the ride. As well, numerous bike mechanics are on the road with riders, plus there are bike mechanics at each pit stop and at camp. They even have roving medical teams, all this co-ordinated through a communications section.

Annette had signed up to do the ride this year, and her friend Connie volunteered to go along with Annette. They spent most of Christmas and the Spring collecting donations through such fund raising items as dog biscuit wreaths and making bracelets with various cancer symbols on them.

Two months before the ride, while Annette and Connie were on a training ride, Annette had an unpleasant meeting with the ground and broke her wrist. Six weeks in a cast and no way she was going to be able to ride on that special weekend. Annette opted instead to become a crew member with the Ride, and Connie decided to continue with the Ride on her own. Larry, Connie's husband stepped up to the plate and said that he would ride in Annette's place. A pretty big step up to agree to an endurance ride with little training.

As it was, Connie and Larry are in excellent shape, and they were able to do the entire ride with surprising ease - very impressive! Annette was kinda down about not being able to ride but she was glad she went along anyways to help out how ever she could.

The story is best told through the video; I couldn't possibly describe the ride as well as the video can, no matter how good you think I am! :)
Watch for Annette and Connie to do the Ride next year - they are talking about the Calgary Ride next time!

If the video is too wide for the blog page, go to my YouTube channel to watch

A Walk Through the Upper sections Of Kanaka Creek Park

2010-06-12T00:56:00.000-07:00

Kanaka Creek Park is a GVRD created park that encompasses the entire course of Kanaka Creek, from it's head waters in the Coast Mountain Range in the northern part of Maple Ridge, all the way to where the creek flows into the mighty Fraser River directly across from the old townsite of Derby on the south side of the river, the site of the original Fort Langley.

Kanaka Creek, indeed the Kanaka area of Maple Ridge, is named after the Hawaiian labourers that sailed on the Hudson Bay Company ships from their home port in the Hawaiian Islands to North America. Some of the Islanders liked the area so much they left the employment of the HBC, married regional First Nations women and settled across the river from the fort, at the mouth of a large, slow moving creek.

Here the Kanakans, which means "native Hawaiians" or "kānaka maoli" in Hawaiian, established a small village inhabited by a mix of Kanakans and First Nations people. Many of them worked at the fort, and they rowed daily across the river to work. At the mouth of the river are remnants of a wier that the locals made to trap fish for food for the settlement. If you go to the viewing platform that over looks the confluence of the Kanaka Creek and the Fraser River, you'll see decaying wooden posts protruding from the water.

For our walk tonight, we chose the northen sections of Kanaka Creek; this is the area of the park that is bisected by Dewdney Trunk Road. Dewdney Trunk Road, or DTR, has a pedigree of its own. It was surveyed and constructed by Edgar Dewdney, running from Port Moody at the eastern edge of Burrard Inlet, eastwards to the town of Dewdney in the Fraser Valley. Edgar Dewdney also surveyed the land for the City of New Westminster, and, if you've done any travelling in the southern section of B.C., you'll be well acquainted with the "Dewdney Trail" which Edgar Dewdney surveyed. The Trail was to run from HBC Fort Hope at the head of the Fraser Valley, 720 kilometres east along the southern edge of the province reaching HBC Fort Steele in the East Kootenay area of B.C.

We parked at the intersection of DTR and 272 Street where an old logging road starts. This road, I'm told, goes as far north as the local mountains, which is a few miles back. We weren't going that far, we were only going as far as the geocache I have hidden 10 minutes up the road. This is a great area, a typical West Coast Rain Forest in all it's glory. Various types of moss coat the cedar and broad leaf maple trees, for which Maple Ridge is named. Sunlight filters down to the forest floor where ferns and salmom berry bushes spread their leaves to gather the sunlight.

As you walk along the old road, large cedar stumps, some 10 - 15 feet high, stand as sentinels to remind us of a time when logging was a manual job. Loggers would cut a notch into the tree approx 5 feet off the forest floor, then jam 6 foot long "spring boards" on which they would stand to help clear them of the bushes and smaller trees at forest floor level. Two men would handle a large saw and slowly work their way through a tree with a trunk so big that it took 4 men to reach around it.

Now, the remnants of those grand daddy trees serve as nursery trees for the younger generations; many old stumps have younger trees growing out, and around, the stumps. In nature, with death comes life.

We walked along the forest road, enjoying the setting sun as it strained to shine between the trees, casting bursts of light that lit up the hanging mosses that still dripped water from the earlier day's rains. It was a golden moment to be sure. Geocache found, log book signed, we sauntered up the road a ways further before we turned around and headed south for another section of the park.

We parked near Cliff Falls, a section of Kanaka Park where the creek runs through a small canyon of sandstone. Sandstone is a "soft" rock, which allows the river to wear away at it easily, creating sculpted formations of pot holes and smooth sandstone beds where the river rushes over. It looks like you could "slide" all the way down the falls from one section to another. Don't try it though, I know of at least one incidence where a young person enjoying the creek during the heat of summer under estimated the force of the water and paid a high price for their fun.

From the western end of this section of the park, there are several trails that run east on the north and south sides of the creek, as far as the Bell-Irving Fish Hatchery on 256th street. These are easy trails with moderate inclines, doable by most people.

For our short jaunt tonight, we stayed in the area of the falls. The falls are known as Cliff Falls, but I've also seen reference to them as Arnold Falls, which I could not find an origin for the use of that name. We found the two geocaches in the falls area, more importantly we got to experience the power of the falls and the beauty of the park created by the forces of wind, water, and earth. Hard to beat that!

Before we knew it, 9.00 PM was upon us, as was the descending darkness. Time to quit gawking and start "gittin" home. In total, we only spent a couple of easy hours in the park, but the two hours were breath taking. If you have the time....no, _make time_ to spend a few hours amongst the beauty of the forest that is so close to home. The few geocaches may seem like the prize for coming, but you'll forget all about them once you start to walk the trails. The real prize is nature at it's finest.......

Black Bear in Our Back Yard

2010-05-31T23:48:00.000-07:00

We had a young black bear come visit us after dinner tonight; he was a bit late for dinner at our house, but he was just in time to raid some of the garbage cans in the neighbourhood.

Annette and I were just running out the door around 8.30 PM to do a couple of errands, when we seen a lady across the street on her cell phone, looking at our house. As we came out she shouted "there's a bear in your yard"!, nothing new there: we have had several visits over the years since we've been here.

We went back in the house and looked out the windows into the back yard; the bear was standing on the back fence. As we have a short yard, he was only 40 feet or so from us, so we could tell it was a male! :)

The noise we made opening the back door must have scared him, as there was garbage in our back yard that he was evidently dining on. He was now on the fence, balancing on the fence like a ballerina. Annette tried to get a picture, but he jumped down into the neighbour's yard behind us and sauntered over to their garbage cans. At this point I ran and got my cam corder and started taking some video.

He dined on the neighbour's stuff for a while, then the noise from the neighbourhood on the front street scared him, so he walked back to our fence, looked over at us 40 feet away, and then jumped up on the fence and walked along the fence into the neighbour's yard behind us and one door over. There he found some more good eats in their garbage cans, and dined there until the noise again scared him away.

Back up on our rear fence, he tight rope walked the fence and then dropped into our neighbours next door. He checked out their down stairs door, then decided he had had enough of the neighbourhood talking about him. He went along the side of the house into the front street, and then ran across the street into the ravine area across from our house.

A couple of screechers from a neighbour probably got him moving further into the ravine and away from the neighbourhood. A good example of a surprise for the neighbourhood, and why the Bear Aware program is important. Easy meals will keep this guy coming back until he can't find good eats around here.

Maple Ridge Caching Goes to the Dogs

2010-05-30T22:47:00.000-07:00

Took advantage of the break in the weather to do a little caching close to home in; corralled MrTJ into coming along, which was good, as all the caches I went looking for were his. Hard to DNF with the cache owner along!

MrTJ brought his two geohounds, Jasper and Mya, and I picked up my daughter's boyfriend's geohound, Titus the Great Dane. We headed into the north part of Maple Ridge, where the hills start to climb towards the mountains. There are a series of old logging roads and horse trails in the area on which MrTJ has planted a series of caches, some with the word "EGG" in the name.

MrTJ has placed 6 caches in such a way that you can do a loop in under an hour and pick up all the caches. The terrain is not strenous, although in some areas it is not flat. Gentle slopes with the occasional steeper uphill section are the worst that this walk provides. Wear good shoes and expect a little water on the trails, with a spot of mud here and there. Most people will be able to do this series no problem; I don't do hills well and the worst I did was a bit of huffing and puffing.

The area is highlighted by tall cedar stumps complete with spring board notches from when the loggers swung an axe to take down these huge trees. Spring boards were typically 6 feet long, the loggers would cut a notch out of the tree about 5 feet up the tree and then jam the spring board into the notch. This would accomplish two things; 1) it would let them cut through the tree were the trunk was a bit smaller, and 2) it would get them clear of the florest floor so they could swing the axe unimpeded.

If you are looking for a healthy walk through our local wet coast forest with ferns and trees and moss aplenty, head to the north end of 236th street in Maple Ridge and enjoy a stroll through what makes Maple Ridge so special.

Walk through the rain forest with me by watching the video! You'll want to go there for sure! :)

Abbotsford Geocaching with The Jeep Brothers

2010-04-22T21:25:00.000-07:00

Had a great day of geocaching in Abbotsford with brothers Alan and Ken, AKA Bowser98 and MrTJ. Yes, that's right, if you didn't know by now, we are three brothers who have or have had Jeeps during our geocaching lives. We are alternatively called the "TJ brothers", as TJ is in Ken's and my caching names. Bowser98 now has a Jeep Liberty, so he's now in the club! :)

Video can be found at the end of the post

The weather was good on this day, which we were so happy for, as our last few excursions had seen us get absolutely soaked, several times in the same day - not fun! So with out a word of a lie, we were pretty darn happy to see the sun.

We started off where we left off on our last visit to Abbotsford, and that was pretty well right across the street from where we parked before. Our first cache was called "Yo Mamma", a pre-made cache that Micra Man won at a local geocaching event; the cache was complete, ready to go. Even had the cache name was attached - Yo Mamma! As the cache owner readily admits, a low effort cache to put out, just needed a place to hide it. The place he chose was the western arm of Clearbrook Park.

Clearbrook Park is a large park that has a little of everything; the western edge borders a large ravine area with the southern part consisting of open grass areas and softball fields. The heart of the park is the large ravine area, with numerous trails that gives one a good loop walk through the park. The main trail skirts the park's northern edge and leads past an active beaver pond, complete with the requesite partially chewed trees. Several caches are hidden in the forested area of the park, allowing the cacher to pick up 4-5 caches with a good walk thrown into the mix.

This write up could have been titled "Park to Park", as many of today's caches were found in well tended urban forest parks. The types of parks varied; we were in small parks with small trails, narrow linear parks along side of a hill, and parks with large lakes in the middle. All were well thought out and a pleasure to explore, a testament to the foresight of the Abbotsford Parks Department.

Some of the caches we did today were part of a series called "Mother Goose"; they were based on the various chracters like Little Miss Muffet and Jack and Jill. Like other series, you had to visit the caches and collect the clues before you could find the final cache. We got some clues today, and had done some of the Mother Goose series previously, but still have nore to find, so we are still working towards the final cache.

We did a cache called "PBC", which I still don't understand what the abbreviation means, but it was one of those caches where you opened a large ammo can to find 100 or so pill containers, all of them camo taped making it impossible to see inside; one of them holds the log book...you have to search through a whole wack of them before you find it....not difficult, just designed to be a bit of a PITA in a joking sort of way. This cache also marked Bowser98's 1,000th cache........YAY BOWSER98 !!!!!!!

One of the well known parks in Abbotsford is Fish Trap Creek Park. This is a linear park that is divided into several parts as the park follows the Fish Trap Creek watercourse; the park is large enough that several caches are placed in various sections, and it seems every time I visit Abbotsford there is a new cache in the park. The main section of the park has baseball diamonds which are well used by the local teams; it also has a large lake that is just the right size for a good stroll around it's perimeter. In fact, there have been several multi caches that take you on that very stroll collecting clues before you are rewarded with the location of the actual cache.

The stroll allows you to see the ducks and Canada Geese that inhabit the pond, as well as the thrushes and Red Wing Blackbirds that love the marsh area, just to name a few of the feathered friends you'll find there.

We had a few more urban caches mixed into the pile; some on street corners on lamp posts, some at tiny parks designed to show off the civic pride in the city. In the midst of all this was a puzzle cache called "I, Jedi". To decode this cache's secret co-ordinates, you had to first know the Jedi code, then you could find the hidden co-ordinates in the code. Wasn't too hard to figure out, the reason I mention the cache is that it was in a typical urban ravine park that was under used, therefore a little "wilder" than most city parks.

This park trail started off going down a bit of an embankment where you had to jump across a small creek, or at least be dainty enough to step around the muddy areas to tip toe across the creek. Well, MrTJ was dainty and managed to tip toe across the creek - that is after he watched me try jumping from a slippery log across the creek onto the small creek embankment. Of course, I didn't make it - but I was smart enough to roll the camera figuring I'd have some action footage, be it good or bad. It was bad, I crashed to earth - good part was the feet stayed dry, and the video camera was saved. Only casualties were my dirty knees and my pride.

Back up the other side of the ravine, up a small hill we went, along a worn out path to find the magic cache, the secret of the Jedi! The signal was a bit tough amongst the trees and down in the hollow, and the clue fit a few objects. But 10 minutes of looking brought the hidden treasure into our hands. We were just heading back when Bowser98 rejoined us; he had left to go pick up Bowser98 Junior who had bused out to meet up with us. We stopped and waited for Team Bowser to find us in the forest, and then waited while they found the cache. The players all back together now, we continued on with our day of caching.

Another urban park we enjoyed was "Ravine Park", where we found two caches. The park itself is a small park, about 4 city blocks in size, but it too is in a shallow ravine. The neat thing about this park is its raised board walks above the marsh and small waterways. This allowed us to meander through the marsh with out getting our feet wet, plus it allowed us to get close up and personal with the blooming Skunk Cabbage. A pretty shade of yellow to be sure, just not fond of it's aroma.

Ravine Park is also home to a salmon enhancement project, as the slow moving creek and marsh make for a perfect rearing area. Neat to see the city take an active interest in raising salmon in the city and helping the species survive.

The next batch of caches we found were at Mill Lake, a large lake in the heart of Abbotsford. The lake is surrounded by easy walking paths, with park areas on the north and south sides. The caches we were after today were all on the south side, and being a sunny, warm day, this was where the majority of people were concentrated. Just to point this out, one of the caches had a family playing about 50 feet away from the wide open cache hide. Team Bowser stealthly found the cache while MrTJ and myself kept the citizens busy playing fetch with their dog, complete with running commentary to them. Ahh, teamwork - gotta like it!

With the 4 caches done at Mill Lake, we moved on into the downtown area of Abbotsford. Here, on one of the local large art projects, there was a nano cache hidden. This art project was a human size goose driving a minature delivery truck; the name painted on the door made mention of one of the long time merchants in the area. There are 5 of these art projects with a block or two of each other, they are really well done and defintely lend to beautifying the downtown core. They are part of a multi cache even; you have to visit each one, get numbers off them, then add the numbers together and off you go to the final. I enjoyed doing that multi as it pointed out these pieces of art I had driven by numerous times with out even noticing!

And that's one of the beauties of geocaching; pointing out great things that had escaped your attention!

We just had time for a couple more urban caches before Team Bowser98 had to leave and head home; the sun was on it's way down and MrTJ and I decided to pick up 3 or 4 more quick ones before we called it quits as well. Caching done for the day, we turned off the GPS', took our jackets off and had a relaxing drive homewards. I ended up with 33 caches in the bucket, MrTJ had a few less as he had previously found some, and Team Bowser98 had a few less as they left before we quit. Still, no one was complaining, 3 brothers and a nephew had a fun day of geocaching and seeing some beautiful areas of Abbotsford!

A special thanks to all the cache owners of the caches we found today - "Thanks"!!

Caching Along The Fraser River in Delta and Surrey

2010-03-10T00:02:00.000-08:00

Had another chance to go caching as a member of the "Jeep" brothers, whose members are myself, AKA tjguy98, my brother Alan, AKA Bowser98, and another brother Ken, AKA MrTJ.

We set our sights on the Delta area along River Road as our start point and meet point on the day. Our first five caches were in the Tilbury Industrial area, either along side the Fraser River, or in small "green" spaces mixed amongst the big block industrial buildings. While caching along the edge of the Fraser River always gives one an opportunity to view a working river complete with tug boats, barges, and wood mills, caching in and around old industrial parks somehow provide a feeling of gloom to the day. There's nothing pretty here, just the smell of diesel from the parked semis and scattered garbage from tenants who don't care about there surroundings.

The one bright spot was a cache called "Ant Hill" which was placed in an undeveloped lot back filled with sand as these industrial lots are. The cache was placed next to a fair size ant hill, and with the warm weather the ants were once again active; a little bit of nature in this artificial neighbourhood.

The Fraser River played host to the 3 brothers today as many of the day's caches were located along the shoreline. A typical one of these caches was one of the Blue Sky caches; placed in conjunction with BC Parks, these are designed to showcase the province's parks, and at the same time promote green caching.

This cache was placed right along side River Road, a mere dozen or so metres from the roadway. Perfect for biking or a bus trip to the cache; today we were car pooling as a way for us to cut down on our carbon footprint.

The cache itself was hidden inside an huge old stump that had been washed down river many years ago, and found a home resting on the fore shore of the river. Neat to see such a large piece of drift wood on a river that appears to us land lubbers as "clean" of debris.

That cache quickly found and logged, we moved on to an historic part of Surrey called Annieville. Annieville, and Annieville Slough, have their roots back in the 1890's when the area was a bustling fishing camp complete with a cannery for packing the salmon reaped from the vast runs at the turn of the century.

Annieville Slough is a sliver of water where fishing boats can pull in protected by a few hundred feet of land that parellels the main shoreline. Old live in shacks and boat shacks line the water's edge, very reminiscent of Finn Slough in Richmond.

While looking for the cache here, a sleepy Mallard duck wasn't too worried about having 3 humans walk around him. He walked just a few feet in front of Ken, and actually walked up to me and stopped just 2 feet away! Got some great video of him as he checked us out....

From there, we moved on to do a number of urban caches, none of them very spectacular; just more green spaces or small city parks with nothing too exciting, other than the caches themselves.

The one cache that did stick out was a cache called "Lest We Forget". This is a micro cache placed in North Delta at the local community complex. I don't want to give the hide away, suffice to say it is a very well camoflaged cache container, and, as usual with these best ones, it is out in the open.

As we drove up, we seen the telltale behavior exhibited by two individuals; head down walking slowly in an aimless pattern, covering only a few feet before stopping and changing direction. Sure enough, CoachDoug and Bear were on the prowl for the cache. We walked up to them, and in typical fashion played dumb and asked what they were doing. CoachDoug says "geocaching, ever heard of it"? "Why yes we have, is that where you use the GPS units to find stuff"? About that time CoachDoug noticed the official Geocaching ball caps we were wearing and clued in that we were pulling his leg.

After a few hellos, all 5 of us sauntered around for a few minutes before MrTJ made the find; we all said "good hide, good hide"! Log book signed and the cache put back for the next finders, we said goodbye to CoachDoug and Bear, and continued on with our caching day.

A few more city caches brought us to a cache called "The Pit". It was located in a short green space right behind some houses. The pit is actually one of those large sunken green spaces that Surrey utilizes to control the water drainage from the surrounding land.

As we walked past a house through the pit area to get to the rear green space, I noticed a lady in her kitchen window not 10 feet from where we had to pass. I said, "this is awkward, there's a lady sitting there watching us". A few more feet and she opens the window and says "it's around the back, right under the *******"

Well, knock us over with a feather....she says "there's lots of you coming around looking for it".

I guess she was just trying to be helpful, and here I was thinking we were making her nervous... :)

A few more caches had us working east ward along the north side of Surrey as we headed towards Langley, if we even got that far. Well, surprisingly we weren't that far away now; the next two caches were along the new bike path that follows Golden Ears Way. The second one brought us to another piece of historic roadway, this time Telegraph Trail.

From 1884 to 1904, the only way across the Fraser River from New Westminster to Surrey was by ferry. The ferry ran from downtown New West across to Brownsville. In 1861 The Kennedy Trail linked Annieville, just down river from Brownsville, south to Oliver's Slough near Mud Bay, still Surrey but commonly called White Rock by most people. In 1865 The Telegraph Trail opened to link Brownsville with the U.S. border; in 1866 a link was extended to run to Fort Langley. It would be another 10 years before the most famous and enduring road names in the Fraser Valley would appear, that being Old Yale Road....only back then they didn't call it "Old".

It was this Langley spur of Telegraph Road that we found our selves on to find one of the caches along the brand new, modern Golden Ears Way. Quite the juxtaposition of the old and the new highways as one replaced the other. I stood at their intersection and I couldn't help but feel there was much more character to the old road than the new. The new highway shot like an arrow across the land, bisecting old residential roads, sliding under the freeway to then wind it's way between and up and over the North Surrey industrial area. The old road, on the other hand, meandered at a 45 degree angle to all other roads as dawdled along it's way to Fort Langley, much like an older person who knows there is more to getting somewhere than blasting along a freeway. The trip itself is just as enjoyable as the arrival......

With our last two caches we had made the transition from Surrey to Fort Langley as we headed for a couple of caches on Glover Road. The "Salmon River Cache" was located along the shore of the Salmon River right at a salmon fish trap used these days for catching salmon to count their numbers passing the trap as they go upstream.

The Salmon River itself is another historic piece of Fort Langley, as the original fort in Derby was located near the river. Salmon were plentiful then, and no doubt the Salmon River got it's name from the runs that filled the small river, like every other small tributary of the mighty Fraser River.

The cache itself was unique, not the first one like it in the Lower Mainland, but one that took a certain amount of time and effort to create. As a cacher, I appreciate when a fellow cacher takes the time and effort to make something special, and I always make sure to say so in my logs.

The last cache of the day was only fitting to finish up our historical tour in the area. This was a cache called "Telegraph Trail". It was located at the corner of Telegraph Trail and Glover Road on the outskirts of Fort Langley. At the location is a plaque commemorating the historic Telegraph Trail and the importance of the route.

You see, Telegraph Trail didn't start off as a road to the "suburbs", it actually was the local section of the trail blazed to string the Russian - American Telegraph that had it's ends in San Francisco and Moscow. In the spring of 1865, it had reached New Westminster from San Francisco; the first message it carried was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln!

From New Westminster it went to Yale and then along the Cariboo Road and the edge of the Fraser River to Quesnel. From Quesnel it continued to Kispiox, past Fort Fraser to Hazelton, where it was learned that Cyrus West Field had already completed laying his TransAtlantic cable, rendering the whole project obsolete. Still, it left the province with a working telegraph between New Westminster and the gold fields in Quesnel.

And this was also the end of the line for us; the overcast day that we started off in, for the past few hours had turned to rain, making us feel like wet dogs. Last cache found, signed and returned, we headed back to our modern homes, having enjoyed another fine day of caching and learning a bit more of our local heritage.

Going N.U.T.S. in Bellingham, and Finding # 2,000

2010-02-03T22:48:00.000-08:00

I received a phone call from Cookie...Cookie Cacher that is, another geocacher whose name in her other life is Jeanine. Seems Cookie Cacher, who is much smarter than I, had been working on a puzzle series in the Bellingham area called N.U.T.S., and had solved approx 25 of the 37 in the series.

"Road Trip"? she says.....hmmmmm sounds good! This January has been so mild in the Vancouver area that you almost can't call it a winter; more like a mild Fall. Bad for the 2010 Olympics being held here, good for people like us geocachers.

So, road trip it is; 5.20 AM I'm up...no really, I can get up that early if I want to! I bomb out of Maple Ridge over to Surrey to pick her up, only 10 minutes late - not bad considering I'm only half finished my morning cup of tea..........and we make the few miles drive south to cross over the border into the U.S.A.

A 20 minute run down the I5 brought us to the turn off we needed by the Bellingham airport to start our day of caching. Our first cache is a multi-cache that showed we weren't quite with it yet, as it took a few minutes to figure out the trick to the math that we needed to figure out to get to the next waypoint. We ended up solving the quiz and found the cache in the first place I had pointed out 20 minutes ago when we first got onsite. At least we were right!

That "toughie" out the way, we rolled on doing some of the N.U.T.S. caches, mixed in with a few regular caches, as we made our way along the coastline heading for the old section of Bellingham known as Fairhaven.

Fairhaven is the original section of Bellingham, just like Gastown is in Vancouver. There are many brick buildings from the turn of the century, with just as many stories about the buildings and places in the old town. The surrounding areas are a mix of blue collar sections with the occasional old estate style subdivisions reminiscent of a wealthy time. Old stately houses on large lots located on wide, windy streets show off their eloquence like a fine antique. You have to drive slowly down these streets so as to take in the ambience of what it was like to live here 100 years ago when you were the cream of society.

These sections are what I was looking forward to seeing; the refinement of the 1900's shown in the subdivisions came after the early, rough and tumble days that defined the early downtown area of brick buildings.

Like many cities, early buildings made of wood gave way to wealthier merchants who built stronger brick buildings and planted their families away from the hub bub of coarse downtown, relocating them in the stately suburbs that befitted their stature in life.

There are so many caches in the Bellingham area that we spent the day zig zagging back and forth through various parts of town; from the old section of Fairhaven to the beach front parks, from the present day working class suburbs to the University area high up on the hill, we rolled along through out the day picking up caches.

The area is so cache dense that at times, we would stop and grab a cache, then Cookie cacher would say "the next one is 658 metres away". We would go grab that one, then she would say "the next one is 427 metres away". It seemed like you would jump back in the Jeep, drive a block over, then get out and grab the next one!

The areas that I liked the best, were the old downtown Fairhaven section, the Boulvard Park area on the water front, the old stately homes on their curved, private streets, and the big old houses high above the city on the hill just below the University. These were the most photogenic places, and the locations that told the history of the city as it grew from a mill town to a bustling metropolis where every one can find a home.

To know the history of your own town, is to be able to recognize the various parts of a different town, ones who's growth patterns echo your own. In the Pacific North West, on both sides of the border, many cities are like kin with familiar pasts and easily recognizable points of time in their lives as defined by the building's architecture and their geographical location in reference to the water front. Above all, most cities first took route on the water front.

Early First Nations used canoes to traverse the water highways, going from summer camps to winter homes, trading with neighbours along the way. The Europeans used the water to access the forests and the fur trade that the lands supplied. Later, the loggers used the water front to build mills and process the trees from the old growth rain forest. The salmon were taken from the water and processed at numerous canneries and shipped as far away as Japan and Europe by sailing schooners and later steamers.

Yes, every town on the West Coast starts off at the water's edge, the growth of the town and the height of the various industries in that town, are patterns repeated up and down the length of the Western Rain Forest spanning from California to Alaska. We in Vancouver are plumb centre, and our city's history is one repeated in a hundred other cities - as I said, "if you know your own city's history, you'll recognize the history of a sister city".

Cookie Cacher and I continued through out the day non-stop, having a short tail gate picnic at one of the small parks where we had just located a cache. Sandwiches were eaten quickly, washed down with a drink or two from the cooler, then we marched on looking for the next caches that appeared in our sights.

The day turned to early evening, we made the decision to pass on the caches that required you walking into larger parks as we did not know the access points, nor was it easy to pick out trails and side trails in the dark as readily as it was during the day.

We opted to instead concentrate on easier caches that were close to the road or were simple drive ups where we could stop in well lit areas. Even then, when we first made that decision at 5.00 PM, we still found a dozen or so more caches until I finally called "TIME" at 7.00 PM.

We still needed to get to the border, sit for a half hour or so in the line up, have dinner, and then drive home. As Cookie Cacher did not have to work the next day, it was me who had to call it quits and aim the Jeep north towards the 49th parallel.

The stats on the day were;

16 hours on the road, 46 caches found for me, 49 for Cookie Cacher, not so many miles on the Jeep this time, and some where in all of that I hit my 2,000th find!

Jeanine was an awesome navigator, as she worked not just the GPS to find, read, and locate the next cache, she also read off the street by street navigation from her GPS. Having her in the shotgun seat definitely made for a much smoother day and contributed to our high cache count at the end of it all.

Thanks Jeanine for another great day of geocaching!

East Van - Burnaby - New Westminster Caching

2010-01-05T23:14:00.000-08:00

Had a chance to get out caching today for the first time in 3 months - lots of rain, lots of cold, lots of dark, lots of work, and a touch of laziness all conspired to keep me off the hunt. Finally a semi-sunny Sunday rolled around, a couple of phone calls lined up two of my brothers, Bowser98 and MrTJ, for a day of caching in the Vancouver - Burnaby - New Westminster areas.

We had approx 30 caches on tap for the day, we ended up with 22 done which was a fair total for an easy day of caching and just having a good time. We started off in Vancouver at a cache in Everett Crowley Park called "Butterfly Garden" in a not so busy area of the park. The garden looked a bit forlorn in the midst of winter, however it would be a great attraction for butterflies in the summer. Bushes that butterflies find appealing are planted here to attract the winged wonders.

Near the garden was a sign board titled "Pollinators' Paradise" affixed to a 10 foot tall, very wide stump. Atop the flat part of the stump were 4 open faced boxes, lying on their sides. During the summer these would be used by the native "Blue Orchard Mason" bees; the artifiical nesting site is meant to encourage the bees to nest here, as well as to inform park growers of the importance of pollinating bees.

Above: "Skaters, strap on your helmuts"!

Next up was a puzzle cache that MrTJ had already solved and found, that Bowser98 had partially solved, and I didn't have a clue but was quite happy to go along for the drive and make the find as well. The cache was called "I see da nine". No hints or spoilers from me about the cache, other than to say there was a neat downhill sidewalk next to the cache that I just know skaters would love to test their skill on.

Above: "Tranquil Trail"

"Tranquil Trail" was next on our list, just off Marine Drive not far over the border into Burnaby. The cache was along one of those small urban trails that cut through a green belt to join one main artery with another. In this case it went from the old Marine Drive south along side a small creek to emerge at the new 4 lane Marine Way where the majority of the traffic now speeds along. The trail was a nice respite from the noise of the traffic, and Bowser98 even managed to do a bit of CITO/clean up of the water course as he jumped down into the creek bed to remove a piece of discarded construction material that may find itself employed as a unique cache container.

Above: Bonsor Park Cenotaph

After our walk along the trail, it was time to head back into the city, at least into the traffic. On the south side of Burnaby is Bonsor Park; in a corner of Bonsor Park is a small plaza with a Cenotaph commemorating our countries fallen soldiers. These are neat places to visit, as like many others, we would probably have ignored it unless it was Remembrance Day. It's good to be reminded of what our armed forces sacrifice so others can have a day where their biggest concern is finding the well hidden nano cache in the plaza.

Another interesting cache we found was in the north-east corner of Central Park on Kingsway. Central Park itself is a 90 hectare urban park founded in 1891. The park's natural highlights are its immense Douglas Fir, Western Hemlocks, Cedar, Poplar and Maple groves. Many easy walking trails crisscross the park, granting easy access to the half dozen or so caches hidden in the park at any given time.

Today we were after a cache in the Jubilee Grove, a small garden area created in 1935 with the planting of a ceremonial Oak tree from the Royal Forest at Windsor in England. In 1939 an archway was created to create an ornate entry into the gardens off Kingsway using the "rope twist" hand carved sandstone from the original Vancouver Club first constructed in 1893. In the early 1990s the Jubilee Fountain was restored and a garden walk created for the benefit of those visiting this small corner of the Central Park.

We grabbed a couple more urban caches in small parks and pathways that ran between streets as we worked our way down towards BCIT and a number of caches hidden around there. One of them was a well disguised micro tucked away on a parking lot pay station. The cache was tricky to find, the other tricky part was that there is a security camera very close to the cache; you can't help but think you are being watched as you search for the cache. Any minute now you expect to see the security guards driving up to give you the third degree. Luckily I got my eyes on this one in just a couple of minutes, which made us all happy....no handcuffs for us!

We finished the half a dozen caches in the area, then moved a few blocks away to a cache called "A Kodak Moment". The cache was located a small creek area right behind the Kodak building in Burnaby. The area is surrounded by industrial buildings and there didn't seem to be any easy way in other than entering through a small green belt and doing some mild bush whacking down to the creek, then follow the bank of the creek along for 150 feet. Either that or trespass through private industrial properties; at least that's the only way we could find in.

The cache was hidden halfway up the bank of the creek on a soft slope of clay; while we enjoyed the quiet solitude of a Sunday when the surrounding businesses where closed, the crows in the trees were not happy with us. This area is very close to Still Creek which runs east to west through Central Burnaby. Still Creek is one of the few remaining habitats where crows can congregate in numbers; as a result thousands of crows roost in communes. At the end of the day, it's not uncommon for the sky to be filled with crows as they wing their way back to Still Creek and the surrounding areas to roost. Lucky for us a murder of crows were in the trees all above us, telling us how we were intruding in their home.

Cache found, log book signed, cache re-hidden, we bid adieu to the crows and wandered a few blocks away to Broadview Park for a quick cache hidden at the lower end of the park next to a small creek. The same small creek in fact where we had just found the previous cache! Had to smile as we were signing the log book, as it doesn't seem that long ago I was on my 5 speed Mustang bike taking advantage of the rolling hills to get up a fair bit of speed as I hurtled towards the very same trail I was now standing on, a short 40 years ago.

With memories put back on the shelf for another time, we headed into East Vancouver to do a few caches around the Rupert and 1st Ave area. #1 was at Sunrise Park, where the usual thing happened that fellow cachers will identify with oh so well.........we get there, and not 50 feet from the cache area are 2 young girls wrapped in sleeping bags enjoying the view over Burnaby and the North Shore Mountains as the sun began to go down. Arrgh.... oh well, lets go have a look.....

Turns out the cache was retrievable from its hiding spot with the benefit of a large tree to be used as cover. Good! Finding the cache made us feel a lot better.

Another cache a few blocks away at the Rupert Pitch and Putt golf course took us a few minutes to find, at least we had the area to ourselves. The night had fallen, and the last of the hackers had drifted away as we approached the cache area. A few minutes of looking had Bowser98 making the discovery of a well disguised micro cache - another reason for us to smile, we found the cache!

This was the last cache of the day for Bowser98 as it was time for him to start heading homeward. MrTJ and I did the same, only we had a few more caches on the pile to do as we meandered along our way.

We aimed for New Westminster and a cache that was MIA last time we looked; "Match Point" was located at the tennis courts in Simcoe Park. Perfect I think, no one playing tennis in the dark. What I wasn't counting on was a couiple of hooligans and their dog hanging around in the dark, in the park, right at ground zero!!

"GREAT" I say in annoyance to MrTJ; oh well, lets saunter over there to see if we can annoy them enough they move away. Turns out the hooligans being here was a good thing, as it was none other than Pollywoggg and Helen & Theo with the cache in hand. As we got closer and I tried to figure out who and what these guys were doing in the dark, the tell tale glow of a GPS screen gave away their identities.

We had a good chat with our fellow cachers and decided to do the next two caches as a team. Well, at least that's what they thought. I was more of the persuasion I'll let them do the hard work and find the caches for us! :)

First cache we went to was fairly easy, especially with 4 pairs of eyes. Good thing to as it was the cache called "The Bus Stops Here", and yes the bus did stop there a couple of times while we were looking. With all of us looking we found it after a few minutes, signed the log and then moved on.

We caravanned over to a cache co-sponsored the province of BC and the BCGA; these series of caches are called Blue Sky caches as they promote both environmental awareness and the beauty and history of BC.

In this case, the cache was hidden at the New Westminster museum located on the grounds of Irving House.

Our timing was poor as the historic Irving House and the museum was closed for the night, but we were still able to wander around to the museum at the back of the property and find the cache. The New West museum is one of the oldest museum sites in the province; it dates back to the days of Gold Miners, steam boats on the Fraser, and New West being proclaimed the second capital of the new province of BC. On display was a stage coach from 1876; neat to see what at the time was the main mode of overland transportation.

Above: our caching companions in New West.

Theo on the left checking out the garden, Pollywoggg in red holding the cache, Helen checking her GPS for the next cache, and MrTJ signing the log book.

We chit chatted for a while before we parted ways, all of us enjoying our short term caching team. MrTJ and I headed east again towards Maple Ridge, picking up a couple of more caches along the way in Coquitlam and Maple Ridge just to round off the night.

By now it was getting on and a late supper would be in store for us, which was a lot better than no supper at all. We ended the day with 22 caches found, fellow cachers met on the hunt and 3 brothers who enjoyed a day of being together doing something we all love to do.

I hope to have more fun days like this soon; it never fails to recharge the soul.......

Cruising Mount Baker

2009-10-29T12:38:00.000-07:00

Video and our route are at the end of the story. You can click on the video to watch now, or you can click on the link for EveryTrail to go to my EveryTrail page and see the actual tracks of our trip. You can also view elevation gains and mileage: you can even "play" our trip route by clicking on the arrow just below the graphs!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

On Saturday Oct 24 Ken and I headed south into the U.S. to meet a group from PNW Adventures group. This group is into exploring back roads and off road areas in the Pacific North West.

We met up with the group in Lyman on Hwy #20 a few miles east of Sedro-Wooley, arriving with only 3 minutes to spare before the official departure time. Not bad timing considering we drove down from Maple Ridge BC to be there for 9.00 AM!

We piled into our 4X4's, 6 vehicles in all, and headed further east on Hwy #20 looking for Baker Road which would take us into the Mt Baker National Forest. As it turned out, we wouldn't have any use of the 4X4 side of our vehicles today, as the roads we chose were either paved or well groomed, moderately inclined gravel forest service roads.

We explored several roads that ended in mountain bowls; we checked out a snow mobile area, and drove up to a small parking area that provided an excellent view of a nearby glacier. At least that's what we think we did. The pockets of low hanging clouds obscured our view of the glacier, which, according to Mark, the trip leader, is something quite beautiful to see.

Down the mountain road we went, back to the main paved road that ran north along side Baker Lake, and followed the road past the end of the paved section until it too turned into a groomed FSR. We went as far as the end of Baker lake, were we spent some time enjoying a late lunch, the scenery, and some good company.

By the time we got back on the road it was nearing 3.00 PM, time for Ken and I to say good bye to the group and start our journey back north.

Ken and I geocached as we headed back west along Hwy #20 to Sedro-Wolley, then cached north along Hwy #9 as we headed for the border town of Sumas. It was near 7.00 PM by the time we crossed back into Canada; a few more caches in the Abbotsford area finished off our geocaching for the day.

We got back home around 8.30 PM, an early day compared to some of my recent road trips! :)
Time enough to have a late dinner, log our caches, and get to bed at a reasonable time.

Mt Baker - Tour Of South Baker & Baker Lake at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Share GPS Tracks

Meandering Around Merritt

2009-10-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: The Quichena Hotel established 1908

Videos and my GPS tracks at the end of the trip report.........

Stu and I decided to take advantage of one of the last remaining good weekends of the year and set our sites on the Merritt area. It would be one of those long day trips where we would log 764KMs, 13.5 hours in the saddle and only 10 caches to show for it, but we got a months worth of enjoyment on the day.

Stu (geocaching name "Scruffster") and I (geocaching name "tjguy98") met up in Maple Ridge, just outside of Vancouver BC, loaded up the Jeep with the necessary survival items (2 GPS, a sandwich and a credit card) and took off down the road at 6.00 AM, lots of time for a day of caching and back road driving.

I wanted to drive a few roads in the Merritt area that I liked so much one more time before the weather changed for the worse; Stu was quite happy to come along and see some of the historic areas around Merritt, and of course we had to throw in a few caches here and there just to keep up the pace.

Our first stop was at Bridal Falls Provincial Park, just east of Chilliwack. The sixth highest falls in Canada drain the north slope of Mt. Cheam, which rises almost 7,000 feet above the Fraser Valley. In the park were two caches we planned to find; one was a cache placed last year in conjunction with B.C. Parks, this one was called "BC Parks GeoRush 2008 - Bridal Falls". The second cache we had in mind was part of this years version of the BC Parks program to encourage people to come visit the parks; this one was called "Bluesky - Bridal Falls Provincial Park". The term BlueSky is in reference to the Parks Ministry encouraging the public to think about "going green" in how they get to a cache location, as well as going green in their every day life.

Caches found, we jumped back in the Jeep and continued our eastward trek, turning north just after Hope as we followed the Coquihalla Highway, provincial hwy #5. As soon as we did this, we were on a historic path; we were now following the path of the old railway known as the Kettle Valley Railway. The railway originally ran from Hope up the Coquihalla Canyon to Brookmere, then through the Interior to Kelowna, then headed south crossing the border at Midway.

Our next stop was along the KVR railbed just west of Brookmere; the railbed is now part of the Trans Canada Trails system and in some parts is driveable or rideable on quads and motor bikes. This section was for quads only, as a nearby old train trestle was blocked by a post not allowing cars any further. As it was, we did not need to go any further either, the cache being located along side a quiet section of the the Coldwater River. "BlueSky - Coldwater River "S" Bend" cache was tucked away just down the trail in a picturesque location.

The railbed ran straight through this section, and you could see where the cliff was sliced to allow the tracks to pass. The river itself was a great area where small pools formed in the "S" shape of the river, making me think some fisherman would have good luck here.

From the Coldwater River we we shot north on the Coquihalla Highway through the Great Bear Shed and on past Zopkios Ridge, which is made up of huge granite slabs and soars bare of trees high above the highway. We went as far north as Merritt, and turned east along highway 97C for a few miles till we reached a roadside information kiosk explaining all about the surrounding grasslands. "Grasslands" you say? Why yes, we had left the Pacific West Coast bio zone, transited the Alpine area of the Coquihalla Summit, and were now in the Interior Dry Lands of south central BC.

The kiosk and the surrounding park area was dedicated to Laurie Guichon, a member of the pioneer farming family of the Merritt area. Laurie Guichon spent much of his life as a guardian of the grasslands and gave back to the community in many ways. The park was a way of recognizing his contributions, and to help pull in people to the area was a cache placed here as part of the Gold Country series. This series highlights historical areas near 6 communities in the southern interior of the province; this series is also funded by the BC government through its community funds to help revive the economies of hard hit cities.

This cache was also the start of what we would be exposed to most of the day; wide open spaces where your vision can stretch for miles or only as far as the next gentle rolling hill. A big change for us city folks from the West Coast where forests of cedars are can be found.

Our next cache was on the outskirts of Merritt, at the edge of the Merritt airport. "Ranchlands Cache" was accessed by a dirt road that ran along the airport, then turned the corner at the end of the runway and dead ended into a small parking area. From here were were treated to a view that extended in all directions; we could see the dry grasslands across the valley, we could watch the flow of traffic heading north along Hwy #5 to Kamloops, or another stream of traffic heading north-east along Hwy# 5A also towards Kamloops. Hwy# 5A was the main road to Kamloops before the new 4 laned super-highway opened, taking over the title of Hwy #5.

Back in the Jeep we also took the older route of Hwy 5A on our way to our next destination, the Quilchena Hotel. The hotel was built in 1908 in hopes that the KVR would be built through Merrit, traversing the east side of Nicola Lake and then up to Kamloops. Well, that didn't happen, instead the KVR only came as far north as Brookmere in the Coquihalla Valley, then turned south to Hope. The Guichon family (remember that name from the earlier Guichon Grasslands cache?) missed out on the railway traffic, but were able to capitilize on the stage coach traffic, and the tourist trade, as Nicola Lake was a popular destination. Poor economic times forced the hotel to close in 1917, but re-opened again in 1958 much to the delight of generations to come. You can read about the Quilchena Hotel here.

Time to take a step backwards a few miles as I almost forgot to mention the town of Upper Nicola.

Before the ranching town of Merritt came into being, the First Nations people in the area lived in two communities, Upper Nicola and Lower Nicola, the names coined from where the villages were located on the Nicola River.

Our first stop in Upper Nicola was at the historic Nicola Cemetery; framed by a lovely old fashioned entrance, the gate to the cemetery was chained shut. Rather than just jump the fence, we respected the communties wishes and viewed the old grave and their tombstones from the outside.

Just up the road was Upper Nicola itself, a small town that at one time was the capital of the valley. The area consisted of a sizeable population, as evidenced by the court house that still stands today. Just next door is historic Murrary United Church, built in 1876. As with many small town churches, there is an old grave yard on the church property. Here we found many graves dating from the late 1800's. The church itself was beautiful in its plainness, a small working ranch land church serving a blue collar congregation. Small wooden doors were chosen to secure the threshold, and a large bell in the belfry still had it's rope attached that the minister would pull to summon the congregation to worship.

OK folks, stay with me, we're jumping forward again a ways up the road.....

At this point we switched gears, so to speak. We moved from a caching mindset, to a more wordly mindset of looking at the land with an historical eye. We put away the caching papers, and headed north to Douglas Lake Road, a dirt road that would take us into the heart of cattle country. And you can't get much closer to cattle country than this - The Douglas Lake Ranch. The ranch is the largest working cattle ranch in BC; in it's past it supplied all the beef for the workers who built the CPR across Canada. We toured the local ranch "town" which consisted of a couple of dirt roads and employee housing. I call it a "town"as it really was a town unto itself. For the hundreds of staff and their families, this was the town they came to; the town contained a school, a church, a general store, and even had it's own Canada post office! You can see a web cam of the ranch here and read about the history of the ranch as it works through it's second century of operations, 120 years and counting.

From the Douglas Lake Ranch we retraced our steps along Douglas Lake Road until we came to a small First Nations settlement. Officially the area is known as "Douglas Lake Indian Reserve #3", the local natives know this area as "Spahomin", the word to describe the reeds in Douglas Lake that the natives used for weaving to make baskets to carry their goods.

This was also the location of the intersection of Minnie Lake Road and Douglas Lake Road; this time we were headed south along Minnie Lake Road. The new road was picturesque in it's own way; instead of giving us views of wide open valleys, we were now on a bit of a roller coaster ride as we went over hill and through the dales as the road wend its way through the old bed of what once was a glacial lake. The entire area known as the Douglas Plateau, gets it's topography as a result of glaciers that flowed north to south through the valley, creating the long shallow Douglas Lake surrounded by glacial features that an amateur geologist would love. Lateral morraines, end morraines, terminal morraines, drumlins, eskers, kettle lakes and glacial erratics were all evident in our drive through the open country side.

We wound our way south as far as Minnie Lake, where we intersected with the Pennask Lake Road and followed it westward towards Nicola Lake and Hwy 5A. Try as we might, we could not make good time through here as we were continually stopping to get out and enjoy the vista that surrounded us. From the occasional cattle guard to the open range pen stocks, everything let us know we were in cowboy country, where real life was played out on the open range lands.

Eventually we made it back to Hwy 5A, leaving us on the edge of Nicola Lake. We headed back south to the town of Merritt and, switching back to caching mode, did a few in-town caches. The one we liked the best was another Gold Country cache called "Merritt View Point", and that's exactly what this one was. Located high atop a hill on the north-east corner of Merritt, a short scramble up from the parking lot gave you an eagle eye view of the city of Merritt.

The golf course was directly below us, the city lay at our feet, across the valley the open range lands started their run north back up Nicola Lake towards the vast holdings of the Douglas Lake Ranch, to the south-east the 4 lane super highway known as the Coquihalla started its run south to the alpine area of the Coquihalla Summit before it plunged down to Hope, and to the east was the green land of a well irrigated farmer's field that seemed to be have one foot in the grasslands bio zone and one foot in the montaine terraine bio zone. Quite the view point indeed; from this one sight we could view 3 different climates that help shape the BC landscape into what it is today.

Back down the hill, we turned west out of Merritt along Hwy #8 as we headed for Lower Nicola, one of the older townsites that existed before Merritt came into its own. Here we stopped at a small country intersection for an easy micro cache; but more importantly, we were back on the pathway of the old KVR at a small whistle stop known as Coyle. Today there is nothing here to advise that there was once a mighty train that came through here on its way to tackle the rugged mountains on its journey to the far end of the line. Too bad really, it would be neat if all these small forgotten places has historical signs to remind us of what once was.

We shot up Hwy 97C for a few miles as we went in search of another Gold Country cache called "Craigmont Mines". This cache was placed across the road from Craigmont Mines, a large producer of copper in its prime. It has all but ceased operations, the only activity being the recovery of media grade magnetite from the mine tailings to be used in the creation of steel or as an abrasive added to cleaning products.

Cache found, stickers retrieved for our Gold Country book to mark which caches we have found, we headed back down Hwy# 97C to Hwy #8, turned west again, and went up the next road heading for the top of Promontory Mountain, a wind swept bare peak at 7,000 feet high.

The black top road quickly turned into a forest service road, complete with uneven gravel, the occasional trench dug cross ways on the road to minimize water damage, and even a downed tree or two edging you off the FSR and making you squeeze past them. 6K later, after many switch backs, we arrived at the top of the mountain to find ourselves back in winter. Down on the Coast, my wife was enjoying a nice sunny day at 18 degrees C in our back yard; here on top of the mountain, we were in a cold wind, temperature down to 6 degrees C or so, and patches of snow on the ground. Even the picnic table had snow on it, with one large icicle melting and dripping it's liquid life blood onto the cold ground.

What made up for the trip up the mountain road and the cold, wind was a cache, of course, and a great view back down the Nicola Valley to the town of Merritt some 10 K away. The cache we came for was another Gold Country cache highlighting the significant geological and biological nature of the area. Some of the flora on the mountain have specifically adapted to grow in the harsh mountain climate, and are rarely found else where.

The geological foundation of the mountain stretches back to the Upper Triassic period with intrusions dating from the Lower Jurrasic period. Many formations and rock types associated with volcanic activity can also be found on the mountain; buried amongst the rock formations are marine fossils from when the mountain top was once part of an ocean floor. That type of vision is hard to wrap your head around; how could the bottom of an ocean, thousands of feet beneath the sea, become the top of a 7,000 foot mountain? Our small human minds have difficulty grasping the enormity of our world.

Cache found, pictures taken, back in the Jeep we go to warm up and start our descent back down to the floor of the Nicola Valley. The trip down always seems so much quicker than the trip up for some reason.

This was the last cache of the day, as we were running out of daylight and nearby caches. We headed into Merritt to gas up the Jeep and gas up our tummys for the long haul back to the Lower Mainland.

We only found 10 caches on the day, but as much as we enjoyed the caching, the history and the views of the Merritt area far outweighed the caching fun.

My thanks to Stu for being such a fun shotgun partner, and for his excellent "live" video shooting taken from a bouncy Jeep on grass land roads.

My Merritt trip on EveryTrail.com; download my route to retrace my path or click on the map to zoom in on the trip.

Meandering Around Merritt at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: GPS Trip Sharing with Google Maps

Janelle Shows Us The Fun Again

2009-09-28T23:38:00.000-07:00

I've been caching for 5 years now, (doesn't seem that long ago that I found my first cache), and the thrill of the search isn't as strong as it once was.

What is still there is the love of the drive to the cache location, the walk to the cache along some forested path or along the edge of a hidden stretch of seawall along Burrard Inlet, or a gravel path along the wide open expanse of a dyke running along a river's edge which offers a panoramic vista that surrounds us.

However, the real FUN and THRILL of the hunt can only be seen through a child's eyes. Recently I've been given the privilege of sharing that long lost feeling with a very young lady I know named Janelle. She is all of 8 years old, wide eyed and excited as can be to go out and find the treasures that only special people know about.

Her mom and I met at a couple of local caches just to give her a taste of what it's like to look for hidden treasures in the woods. And darned if it wasn't a good thing we did, as she found a well hidden cache that this veteran cacher was having trouble finding.

Her mom and dad do not have a GPS yet, but that doesn't stop Janelle from wanting to go out to find more. As a way of saying "thanks" to her for showing me what's it's like to feel the intensity of a fun day that only a child can, I placed a cache near her house for her to be the FTF on, as well as for her to maintain. Janelle's FTF prize was a small keychain flashlight for checking those dark crevasses in the forest, as well as a small note book for keeping track of her cache notes while she is on the trail. The ownership of the cache I hope will instill a feeling of being a guardian of treasures for another people to enjoy; a way for her to have fun by way of allowing others to have fun finding her cache.

The cache is named "Janelle's Cache" GC1YR1Z located in Coquitlam BC not far from the Coquitlam Centre Shopping Mall. If you have a chance, stop by, find the cache, and take a minute to remember how exciting everything was when you were a child. Those moments are long gone for us adults; we can only reclaim fleeting glimpses of them when we look through the eyes of a child.

8,000 Visitors !

2009-08-14T15:21:00.000-07:00

After writing trip reports for various web groups I belonged to, such as the Full Size Jeep club and the BackRoads Driver group, both on YahooGroups.com, I decided that I wanted to have my own site where I could post trip reports and stories that crossed multiple interests.

I was originally thinking of having my own web site, but decided that a blog was easier to do and would fill the need. On Oct 2 2006 I launched my blog and added some trip reports and pictures from my "archives".

Here we are, not quite 3 years later, and I now have 74 entries on my blog, and have had over 8,000 visitors! WOW, that's more that ever thought would visit...to be honest I don't know how many I was expecting to visit when I entered the online world.

Things I did foresee; my still writing of trip reports and putting pictures up on my Flickr site so every one could "come" along the trip with me, in the virtual world if not in the real world.
I expected some family members and a few close friends and a few 'Net friends to visit over time.

Things I did not foresee? I certainly did not envision having people from around the world take an interest in my site; I did not foresee hits from over 40 countries on my counter; I did not foresee myself getting into video and making short films about geocaching, off-road exploring and other exploits I get myself into.

What really amazes me is how my simple plan of having a web presence has morphed into a larger world of videos, pictures, and stories supported through various media such as a Video editing tool, a Web blog, two web sites to store pictures, and an account on a video web site.

Not to mention the various web groups I belong to and have posted messages to and uploaded my media presentations to. I have even had one of my pictures of England used on www.Schmap.com This is a web site that is a combination map and picture site...

So here's to the next milestone of 10,000; which now doesn't seem that far away...

PS If you want to know how far back I go with my trip reports on the web, here's a clue. I found one of my original stories archived on a friend's web site; the date I wrote the story is May 26, 1997. Have a look at the early web days of Ed at http://wagoneers.com/FSJ/rigs/Eddie/

Thanks for visiting, and if you've enjoyed the site, please leave a comment at the bottom of this article or any other article you've enjoyed.

Ed Pedersen AKA tjguy98

Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver

2009-08-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Lonsdale Quay

Annette and I spent a sunny afternoon wandering around Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver as a way of enjoying a slow day of holidays. The weather was perfect, nice sunshine, just a little bit of clouds, and not too hot.

The Quay is a great place to visit as it has many food shops located on the lower floor where you may buy fresh ingredients for tonight's dinner. If you want to take home your dinner, or enjoy a lunch now, there are plenty of kiosks in the Food Fair area. As well, there are two levels upstairs that offer higher end stores stocked full of cute and unique gifts, games, and clothes. They even have a "Kid's Alley" devoted to shops just for the rug rats.

We have a family friend who's daughter just had a little boy a month or so ago, and Annette is going to the baby shower in a couple of days; we picked up a cute little jumper in Baby Blue with writing on the front. The writing states: "All Mommy Wanted Was a Back Rub"!

When we seen that, we couldn't stop laughing and just had to buy it as the perfect baby shower gift!

ABOVE: The yacht Attessa owned by Dennis Washington

We went outside to meander the Quay dockside and walk the Burrard Dry Dock pier. We opened the door to go outside and the first thing that filled our vision was this HUGE yacht!
This thing was massive, and we could only begin to dream about what it must be like to cruise on this vessel.

We walked over to the Burrard Dry Dock pier, which was the old grounds of the Burrard Shipyards were over 450 vessels were made, many of the BC Ferries came from here as well.
The pier runs for 700 feet out into the waters of Burrard Inlet, giving you an excellent view of the Vancouver waterfront on the south shore of the inlet. It also gave us an unobstructed view of the Attessa, in all it's glory.

We walked back towards the Quay just as a twin prop 10 passenger float plane came in for a landing and taxied towards the Attessa. We waited for a few minutes and snapped off some shots of the plane landing and then docking next to the Attessa. It was no coincidence that the plane's colourings matched the Attessa, it was also from the Washington group.

We watched as two older gentlemen and one younger man deplaned and headed up the ramp towards the street. We managed to come around and meet them out on the street; we were very interested to see if we recognized anyone.

Well, we didn't, but Annette managed to snap a couple of photos of them anyways just in case. The young fellow looked like he should be a hockey player; about 6'2' with a good build ready to play the position of a tough defenceman. The older gentlemen we did not recognize, sad to say.

We finished up our walk around the piers and shops in the quay, then joined the rush hour crowd back to Maple Ridge. When we got home, the first thing we did was download the pictures, and then start googling the Attessa.......here's what we found out.

First, one of the older gentlemen we passed was Dennis Washington himself, presumably just back from the island resort.
The Attessa is 225 feet long, the 16th biggest yacht in the world; it is owned by Dennis Washington out of Seattle. The billionaire owns, among others, the following enterprises: The Washington Marine Group, (who owned the Fast Cat ferries and just sold them to a Middle Eastern buyer), he owns Seaspan Tugs, which was why he was docked there, and he owns a private island on the BC coast complete with a golf course and guest resort. He also owns several airplanes, one which mainly flies in BC ferrying guests and owner from Vancouver to the island resort and back.

The man loves to live in the luxury he can afford, all the power to him!
With dreams of yachts and private islands dancing like sugar plum fairies in our heads, we uploaded a few pictures to our web sites, looked at each other, and sighed....."ahhhhh, if only".

Crazy Canyon Caching

2009-07-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Somewhere on the Thompson River

Crazy Canyon Caching is an excellent name for this trip report as the whole day fits into the category - just crazy!

Here's the stats on the day; 22 hours on the road, 770K, 12 Gold Country Caches for Cookie Cacher, 12 more for me to obtain my 24 caches required for the Gold coin, a total of 60 caches for me and 66 for Cookie Cacher!

Videos and the GPS route of the day's trip, uploaded to EveryTrails.com, can be found at the end of the write up.

THE STORY

I had been up the Fraser Canyon two weeks ago with Stu, AKA Scruffster, as we blasted our way through the canyon one early morning on our way to Cache Creek to arrive just in time for the official late morning kick off of the Gold Country Geotourism event. The event was being held in 6 cities, Cache Creek, Clinton, Lillooet, Lytton, Merritt and Logan Lake, all in an effort to promote tourism in the area.

All that morning, we kept on passing caches that just begged us to pull over and find them; with broken hearts we passed them by, knowing full well we would be back here soon answering their call. This Saturday we were back, only instead of Scruffster being in the shotgun seat, it was Jeanine AKA Cookie Cacher.

Cookie Cacher had been asking to go caching with me for quite a while, and today seemed like the right time for me to make good on my promise of a day of caching together.

We met up in Maple Ridge at 6.00 AM, me almost sleeping in and waking up only 20 minutes before we had to meet. We met up, both of us semi-awake, loaded Jeanine's stuff into the Jeep, and cruised east out of Maple Ridge aiming for the Fraser Canyon.

We did a couple of caches just north of Hope as a way of warming up on the day, then made our way to Emory Creek area where 4 caches awaited us.

One of the caches highlighted the Emory Creek area, explaining how there was a townsite here in the 1880s; it boasted of 13 streets, two hotels, nine saloons, a brewery, blacksmiths, a general store, and residences. It soon became evident that the CPR would make Yale the terminus of the railroad, and by the 1890s no sign was to be found of Emory City.

Also in the area is a Provincial historic signpost explaining the significant contribution of the Chinese in building the original Cariboo Road, and later the railroads.

We found the 4 caches in the area, then moved on to Yale to look for caches there.
In Yale there are several historic places, suchs as the oldest church in BC still on it's original foundation, Lady Franklin Rock, named after Lady Franklin who toured the world while her husband was on his expedition to the Artic.

Another little know fact is that, in 1868 there was a meeting of 26 delegates from all over the colony of BC who were dissatisfied with the colonial government. This convention did much to stimulate popular support for the idea of the Colony of BC uniting with Canada to become a province of Canada.

We finished up in the Yale area, then moved north on our journey, grabbing various roadside caches that highlighted the best scenic viewpoints in the Fraser Canyon, or otherwise little mentioned historic areas.

Another of the more historic spots was highlighted with a cache placed on a trail; not just any trail, but an HBC Fur Brigade Trail.

This one was placed a short ways up the trail next to Alexandra House. Alexandra House was a road house on the original Cariboo Wagon Road, and the fur brigade trail predates the road house. The original road house was torn down and the current one built, supposedly using one or two of the original road house walls. Hard to determine which ones were used, but even so, the current building is pretty old as is.

The cache was located about a 5 minute walk up the trail from the noisy canyon road, but you might has well been 100 miles from anywhere. The trail leads over the mountains into the Coquihalla Valley, on through the Voight Valley, then cuts across the Douglas Lake Ranch holdings on it's way to Fort Kamloops.

In it's heyday, the pack trains of horses were an incredible site; 500 horses packed with large 80 pound bales of fur on each side, requiring 150 men to run the pack. The First Nations people would watch this procession go by in amazement; never had they seen so many "English" men at one time.

In the Gold Rush days, there were two kinds of white man; those that came from America were called "Boston men", as many of the gold seekers came from Boston. Every one else was called an "English men", as most of the non-Americans were English.

This was a great chance to stretch our legs and provided the wonderful experience of allowing us to step back in time, if just for a few minutes, and imagine the sound of many hooves from labouring horses, intermingled with the voices of the packers encouraging their charges to keep moving.

Northward we continued, stopping at more viewpoints and scenic waterfalls till we got to Boston Bar, the site of a bar in the river first worked by American miners, hence the name "Boston Bar". Here we did a couple of caches aimed at highlighting the old suspended cable car that use to run over the Fraser River from Boston Bar on the east side, to North Bend on the west side.

Many an old folks have used this cable car, and can still vividly recall their trips. Years ago the cable car was replaced with a high level bridge to provide more permanent and improved access for the residents on the west side of the river.

In Lytton we came across our first Gold Country caches, where we started collecting stickers to place in our books. We visited a historic church, The Church of St. Mary and St. Paul, and the Lytton cemetery; we also stopped at the Lytton Jelly Roll, so called because, well...it looks like a giant jelly roll. The roll was created in an ice bound lake during the last glaciation period when an underwater landslide caused the sediment layers to slump away. Rather than breaking up and dispersing, the layers rolled up instead to look like a jelly roll.

With jelly rolls on our minds, we scoured Lytton for as many more caches as time would allow, before we headed north once again.

Next stop, beautiful Nicomen Falls; get ready for a great view of a tall waterfall seemingly coming out of a crack in the hill, and a steep short hike to find the cache. This one I looked forward to doing, and I didn't.....I'm no so good on uphills... :(

But, there was no way I was going to pass on this cache just because I had to huff and puff a little bit; besides, I was hedging my bets......I had Cookie Cacher along to perform CPR in case I over exerted myself... :)

As it was, a short, 2 minute hike brought us to the cache location...."well, that was easy"!
"What was I whining about"? With cache in hand and cameras going, we took a few minutes to enjoy the area, before the calls of the caches up the road begged us to continue.

Into Spences Bridge we went, criss crossing the small town while we searched for caches at a cemetery, at the oldest Inn in BC, at a small camp ground on the banks of the Thompson River, and at a small cafe called The Packing House.

Caches found, it was time for a "time check"; it was 5.30 PM-ish.....oh boy, so many more caches to do, so much more ground to cover.

We raced towards Ashcroft picking off caches as we went, taking the time at each cache to enjoy the scenery. As much as we wanted to to the "dash and grab" thing, the vistas where just so beautiful we couldn't help but stop to admire the land and think of what it was like over 100 years ago. It might not be all that different now; the clear blue Thompson River cutting it's way through the surrounding lowlands of glacial till, vast morraines of gravel and sand left by the retreating glaciers 10,000 years ago. The low rainfall, hot sun, and poor soil combine to make this the land of sage brush and rattlesnakes.

We arrived in Ashcroft around 7.30 PM, knowing that we had two, maybe three hours of daylight left before we would have to make a decision; whether to quit at night fall, or break out the flash lights.

We did the Ashcroft caches as quick as we could, then moved up to Cache Creek to pick up the ones there. By now it was around 8.30 PM....what to do, what to do.....we still had a few more caches to do, and I was getting caught up in the Gold Country quest as I only needed 4 more caches to get my 24.

We made the daring decision to push through to Clinton to pick off the caches we could, specifically the Gold Country caches. It was after 9.00 PM by the time we got into Clinton, and we needed to break out the mini mag lights to find the caches around town, all the while trying to not be too suspicious waving flashlights around in a small town.

We grabbed the Gold Country cache at the historic St Peter The Apostle church by the light of the flash lights and got away from the church lest we looked like we were up to no good.

Back in the Jeep, we counted the Gold Country caches, I now had 23, I needed one more! ARRRGGHH.......

Oh well, by now it was after 10.00 PM and it was time to start heading south for the long drive.
Visions of completing my Gold Country quest were fading as I realized it was not to be this day, and that I would just have to do another tour to the area.

Heading back to Cache Creek, Cookie Cacher says to me, "you know, there is another Gold Country cache called Hat Creek just 26K west of Cache Creek on Hwy #99"

I ran the logistics through my head, guesstimating how long it would take to drive out west, find the cache, drive back, and then dead head all the way back to Vancouver. I came to the conclusion that it was better to say "enough's enough", and head home.

Cookie Cacher gave me one more assurance that if I wanted to go grab the cache, she was willing......tempting, but nahhh....time to turn towards home.
As we approached the turn off for Hwy #99, I was content to know that one more cache was waiting for me some where down that highway.

"Wait, what's this".....that adrenaline rush was starting in the brain and moving down my arms, and then into my hands....and then a 'force' over came me and I turned the wheel hard so that the Jeep's grill was now pointed west ward towards the last remaining cache.

I couldn't see Cookie Cacher in the darkened cab of the Jeep, but I swear she was smiling, knowing that I had felt the irrestible pull of "just one more cache"!

Down the highway we ran, highbeams picking up the curves of the road as it meandered through what I remember is a lovely small valley with farm houses filling in the loneliness of the land.

We arrived at a fork in the road, one sign saying Hat Creek Road....Cookie Cacher says "thaddaway 4K"....off we go on the gravel road, the Jeep's tires hugging the gravel around the corners keeping us safe. We come to one more fork in the road, Cookie Cacher says "Left" on Upper Hat Road, just one more K and then "STOP"!

We park the Jeep on the side of the road, leave the parking lights on to help us find our way back in the dark, break out the BFLs and plunge off into the bush counting down to the treasure 30 metres away. We end up going in circles for a few minutes before Cookie Cacher leads us to a suspicious looking wood pile; we grab the wood off the pile and YES, YES, YES!! there it is!!
Number 24 of the Gold Country caches found, the day is now complete!

We sign the log, ensuring we grab the required stickers, I do a little bit of the "Oh Yeah, Oh Yeah" dance singing "uh huh, uh huh, oh yeah, oh yeah, complete with the arms and hip movements! Cookie Cacher is not impressed....actually I think she was trying hard not to laugh at me......

Back in the Jeep, back down Upper Hat Creek Road , then down Hat Creek Road as Cookie Cacher reads about the coal deposits found in the area, back down Hwy #99 to the turn off for Cache Creek, then into Cache Creek for a tank full of gas for the Jeep, and a stomach full of Momma and Sirloin Burgers for us.

We looked back on the day, thinking how 6.00 AM was so long ago, it seemed like yesterday, and it almost was. Stomachs full, we started back through town when I said to Cookie Cacher, "wait, there's one right there you can get".

So, here we are, in downtown Cache Creek, in the middle of the busiest intersection in town, right by the Dairy Queen, at midnight, finding our last cache.

OK, OK, that's really enough now!! Let's put away the GPS' and start home.
And we did, back down along the Thompson River, through Spences Bridge, through the Thompson River Canyon, entering back into familiar territory when we once again joined the Fraser River at Lytton.

Down on through the Fraser Canyon we travelled, past caches that we found oh so long ago....
We spit out of the Canyon at Hope, now on flat land, and hightailed it back to where Cookie Cacher had left her car in Maple Ridge.

It was just before 3.30 AM that I dropped her off, I'm sure she didn't get home till after 4.00 AM. 22 hours on the road, a whole day come and gone in the search for little tupper ware containers in the bush...some how it all seems so normal to me! :)

It took me hours to go through and log the caches, and I'm sure it was the same for Jeanine, not to mention the pictures to download.

Still, if you asked me to go up country this weekend and do it again, I'd say sure! That is, if I'm allowed.... LOL

Videos below, as well as the GPS Route I made of the day and uploaded to EveryTrails.com

You can click on the map to go to EveryTrail.com and see more details. You can also change the map type be selecting a different map style from the drop down menu in the upper right.

Fraser Canyon Caching at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail: Geotagging Community

Gold Country Caching - Cache Creek

2009-07-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

Had the good fortune to do a road trip to Cache Creek for the kick off of the Gold Rush Event on this past Saturday. Cache Creek is one of 6 B.C. Interior cities that have benefited from government funds to help the local economy recover during this economic downturn.

Cache Creek, Lillooet, Lytton, Clinton, Logan Lake and Merritt were all part of the Gold Rush Geocaching program designed to bring tourism dollars into the cities.

Aprrox 72 caches were placed between the cities and surrounding areas, highlighting the historical locations and at the same time, bringing in a new wave of tourists, in this case geocachers.

I had the pleasure of sharing the day's journey with Scruffster, also known in real life as Stu. I have travelled a fair amount in BC, as have many other cachers, and know the lower part of BC fairly well. Spending a day with Stu is always a treat, first because he's just basically a great guy; second, sharing a road trip with a person who doesn't see this part of the world very often reminds myself of why I like travelling as much as I do. Stu's excitement is contagious, and it leads me into enjoying the trip that much more.

The gawd awful time of 6.00 AM was the pre-arranged meet time in Maple Ridge where Stu would leave his car and jump in the Jeep. That meant I had to get up around 5.00 AM, and Stu was up even earlier....I think Stu was up at 4.00 AM !

We met up, loaded Stu's things into the Jeep, and then set off eastbound and down on the Lougheed Hwy.

We did a cache in Chilliwack just to warm up, but we should have taken this as an omen; it was a real, simple hide, that took Stu and I the better part of 15 minutes! Sadly, our caching skills would not improve much on the day.

We then travelled up the Fraser Canyon, with Stu shooting video for me where possible and firing off his own camera when ever he could. We stopped at the old Alexandra Bridge, then stopped just up the road at the Alexandra Lodge where we took some more shots of the old building and made note of the start of the First Brigade Trail, a Hudsons Bay Brigade Trail that wound over the mountains into the Coquihalla Valley.

Back on the road we stopped again at Hell's Gate to have a look over the edge at the river and building complex down below. While filming here, the gondola cars moved; one went down and one came up; on the one coming up, a woman was sitting out on the structure of the large arm that attached the car to the cable. She was obviously a tech checking the cable for wear and tear; if you think it's scary enough inside the car suspended over the canyon, try sitting outside above the car in a seat barely big enough for your bum! Didn't seem to faze her though....

From there we basically made a bee line for Cache Creek to make it in time for the 11.00 AM dead line where they would hand out the locations of the caches. We arrived at 10.30, which gave us time to sign in, put our name in for door prizes, and eat some of the large geocaching cake made especially for the kick off festivities.

At 11.00 AM precisely, a book was handed out to the cachers; the book contained not just the caches for Cache Creek, but for the other cities as well. Each cache had two pages dedicated to tell the historical significance of the area so that we may appreciate the history presented to us as we looked for the cache.

The cache pages also had parking co-ordinates, and the actual cache co-ordinates, it even gives the cache co-ordinates in UTM. Plus, as an added incentive to those non-cachers, the cache is also designed as a letterbox type. That means, rather than being provided with GPS co-ordinates, you are supplied with a set of instructions such as "walk 10 feet past the last fence post, then turn right and count 20 steps till you reach a large boulder". This way, even non-cachers can still be drawn to the local historical locations and have a chance to re-live the past.

Having this book is a great idea; you can pick up the book from the local tourism office, then as you travel through the Interior of BC following the Gold Rush Trail, you can pick and choose which caches to do, at the same time be educated about the history of the province.

The benefit to the communities is that they have now created themselves as a destination point, rather than a drive-through town. This will pay dividends in time for the local business owners; here's an example I over heard from just one couple this weekend; they arrived Friday night, head a few drinks in one of the local pubs, went over to a restaurant and had dinner, then stayed at a motel. In the morning they got up, had breakfast, started caching, had lunch, gassed up the car, had dinner and then headed home to Vancouver. Each one of those businesses benefitted from the Gold Rush campaign as, more than likely, they would have not even stopped and would have carried on to another destination like Kamloops.

Scruffster and I cached the morning away in Ashcroft and Cache Creek meeting up with several other cachers at various cache locations as we all searched for the elusive treasure hidden by the local Gold Rush group. The morning passed quickly and soon it was after lunch before we knew it.

We met up with another set of Vancouver area cachers called MSthebrain and Pinky, and decided to travel together as we started thinking about a route home. We decided by heading south-east we could hit Logan Lake and Merritt, two other participating cities in the Gold Rush event. This enabled us to pick up 12 event caches on the day; 12 more and we can send away for a special prize which I understand is a gold nugget... "hmmmm....gold......"

We had a great day doing the road trip, we had a ton of fun doing the Gold Rush caches and learning the history of the areas, and we had absolute blast spending time with MSthe brain and Pinky, they made the long trip home seem so much shorter.

AND, we got to share their finding of their 3,000th cache...only we didn't know it at the time and I'm not sure if they did either! :)

The road trip ended up being 750 K and 17 hours long, but I would do it again in a heart beat if I could. It was the two things combined that make up the core of a geocacher; exploring the open road and exploring new areas and finding new caches. In other words, just exploring is what drives a lot of us; that curiosity to see and find something new!

A big thanks to the Gold Rush staff who put this event together, and congrats to their cities for having the foresight to look at a new form of low impact tourism.

I have split the day's journey into two videos loaded up to YouTube. You can see them watch here or by going to my YouTube page here to view them and other geocaching videos I have done.

Cache On!

A long day of Caching in Burnaby, North Delta, Surrey

2009-06-08T00:41:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: New fountain at the corner of Kingsway and Edmonds in Burnaby; sybolic as Byrne Creek starts under the roadways in this area

Spent a very full day with MrTJ on the roads of Burnaby, North Delta, North Surrey and Fort Langley before catching the Fort Langley ferry back home to Maple Ridge.

Not much news to talk about in terms of the caches found; more to show in pictures really.

Have a look at some of the pictures posted on my Flickr site here

Surrey Caching

2009-05-30T23:08:00.001-07:00

ABOVE: Darts Hill Garden Park in South Surrey

Ken and I had a great day of caching in the South Surrey area today, visiting some neat places we had been previously, and some we had not.

One of the places we always enjoy going to is Redwood Park; there you can see not just redwoods that the South Coast is well known for, you can also see many imported trees planted by brothers Peter and David Brown when they owned the land in the early years. They cleared the land and planted over 30 exotic species not seen before in BC.

Another place that Ken and I had not known about before, were the Darts Hill Gardens left to the City of Surrey, by owners Edwin and Fransisca Darts. They lovingly worked their large property for over 60 years turning it into an oasis, and now the citizens of Surrey benefit from their passion. Visit the web site for Darts Hill Garden Park here.

The other highlight of the day was visiting historic Hazelmere Church and reading the informational sign describing the age of the building and how the building served multi denominations of worshippers. These were the types of places that we really appreciate cache owners sharing with us...

I have a dozen or so photos from the day's trip listed on my Flickr site which you can view here.

TIPS: Right click on the link and say "Open in New Tab" so you can keep the blog page open _and_ view the write up at the same time.

Don't forget to start the slide show, (upper right corner of the screen) and remember to click on "Show Info" to see the captions with the photos.

The Great Coal Rush Event in Tulameen - a Geocaching Adventure

2009-05-19T23:30:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Original timbers shoring up KVR tunnel in Princeton

This May Long Weekend was when the Great Coal Rush geocaching event was hosted by the Tulameen Turtles in their home town of Tulameen.

The event area was in a radius of 50 kilometres from Tulameen itself; caches were placed as far south as Princeton and as far north as old railway town site of Brookmere between Hwy 5A and the Coquihalla Highway. A total of 55 caches were on the list of ones to find over the course of the 3 day event.

MrTJ and I did not have the good fortune to be able to attend all 3 days, however we were fortunate enough to be able to attend on Sunday to do some leisurely caching during the day. Our goal was to cache in the Princeton area, then arrive and check in at the Tulameen Turtle lair in the early afternoon. Well, that was our goal....we can now where close with our timing.

We grabbed a few caches on the way to Princeton, then aimed for our first cache at an old Kettle Valley Railway (KVR) tunnel just on the edge of town. Here we met up with some local Vancouver-area cachers in the form of Catapult Jeff and Iron Maiden, Pollywogg, the Wild Wiggly Beanz, the 911Turbos, Scruffster, and Goaliegirl38.

They were just walking back to their vehicles after doing the two caches in the area; we planned on only doing the closest one and then carrying on. We said our "hello's" and said TTYL as they continued on and we went for the cache.

We found the cache quick enough, then headed to the next one on our list; and who did we run into again just as we arrived, and they were leaving? Yep, the "crowd" again..

For the next couple of caches we were a few minutes behind them, and they eventually waited for us to catch up so we could all travel together.

We headed south of Princeton to do 3 caches in the area of the old Allenby mining town; not much is there now but a few old concrete structures of the mill and concentrator. At one time this was a booming town, but like so many mining towns, you would be hard pressed to find much left with a casual look.

The good thing to happen from all this, is that there are indeed many mining areas in the region, and if you look hard enough, you will find many structures still standing, especially in the Blakeburn area in the hills above Coalmont.

The whole idea of this event was to highlight the mining history in this part of the province, and to share the history with fellow cachers. The Tulameen Turtles did an excellent job of that this weekend.....

Back in Allenby, we found the first two caches soon enough, then continued onto the next one down the hill. This one was called "Standing Wall Sinking Shaft" and it was located at the base of a wall of volcanic rock that had extruded from the earth. All around this wall were several mine shafts that were beginning to cave in, making the area a bit dangerous to search in. The shafts just looked like large holes in the ground, but I'm sure there was a lot more of the "hole" beneath the layer of earth that we seen.

ABOVE; wall of volcanic rock

We finished off with these caches, did a couple more in Princeton, then headed for Tulameen while working on a multi cache called "Meet the Cachers". This was a Turtles cache that brought you to cacher's neighbourhoods in Princeton, Coalmont, and ended in Tulameen.

We met several of the cachers along the way, and stopped and had pleasant conversations with them. The final was located on the edge of the Tulameen River, a pretty spot indeed.

Back in Tulameen it was now almost 6.00 PM, and at 6.30 PM the group was scheduled to meet in front of the web cam in beautiful downtown Tulameen to have a group photo done.

Not all cachers were able to make the photo op due to time constraints, but we had a good representation of the weekend gang.

Right next door to the web cam location was the hall were we met to have a pot luck dinner, and man was the food good, and plenty of it. Don't know how all these people staying in tents or pop up campers managed to make such good food, but they did...

Kris and Jordy, AKA the Tulameen Turtles, presided over the night's affair as door prizes were given out, and the poker players in the cacher group turned in their best hand from the envelopes they had picked up at various caches. Each envelope contained playing cards to make up your poker hand.

The prizes were awarded, the night wound down, and the folks in the hall gave Kris and Jordy a very, very well deserved round of applause saying "thanks" for all your hard work on an event that was beyond belief. Every one has been raving about the good time they had searching for caches and learning the rich history of the area.

This event has set a very high bar for any caching events to follow - again congrats to Kris and Jordy on a fantastic event that came off without a hitch.

After the event MrTJ and I said our goodbyes to our caching friends, then began the long haul back down to the Lower Mainland. The trip would take longer going back then coming up, as the mountain roads are not as safe to drive fast in the dark as they are in the day. One of the reasons I was in no rush as the number of deer in the area is high and they all seem to come out at night.

Between Tulameen and Princeton, as space of 18 miles, we counted 55 Mule deer, many wandering on the highway. Wouldn't want to bump into one of those on a blind turn...

We arrived back in Maple Ridge around 1.00 AM; I dropped off MrTJ, then drove home and dropped myself off into bed....the Jeep can wait till morning to get unpacked....

This event did live up to its name...."The GREAT Coal Rush"

A two part video can be viewed on my YouTube channel here

The cache page for the Great Coal Rush Event can be found here

Below is a map from EveryTrails.com showing the waypoints for the day.

Click on the link at the top of the map to go to my page on EveryTrails.com to see a full size version.

Change map views from the drop down menu to see a satellite version of the map

Tulameen Geocaching Event - The Great Coal Rush at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

Snapping Shots of Maple Ridge & Pitt Meadows

2009-03-25T22:28:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: floats for fishermen's nets await their turn to bob in the Fraser River

Annette and I took advantage of a nice sunny day and the later daylight hours to take a few photos in the Maple Ridge - Pitt Meadows areas alongside the Fraser River.

One of the places we went was a working dock for fishermen; small fishing boats tied up at the rivers edge and no frills marine shops on the surrounding roads let you know this was a blue collar area.

The second was a new subdivision at the end of Bonson Road in Pitt Meadows; this was the site of an old lumber mill. The site has been reclaimed and the contaminated fill trucked away, to be replaced with cleaner land. Many new smaller homes and townhouses have filled in the landscape; a walking trail at the river's edge, along with an open grassy area provides the families access to the Fraser River to sit and view the working boats go buy. A great view of the new Golden Ears Bridge can be had here as well....

You may view the photos by clicking here to go to my Flickr account.......ensure you click on "slideshow" in the upper right corner to start the show................if you want to see the captions for each picture, move your mouse to the upper right of the picture area and click on "Show Info"

New West & Surrey Caching

2009-03-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Caboose at Carre Heritage Square in Mallairdville

Had a fun filled day of caching with Bowser98, TRWFAN, and MrTJ in the New Westminister and Surrey areas on this past Sunday, a glorious sunny day on one of the first days of Spring.

We met up in New West at Moody Park to look for a couple of caches there, then we moved through New West picking off several more caches before we headed over the bridge to Surrey.

One of the nicer places we visited was earlier in the morning while MrTJ and I were on our way in from Maple Ridge. We stopped off in Coquitlam in the Mallairdville area so I could grab a cache at the Carre Heritage Square, the centre piece of Mallairdville celebrating the French heritage of the area.

You can find a good write up on the history of the area here

This is a living museum, with several original buildings on site, such as Mackin House and the CPR railway station. The local community have done a wonderful job of presenting the history of the area through means such as informative sign boards on the grounds, plus they have various activities through out the year.

Let's zoom back over to New West where we continued picking off caches around the Royal City, then we caravanned over the Patullo Bridge to continue caching along the Scott Road corridor.

On the trail in a wooded area on our way to the cache called "Hmscherlic Speaks" we came across a male Pileated Woodpecker who let us get very close to him; I took the opportunity to shoot some good close up video of him pecking at a small stump. As for the cache Hmscherlic Speaks, well, that's a whole story to itself....you have to read the log write ups from the various cachers; go to GCZV20 and view the stories written about this cache!

Another of my favourite places to visit during the day was Burns Bog; there are two caches there we had not yet done. And being no fools, we knew it was a lot better to go in the cool weather, than in the warm summer months. The last cache we did here was called "Plasma Bandits", and they lived up to their name. We were swarmed as we searched for that cache, so today was the day we picked to find this one before the little pests awoke from their winter slumber.

On the day we searched for a total of 21 caches, with 19 found and two DNFs where the caches had been muggled...not bad for the amount of driving involved....

As usual, it was more fun to get out and stretch our legs than it was to add up the numbers to our creds; having said that, I was glad to finally get to the 1600 mark. With the poor weather and the snowy winter, I had been hovering around the 1580'ish mark for what seems like forever. Glad to get that minor milestone out of the way....it felt like a little hump I just couldn't get over...not irritating or annoying, but still satisfying to get past it nonetheless....

Video can be viewed by clicking in the centre of the image below: enjoy!!

Fear Caching 101

2009-03-09T00:14:00.000-07:00

Hate sticking your hands into dark crevasses looking for a cache and instead find something gooey and warm? EWWW!!

Well then, you would have hated this caching event - it was all about bugs and goo and dead things and squirming live things - some which may have been edible!

The twisted genius of a cacher known as Pearlwind, backed up by his equally sick compatriots The Tulameen Turtles held a caching event called "Fear Caching - 101"!

The event was all about conquering your fears of wiggly, gooey things by making you stick your hand into ammo boxes filled with all kinds of things from broken glass to squiggly worms, and some other substances that defined identification, (I hope it wasn't pureed bug guts)

This was all in an effort to find 10 clues that would lead you ultimately to a cache hidden on the grounds of the hotel where the event was held. In the cache was the secret combo to the small safe back in the meeting room.

Part of the search involved going up to room 239 where a suicide had taken place; a desparate cacher had gone mad from his last DNF and drowned himself in the in-suite jacuzzi. Not sure when he had done this, as all that was left was just his bones. Of course some sick individual had stuck some tags on the poor fellow and made a TB out of him!

Many cachers trooped up to the room to search for clues; once there you had to A) read the suicide note, and B) phone the room's voicemail box to retrieve another clue.

If that wasn't enough for you, there was a scavenger hunt to be done; pretty sure it involved sticking your hand into a small hole in an 8 foot stump; inside the hole was bugs, lots and lots of bugs, all squirming in their own juices.... cough, cough, haaaack....sorry, must have been a bug in my throat.

Not real bugs of course, but those brave enough to try were rewarded with slimy hands that took for ever to wash off...that part was real!

There was a great turn out for this event, as it seemed to strike a chord with all cachers who could honestly say "been there - done that" when it came to the icky, unidentifiable stuff on your hand after you have reached under a rock or in between tree roots.

Of course, the ones that had the most fun were the kids - all that yucky stuff was pure heaven for them, and they were the bravest of the lot.

It was a momentous undertaking by Pearlwind to stage the event, and one had to slow down on the hunt to really appreciate the attention to detail both in the main event room, and up in room 239. That's not to mention the other clues hidden around the hotel in various public areas.

Every one raved about the fun they had in their Attended logs on the cache page, and all agreed that it was one of the most fun events they have been to. Caching is a family sport, and this event was made in heaven...err..hell just for the little ones.

You can view the video by clicking on the image below...

Geocaching 101 Coquitlam - 2009

2009-02-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple of weekends, the British Columbia Geocaching Association (BCGA) held several meet and greets around the province to welcome, and educate, the newer members of the sport.

MrTJ and myself attended the event in Coquitlam as these events draw not just the new folks, but the long time cachers as well. It's always a good time catching up with the friends you have made through the sport, as well as meeting the new members just coming on board.

The BCGA did a good job of gearing this to the new members as most of the day's events centered around ideas like; how to use your GPSr, what are the different types of caches, what does a cache look like, etc. Plus, there were 10 caches hidden around the area where cachers of all skill level could get some practice on different hides, especially the ones that encouraged you to "think outside the box".

Plenty of people attended the event, but as most of them were outside either looking for the caches or on a learning walk-about with a BCGA member, the first impression was of a poor turnout. Not so....everyone was outside having fun! As it should be....

There were also door prizes to give away, as well as an opportunity to sign up for a membership in the BCGA. Being a member adds your voice to other cacher's voices as we deal with various levels of government on issues that affect our sport.

The laughs for the day came when two keep-away TBs showed up; a keep-away TB is travel bug that's specific mission is to be kept away from another cacher. In this case, the two TBs were required to stay away from the cachers known as "Best Red" and "The Tulameen Turtles".

Best Red's TB is a huge Panda Bear that she had chosen as a door prize at a Christmas event. Unfortunately for her, the Panda Bear was quickly absconded and made a keep-away TB of which she has only had fleeting glimpses since.

Today she got within arms length of her bear, but the poor panda was sternly protected by the current TB holder, and Best Red never had a chance to hold her baby... :)

The other keep-away TB is called RainForest Rudy; Rudy is a small cuddly bear reminiscent of a Paddington Bear. Rudy is outfitted for a safari, sporting appropriate safari clothes, hat, and a tag-along green tree frog that sits on his head.

Rudy was in my posession for a few weeks, and he had the good fortune of spending a day of caching with myself, MrTJ and Bowser98, three brothers whom enjoy a good day's worth of caching. I took along my camcorder and made Rudy the star of the day; his face was in every cache hunt I recorded; of course, I had to tell Kris (Mrs Tulameen Turtle) all about the video!

I don't know how well that went over, as I never heard from her....hmmmm....

Come time for Geocaching 101, it was also time for Rudy to move on and stay with another friend. The cacher known as Scruffster thought he would love to adopt Rudy and carry on the tradition of keeping Rudy away from The Tulameen Turtles.

Well, where I was subtle in the way I went about pointing out the fact that I had Rainforest Rudy and Mrs. TT did not, Scruffster had all the savoir faire of a backwoods hillbilly. A couple of times Scruffster waved Rudy in Mrs. TTs face, and twice Scruffster was forced to run for the hills to avoid a whupping.

By the end of the event Scruffster still had Rainforest Rudy in his posession, locked safely in his car. Rudy went home with Scruffster, and, since then, a mini-Scruffster has been added to Rudy's entourage.

You can view the video of the event by clicking in the centre of the image below:

Surrey Bend Cache Tracks on EveryTrail.com

2009-02-09T21:08:00.000-08:00

I uploaded my track from the day of caching in the Surrey Bend area to the web site called EveryTrail.com.

This is where you can view all sorts of GPS routes from skiing to walking to 4X4 trips in many parts of the world. You should check it, you might pick up some future trips for yourself!

You can view the full map and story on the EveryTrail.com website here

TIP: When the map draws in, choose a different view from the drop down menu in the upper right corner. I like the "Hybrid" view myself.
Then ZOOM in on the map to see the region better....................................

Surrey Bend & North Surrey Caching at EveryTrail

Caching in Surrey Bend Regional Park

2009-02-08T22:21:00.000-08:00

Had the pleasure of getting out and caching today with Bowser98 and MrTJ in the North Surrey area. We tackled the overgrown riverside trail in Surrey Bend Regional Park as we aimed to knock off the four caches along the trail while the weather was somewhat good and the bushes and brambles had fallen back for the winter.

The Surrey Bend Park is accessed from the parking lot of the Barnston Island ferry near the north foot of 176 Street. There are a couple of caches on the small island (to drive around the island is approx 11K), but there is no public parking allowed on the island. These two caches are best done as a bike ride on a warm summer day.

The first two caches we hit were Festive Tree and The Bridge; these caches are in the main part of the park and the trail to the cache areas is flat and more or less maintained. Except for today, the snow on the ground made it a bit of a chore as we walked along the path, slip sliding around on the snow.

After these caches, there is a small creek that empties into the Fraser River and you have to dip down into the creek bed to cross the creek. Sounds easy, except as the creek bed is at river level; when the tide is high, the creek bed is under 3 feet of water. You would need hip waders to get across!

"Tide" you say? "This is a river, there's no tide here"!

Oh, but there is....the Fraser River water levels are affected by the tides all the way up river to the town of Mission; approx 60 miles from the Pacific Ocean.

To help you plan your visit, here is a web site for local Vancouver area tide levels. Click here to go to the web site.

After you cross the creek, the trail is unattended and at best is described as overgrown and unmaintained. In sections the trail can be indiscernable from the surrounding bush, and where the trail skirts the river edge, is eroded away with just the slimmest bits of land for you to walk along. Not a place for the kiddies; in the summer the bushes overgrow the trail making it hard to even see your feet as you stumble along. Ensure you keep your mouth closed, as the spiders just love to build webs across the trail in the dense overgrowth.

Cache #3 is called "Happy New Year", and we were very happy to find this one as it apparently had been moved from it's original location by approx 100'. After we gave up looking for it, Bower98 noticed it further down the trail sitting out in the open; on our return from cache #4 we picked up the cache and took it back to it's original hide.

Cache #4 is called Rivershore by the hider named Fungi (a made up name); there are two large cottonwood trees on the bank of the river that have large fungi growing out from the trunks. It was neat to see how the fungi had colonized the trees.

With #4 found, we retreated our steps the mile back to the cars by the Barnston Island ferry dock, and continued on caching in North Surrey.

Watch the Surrey Bend video by clicking on the image below;

For the rest of the day we were mostly in the Tynehead Park area where the snow was still on the ground; between the snow and the boggy grounds we managed to get our feet wet and they stayed that way for the rest of the day.

Watch the the Surrey - Tynehead video by clicking on the image below:

Abbotsford Meet & Greet

2009-01-18T22:53:00.000-08:00

The Chilliwack Caching group held a mid-winter meet and greet in a local restaurant as a way of keeping cachers in touch with each other. Not many folks have been out for the past few weeks with all the snow and freezing temperatures, so this was a good chance to say "hello" again to old friends and meet some new ones.

They meet was held in Abbotsford to make it a bit more central to Chillwack cachers coming from the east, and Lower Fraser Valley cachers coming from the west.

It was good to see familiar faces again, and it was also good to see some new faces; some folks were just starting out in the sport, and others hadn't attended past events as they were too far away from home.

Oh, if you are wondering why some folks are walking around with towels around their neck, it's part of a challenge cache where you have to find 42 caches in one day, have your picture taken with 42 cachers, find 42 geocoins, etc, and the towel around your neck is part of the challenge..

I made a short video of the day and you can see it by clicking on the arrow in the screen below.

Enjoy!

Snow...And Lots of It !!

2009-01-04T00:31:00.000-08:00

ABOVE: my house in the snow

Made a short video about all the snow we have here in Maple Ridge; it started Dec 22 and pretty well kept coming until today, Jan 3 2009.

You can watch the video by clicking in the centre of the image below...

Where Do You Come From?

2008-12-30T00:59:00.000-08:00

It's always interesting, if not surprising, to see what part of the world my visitors come from. While it's not always possible to identify exactly where they are, here's a sampling of my last 100 visitors.

In Canada; Toronto, Ontario; Churchill, Manitoba; Swift Current, Saskatchewan; Calgary and Lacombe in Alberta; Kelowna, Invermere, Summerland, Squamish, Nanaimo, Chemainus, Victoria all in B.C. as well as many Lower Mainland areas.

In the U.S.; New Hampshire; Kansas; Seattle, Redmond both in WA; Hillsboro, Vancouver and Portland in OR; L.A. in CA;

Around the world: St. Vincent and The Grenadines in the Carribean; Wolverhampton, London, and Dorset in the U.K.; Bern, Switzerland; Venice, Italy; Jordan, Amman; Chendu and Shanghai, China; and Canberra, Australia.

I'm sure not everyone is coming to read about geocaching and back road driving in BC, but I do get a large number of hits from people searching for topics I have covered in my trip reports. I guess I have posted enough subject material on the 'Net that my logs are high up on the search engine's scans.

Still, nice to see that it's not just local folks enjoying my view of Beautiful B.C.!

Squamish - Lillooet - Fraser Canyon Trip (A Story From The Archives)

2008-12-07T21:59:00.000-08:00

ABOVE: Cayoosh Creek drains Duffey Lake and heads east towards the Fraser River

Hosted by Ed Pedersen

In Attendance

Cheryl Steele from Everett

Amanda Pedersen from Maple Ridge

Jeanine Albert from Pitt Meadows

Ed Pedersen from Maple Ridge

Rain, sun, then rain, then clouds, then sun, then, well you get the idea...We were hoping for a bright sunshiny day to get the full benefit of the mountain vistas we were to be traveling through today, but that was not to be.

We left our North Vancouver rendezvous point around 9.30 AM after waiting for any last minute stragglers that might appear. As Cheryl ( CJ ) was riding by herself Amanda opted to ride with CJ for the day to keep her company. We traveled west along highway #1 through West Vancouver and turned north at Horshoe Bay to begin our trip on Hwy #99, also known as the Sea to Sky Highway.

For the next twenty miles we were treated to soaring cliffs on one side of us, complete with runaway creeks that often cause road problems during the winter. Even the cliffs themselves have been somewhat tamed; in sections they are covered with wire mesh, or even cemented over to try and control the rock face that crumbles and continually falls onto the road.

On the other side of the highway was an expansive ocean view occasionally limited by one of the Gulf Islands like Saltspring or Galliano. We headed north and made our first stop at the Britannia Mine Museum. Here you can take a short ride on an underground mine train that takes you under the mountain to show you the real life working conditions of a mine, as well as the various types of drills used by hard rock miners.

The actual mine is 2 miles on the mountain above the town site, but here were the various mill buildings that crushed the ore to extract the copper from the rock.As well, a complete town was here to support the mine workers and their families.We walked around the outside of the site, and spent time inside the gift shop/museum viewing the different rock types found in the mine.

ABOVE: Brittania Beach area circa 1974

It was interesting to see the old pictures of the mine from 40, 60 and 100 years ago.

Back on the highway and another ten minutes found us at Shannon Falls, a must see for anyone driving this route. Shannon Falls slides through a narrow gap at the top of a 1200 foot cliff, and crashes noisily down a sheer cliff wall, creating a wall of mists that spreads for hundreds of feet away from the cliff site. Even Shannon Creek that leads the water away from the falls is wide, rough and full of sass as it demands your attention.

ABOVE: Shannon Falls just south of Squamish BC

It caroms down a steep hill side and over the house size boulders that, over time, weathering actions caused them to come loose from the cliff face. I have fond memories of Shannon Falls; as children our parents would come here for a day of picnicking and playing, and my brothers and I would climb right to the base of the falls and try to stand in the torrent of water without getting knocked over. On a hot August day the cool mountain water fresh from the glaciers above was heaven!

Five minutes up the road was the logging town of Squamish, and it looks like every other logging town in the Pacific Northwest. The chosen ride is a pickup truck with a toolbox or huge diesel tank in the bed, all part of the tools of a logger.

Squamish is being rejuvenated by eco-tourists anxious to see some of the remaining pure forests close to Vancouver, as well as those that are brought up from Vancouver by the Royal Hudson, a restored steam train that makes daytrips to Squamish. Plus, all the tourists on their way to Whistler and Blackcomb ski resorts stop in for a coffee, donut and a chance to re-stock their supplies.

A trip to the area wouldn't be complete without a side trip to Brackendale, home to the world's largest winter congregation of Bald Eagles. While we were not in prime viewing time, there were still some juvenile Bald Eagles circling and playing on the thermal currents generated by the warm sun. And in the waters of the Squamish River a harbour seal dived repeatedly for young salmon and trout in the cloudy waters.

All around us the magnificence of the mountain scenery was hidden by the occasional rain shower that seemed to be following us so far this day. A major bummer to miss out on the towering mountains that encircle this small town.

Next stop was the main tourist Mecca of Whistler and it's multitude of ski slopes, shops, restaurants and clubs that make it so popular to the hordes of people. Even in the height of summer the town was buzzing; I swear that there was a million dollars worth of mountain bikes buzzing around the town. Every place you looked there were families, young folks, and professional riders all pedaling away.

Miles out of town we continued to see athletes in training just a-charging up some of the steep hills that the road had to traverse. We left this bustling, scenic resort and traveled another half hour north on Hwy #99 to the tiny town of Pemberton.

This is a REAL, no frills logging town...two blocks of Main Street, the local hotel with the bar in it, and the ever present railway station. A smattering of houses completed the downtown area, everyone else lived in the outskirts where they could park there heavy machinery and logging trucks on their own property.

Now it was time to turn eastward, still on Hwy #99, and travel through the First Nations area of Mt. Currie. This is BC's biggest Indian reserve, and they hold a rodeo every year that is one of the best examples of real life cowboys, no rhinestones here!

Mt. Currie is situated in the small valley surrounded by the Lillooet River on one side, and the Birkenhead River on the other. The large strip of river delta that is formed by the two rivers is very flat and peaceful; I always expect to see orchard of apple trees on either side of the road.

Mt. Currie was also the start of the steady climb into Pemberton Pass that would take us over the divide of the Coast Mountains as we headed forthe dry Interior of BC. The descent coming back down into Mt. Currie is so steep that cars going by us invariably smelt of burning brakes. I shudder to think how motorhomes make it down the hill without some scary moments.

ABOVE: Pemberton Glacier as seen from Pemberton Pass

Gaining elevation into the Pass we noticed the warmer coastal air was being replaced by a cool breeze being swept down the mountains from the glaciers on the surrounding mountains. We stopped at a local Mecca for hikers, a destination called Joffre Peaks. Here you could do easy day hikes, hard day hikes to the upper two lakes in the shadow of the MattierGlacier, or if you were crazy enough you could climb on the glacier itself.

ABOVE: First Lake at Joffre Peaks

Us, we just went 10 minutes down the trail to First Lake,a green gem of a lake in the shadow of Joffre Peak. Even that was rewarding enough, and it required several photos to capture before the mosquitoes chased us back to the cars.

A few more minutes of climbing brought us to the full height of the pass, and the next 20 miles consisted of level travel, with a slight downward trend as we headed for Lillooet. As we went along the vistas had us continually chattering on the CB asking each other if we seen "that mountain", or "this peak", or "the lake back there".

Duffey Lake is the halfway point on the pemberton Pass,and it is a deep glacier carved narrow lake between two mountain peaks, and COLD !! BRRRRRRRR !!

ABOVE: Duffey Lake

Here we pulled out the sweatshirts and hats while we drank in the cool mountain scenery; avalanche chutes stretching from the mountain peaks 3000 feet above us running all the way down the mountain into the lake, reminded us of how truly wild this area was.

Quite often during winter this route is closed due to bad weather, snow accumulations and the danger of avalanches.

ABOVE: Cayoosh Creek (cayoosh is a derivative of the Native word "cayuse", meaning pony)

We continued on along the road still awed by the scenery presented around every new bend of the road. We reached the end of the lake, and drove alongside Cayoosh Creek as it ran angrily beside the road, almost at road level in spots.

Soon enough we started our steep descent from the high mountain pass, down through the sharp switchbacks where 20 miles an hour was too fast for the corner, and if you looked straight down you could see the highway a thousand feet below you.

Before we knew it we were spit out of the narrow valley pass where vertical walls 2000 feet tall were so close you swear you could throw a rock from one side and make it skip across to the other.

Suddenly we were down, no more second gear needed to hold us back.....we had reached the other side and the Fraser River was once again in site. We were now 2/3 of the way through our trip, and a stretch break at Seton Lake presented us with a contradiction of sorts.

We had started off in the cool, rain showered West Coast, right on the ocean with it's rain forest of Western Red Cedars, Douglas Firs and soaring waterfalls; then we climbed through a high mountain pass with peaks covered in year round glaciers that blew a cold wind on us, and now we were back in summer-like weather!!

The hot wind felt like a warm August breeze as it blew along the light green waters of the lake, and we were wondering how half an hour ago we could have felt so so cold even wearing a sweat shirts.

We shed our excess garments and rolled down the windows to let the summer in.The tall rain coast trees had been replaced by Ponderosa and Lodgepole Pines, interspersed with various Birch and Spruce species. The water loving wild ferns of the West Coast forest floor were replaced with bunch grass more conducive to rattlesnake territory.

We were in the rainshadow of the mountains, and the arid landscape was indicative of the low amount of precipitation that made it over themountains. All that water that we had as rain in Squamish was now destined for the glaciers in Pemberton Pass.

Lillooet is the Mile Zero on the Caribou Wagon Road of the Gold Rush Days.70 Mile House, 100 Mile House, 150 Mile House, all exist today due to their beginnings as stage coach stops during the 1890's; their names are indicative of their distance from Lillooet Mile Zero.

ABOVE: Mile Zero of the Caribou Wagon Road

We had a quick tour of the highlights of the town; the Mile Zero cairn, the Hanging Tree where Judge Begbie dispensed frontier justice to 8 men, similar to the legend of Judge Roy Bean; the remnants of gold diggings by the Chinese workers from the railroads; mountains of grave land bedrock all lined up in an orderly fashion; and the museum with it's placer gold mining equipment.

"The Bridge of the 23 Camels"; this is a new bridge named to commemorate the bright soul that thought camels would make an excellent pack animal in the arid land of the Thompson Plateau. Only problem was the soft feet of the camels was ripped apart by the hard rock of the trails.

By now a time check showed it to be 6.00 PM, and we still had many miles to go. We pushed on through the dry country as we now followed the Fraser River high above it on the bench lands formed thousands of years ago from a time when the Fraser was many times it's present size.

The landscape was more desolate then we were used to; sparse Ponderosa Pines with their reddish trunks sparingly covered the hillsides, prime habitat for deer, and we saw one right at the edge of the road feeding 4 feet of the highway. It was so well camouflaged that we did not see it until we were only 20 feet away!

The appearance of more farms and houses indicated that we were approaching Lytton. Here we wanted to see the contrasting colours of two rivers merging. The Thompson River flows a deep blue as it travels through the harder bedrock of it's watershed; cleaner gravel and less sediment means less contamination and a"purer" water column.

By contrast the Fraser's watershed is composed of more sandy and clay like hills and mountains, small particles easily suspended by the mighty river that contribute to it's "muddy" appearance. Where the two mighty rivers meet is a clash of colour and a fight for supremacy. The Thompson resists the embrace of the muddy Fraser for hundreds of feet downriver, but the Fraser eventually wins.

Where the two rivers first meet there is a fine line between blue and mud, just like someone took a pencil and drew a line. But we were denied this treat today..it was now 8.00 PM and the sun was disappearing behind the mountains, and the absence of bright sunlight caused the shadows to hide this exceptional sight. Somewhat disappointed we walked back tothe cars, but in true Backroader fashion we were already planning another day's adventure to this area.

Seeing as that we were about to enter the scenic Fraser Canyon in the twilight, we would be missing all the wonderful sights that this region has to offer. We decided to hold a future trip and take the day to explore the Fraser Canyon at a leisurely pace.

Back on the road we high tailed it south towards Hope and the end of daylight and the end of the tour. We pulled into Hope just as dark was falling, at 9.00 PM and had a late meal at one of the local restaurants that served meals that were too big, and HUGE portions of home cooked pies.

We fed our tummies with food and our brains with coffee, then feeling rejuvenated, we headed back out on the road for our last leg of the trip towards home.

It was an awfully long day that passed way too quickly, and the sights that we had seen continually amazed us, and I think I got a sore neck from whipping it around trying to see everything there was to see. It was an ambitious day, not for the faint of heart, and we made the most of it !!

In true Backroads mentality, knowing we missed a lot, and knowing there is so much more to see, that another Fraser Canyon trip won't wait too long before we are once again racing alongside the Fraser River rubbernecking at the Super Natural Scenery of BC

Travel Bug Hospital Caching Event in Surrey BC

2008-12-05T00:02:00.000-08:00

Went to a caching event tonight hosted by Catapult Jeff and met the usual great group of cachers from around the Lower Mainland.

The event was listed as a chance to bring those travel bugs in need of some TLC to the "hospitable" to get fixed up, cleaned up, and back on the road to complete their mission in life.
MrTJ and I, tjguy98 (or as were known as, "The TJ Brothers"), attended the event and enjoyed the evening in the company of cachers we have known for a while. Plus we had the opportunity to meet some new cachers that we had not yet met up with on the trail.

The event was held at the ABC Restaurant in Surrey, and we had our own room for the group, which was nice way to do it.

Below is a 2 minute clip from the night; enjoy!

Car Caching in Langley

2008-11-18T19:53:00.000-08:00

ABOVE: "Garage" at the "Gomer Pyle" cache

I decided that I would call this a day of "car caching" in Langley as most of the caches we did seemed to be car related. We found numerous caches in a series named after the cartoon movie "Cars". Even our first cache was called Gomer Pyle and it was located at a private garage where the owner was obviously a nostalgia buff as he had made the garage look like a service station from the 1950's.

The owner has installed two old gas pumps, placed old pop signs and an old temperature gauge near the office door, and had even placed an old roadster racing car from what I would guess is from the 1940s or older on the roof of the garage.

Mixed in among the car caches were a cache at a Starbucks, (always fun to try and be inconspicous there), a cache by the Nicomekl River, another cache in a flood zone along the Nicomekl River, (could not find that one), a skate board park cache, several neighbourhood park caches, and a cache in a green belt area that we have visted a few times before.

Along the way we ran into some fellow cachers and surprised them with the camcorder running. We got the basic reaction of "WHADAYA DOING WITH THAT CAMERA, WHADDAY FILMING US FOR"? Once we explained who we were, Mr and Mrs Bigbopper1 were put at ease, and we had a pleasant conversation with them about caching and other things in life.

ABOVE: The Albion Ferry

We capped the day off by taking a night time cruise across the Fraser River on the Albion Ferry on our way home to Maple Ridge.

I shot video continously during the day and have put togther the more interesting tidbits for you to view.

You can click on the video below to watch it here; you can also scroll down to the bottom of the page to see my other recent YouTube videos. Look for me on YouTube by searching for tjguy98

Cruising the Cascade Mountains

2008-10-27T18:50:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Hot air balloon taking off in Snohomish

On Saturday we had the pleasure of meeting up with the Backroad Drivers Northwest group in Everett for a pleasant Fall tour through small towns like Granite Falls, Verlot and Silverton before we took Barlow Pass north to the Darrington area. The road through the Barlow Pass is known as the Mountain Loop Scenic Byway.

Rather than me try to remember all the highlights of the trip, I'll instead post the trip report done by Jerry Horn. Jerry has a wonderful writing style, as well as a wonderful radio voice. When you watch the video....video you say? Why yes, I did do a video.....when you watch the video that deep, warm voice you'll hear over the C.B. is Jerry himself.

_________________________________________________________________

Trip Report Mountain Loop Tenth Year Celebration October 25, 2008

This run was a celebration of ten years of Backroad Drivers Northwest tours. We followed the same route as our very first tour and we enjoyed ourselves just as much this time as we did almost 200 trips and a decade ago.

We couldn't have had better weather as we met at Dennys Restaurant in south Everett, Washington. Joining in on the fun were Ed & Annette from Maple Ridge, BC; Rich & Jan from Beaverton, OR; Jim & Kerry and Jim's brother Ron from Lakewood, WA; Dave & Roberta from Edmonds and their daughter Cathy from Everett; Doug & Kathy from Lynnwood; Gary from Olympia; Mark from Lyman, WA; Sid & Mary from Renton; Phil & Laurel from Newcastle, WA with passenger Lizanne; Tom & Robbin with Tina riding; Jon & Melody; Alan; Fred; and us, Jerry & Evelyn fromYakima. I apologize to anyone I missed. I know we had 29 people for lunch and that was a bunch.

Our trek started by driving a busy county road from the restaurant near the freeway in Everett to the Seattle Hill Road where we finally got away from the congestion. We meandered down a curvy hillside into the Snohomish River Valley and crossed farmland to the town of Snohomish where we watched a hot air balloon take off. We drove county roads north of Snohomish including the Machias Road, the OK Mill Road, and the Newburg Road, around Lake Bosworth and into the town of Granite Falls where we made our first rest stop.

ABOVE: Granite Falls where there is a fish ladder that enables the fish to move upriver past the falls

Just out of town we stopped again to check out the falls and fish ladder then began our jaunt up the Mountain Loop Highway, now known as the Mountain Loop Scenic Byway. The road was paved and smooth, the weather was sunny, the leaves were all shades of yellows and greens, the twisty Stillaguamish River was beautiful and our group was busy commenting about various subjects over the C.B. radio as we enjoyed the drive.

After passing the community of Silverton and then the entrance to the Big Four Ice Caves we started feeling like we were in the mountains. When we reached Barlow Pass the pavement ended and an improved gravel road took us close to a majestic section of the Sauk River where huge boulders had been arranged by roaring currents with giant tree trunks wedged into the rocks like toothpicks.

The river was only a trickle today, but we could imagine how powerful it must be certain times of the year.

ABOVE: We turned the road into a parking lot!

Our road was just wide enough to pass on coming traffic and with the exception of a few potholes it was in pretty good shape. We drove slowly along the river and stopped at a wide spot in the river called Monte Cristo Lake. It was more of a pond, but the setting was scenic and we enjoyed the stop. The road continued through a heavy forest of firs, hemlocks and hardwoods. Leaves had turned and the colors were beautiful. At one point the evergreens all but disappeared only to be replaced by deciduous trees with falling leaves sashaying back and forth on their way to the partially covered roadway. It was very pretty indeed.

ABOVE: Monte Cristo Lake on the Mountain Loop Highway

We made another stop at the Whitechuck Mountain Rest Area where we managed to find a place for all thirteen of our vehicles and take advantage of the primitive facilities. It was a little foggy at the higher elevations so we could not see the mountain, but it was still a nice place for a rest. Within a short distance of the rest area we hit pavement and followed it intothe mountain town of Darrington where we stopped for lunch. The restaurant had a room set up for us and we filled it, all twenty-nine of us! I don't know about the rest of them, but my burger was great.

After lunch we continued following the Sauk River on Hwy 530 until we turned off on the Concrete-Sauk Valley Road. We were still on pavement, but on the opposite side of the river. It was the same road, but the name changed to the South Skagit Highway soon after the confluence of the Sauk and Skagit Rivers. We followed the Skagit River until we reached civilization on the outskirts of Sedro Woolley.

We were only a few miles from Interstate 5 via Burlington or Mount Vernon where we gathered at a park-and-ride to say our goodbyes. Evelyn and I really enjoyed seeing everyone. We had a great day and we sincerely thank you for coming.

Jerry________________________________BACKROAD DRIVERS NORTHWEST

Caching in the BC Interior

2008-09-30T19:57:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Old truck we came across in Chilliwack

Had a week off from work and decided that the best way to spend it was to have a caching week. But what to do....hmmmm.....I know. Two of my brothers are retired, may be they would want to do a road trip!

And that's just what we did: from Vancouver to Kamloops, through to Vernon, on to Kelowna and back down to Vancouver, all done over the course of 4 days.

The complete set of pictures can be viewed here on my Flickr site

It was a "boy's" weekend away, no wives allowed! Just 3 addicted male cachers spending the entire day, and some of the night, driving and caching.

We left the Vancouver area late morning and drove up to the Agassiz area where we stopped occasionally to find caches in the area. Not a lot, just enough to wet our appetite for the drive up to Kamloops.ABOVE: Mile Marker 97

One of the more memorable caches we found was, well, memorable! It was a piece of history from the 30's or 40's, back when the main road east from Vancouver was not a main freeway, but a succession of roads where Mile Zero is at the main Vancouver Post Office in downtown Vancouver. Along Main street to Kingsway, then into Burnaby and over the old bridge to Surrey, then out along the Fraser Highway into the Fraser Valley.

100 Miles from Vancouver to Hope, and at every mile was a stone cairn with the mile number engraved on it. This time we were at Mile marker 97, it stands on what was a busy Old Yale Road which itself starts at the shore of the Fraser River in Surrey and runs all the way to Hope.

Now the road is covered over by other streets or in sections a mere shadow of what it once was; here on the outskirts of Hope, Old Yale Road is a quiet residential street and the cairn is on a neighbour's boulevard.

We quickly found the small container with the log book inside, signed the book, and enjoyed this little piece of history resting comfortably on the shoulders of an old highway companion.

Back in the truck we headed up the Coquihalla Highway picking up a drive up cache at a truck rest stop, then continued on to a threesome of caches along a road that acted as a byway around the toll booths.ABOVE: The start of the bypass road at the south end

This road is suited only for vehicles with high ground clearance like a truck; we did it in Al's pick up but even so we bottomed out in one area. As we were heading south to north, the road headed down into the valley north of the Coquihalla Summit. The road was rough and broken in places; south to north is the easy way. If I was coming from the north and had to climb the worn out section of forest road, I think I would want to have a 4X4 rather than a two wheel truck. But we made it, found all three caches; one at the south end, one in the middle, and one at the north end.

We pulled into Merritt and made the usual stop at Tim Hortons for a coffee and a quick snack; phone calls were made to the home fronts to let the loved ones know we were still alive and well, then we pushed on north through Merritt taking the old Hwy #5A out of town.

We were into a different part of BC; this was one of rolling hills, bunch grass, arid hills with barely a tree to be seen. We were now in cowboy country! Gone was the West Coast forest consisting of giant cedars and firs; we left that behind when we took the bypass around the Coquihalla Summit.

We had left the main highway in the Coquihalla Valley surrounded by lush vegetation supported by 110 inches of rain a year. Just 24K up the valley and beyond the bypass road, the rain shadow effect from the mountains kicked in. Now we where in a semi-arid biozone where the average rainfall was less than 30 inches.

As a matter of fact, much of our trip would be through this very same biozone; hot in summer, cold in winter, and little precipitation year round made for a land that only supported small trees and plants, at least compared to the coast.

ABOVE: Nicola Cemetery

We stopped at caches along Hwy 5A, the first exciting one being the old Nicola Cemetery on the south shores of Nicola Lake. We wandered around the old graves as we wondered what it was like in the early days.

The name "Nicola" was given to the famous chieftain Hwistesmetxque by the early fur traders, as they could not pronounce the chieftain's name properly. When they tried to say it phonetically it sounded like "Nicolas" or "Nicola", and the incorrect pronunciation became the name of the valley, the lake, and the surrounding area still used today.
ABOVE: Historic marker on Old Kamloops Road

Further along the highway we stopped on the east side of Stump Lake on the Old Kamloops Road for a cache placed at a historic marker. Just being on the Old Kamloops Road (the main road from Merritt to Kamloops long before the coming of the modern highway, and long before the 4 lane Highway #5 that now carries most of the traffic headed for points north) was cool enough, but this cache was placed at a point on the lake where one of the original Hudson Bay Brigade trails skirted the lake.

In use from 1849 to 1860, this trail was an important byway for the bringing of furs from Fort Kamloops to Fort Vancouver. The brigades consisted of over 400 horses and 100 men; each of the horses was laden with a bulging sacks filled with furs from animals trapped in the Interior.ABOVE: "Once the grass was as high as a horse's belly"

As we continued on the road we had excellent views of what were once rolling fields of grass as high as a horse's belly; this area was one of the places where ranches sprung up and the miners turned their eyes from gold in the form of nuggets to gold in the form of horses and cattle. Sad to say the grass is no where near what it was then, a result of over grazing.

We continued further up Hwy 5A and were surprised when we reached the far outskirts of Kamloops, only to see the the term "far outskirts" no longer applied. The city had expanded south up the hills away from the Kamloops Valley and was now claiming land in the form of sub divisions.

By now it was dinner time and we were behind our projected schedule, so we opted to cache until dark, then grab a motel to ensure a room for the night. Once that was secured, we went back out into the night and picked up another 8 caches, then grabbed a late dinner and went back to the motel to crash.

Up in the morning to a steady down pour.....ewww..doesn't sound too nice out there! But we were in luck; by the time we had finished breakfast and checked out of the room, the rain had all but stopped and the skies were brightening. The rest of the day we spent caching in the Kamloops area, working our way east out of town headed for the highway that would take us down through Falkland and Westwold as we aimed towards Vernon.ABOVE: East of Kamloops the ancient bench of the Thompson River is plainly evident

Many of the caches on this side of town were located high on the ancient benches of the Thompson River. 10,000 years ago, when the mighty glaciers were melting, the Thompson River was hundreds of feet deeper and reached the tops of the surrounding hills, and across the width of the valley. Many of the provinces rivers were giants compared to now, carving deep valleys as they scoured the earth beneath their waters, only to leave a river a fraction of their true size at the bottom of large valleys.

How big where the rivers 10,000 years ago as they carried away the frigid ice waters of the continental ice sheets? Picture this... stand at the top of Grouse Mountain on the North Shore of Burrard Inlet in Vancouver. Now get in your car, drive over the border, past Blaine, past Bellingham and stop on the highest peak in the moutain range south of Bellingham. You have just defined the north and south shores of Glacial Fraser River that carried such a volume of meltwater and suspended ground material that it layed down a layer of sediment 1 mile deep 100 miles inland from the ocean. This fertile land created from the sediment of what once was eroded mountains and scoured upland Interior plains is what we now know as the Fraser Valley. Try to imagine, that as you drive through Abbotsford and Chilliwack on your way to Hope, that the actual bed rock of the land is one mile beneath your feet!ABOVE: Old Chevy truck

We rolled through Monte Creek, Monte Lake, Westwold and into Falkland where we spotted a used car lot with many vintage cars. Most of these cars were restored to running shape but they still needed a lot of work to call them restored. We stopped in for a look see and ended up talking to the owner for a while. Al and Ken created a new customer for their business; they have a business called KAR Books and sell old car manuals, along with other type of repair manuals, online, at car swap meets, etc.

As they talked shop, I wandered around the lot snapping off pictures of a dozen or so old vehicles for sale. Not that I'm all that into vintage cars, but it's still nice to see them being saved all the same.ABOVE: Falkland Valley

Just out of Falkland, we turned up a side road and headed for a forest road that would take us up the side of a mountain for a cache that had been out for a month but only had two vistors. In the city, there would have been 20-30 visitors to the cache already We nearly tripled the number of visits to this cache just by the three of us signing the log book. The cache was located just off an old skid road about 7K up the main FSR; the cache location gave us an wonderful view of the Falkland Valley which emphasized the fact we had transitioned biozones again.

We had moved from the dry Interior zone to the Wet Interior zone; gone were the sweeping open lands of grass and rolling hills; instead we were now into mountains complete with forests and logging trucks.

But that wouldn't last long; as we travelled the highway we crested a mountain pass and began our descent down into the north part of the Okanagan Valley, down to the shores of Okanagan Lake. While we did this, we traversed back into the Dry Interior Zone and once again the forests were replaced by Ponderosa Pines and aspens. There were more trees here than the Merritt area, and more green areas, but it was still a dry environment.ABOVE: Okanagan Landing, site of the terminus of the CPR line and the terminus of the Okanagan Lake paddle wheeler service

Once again we did a last few caches as night fell, then went in search of a room for the night. After that, we made our way to the south side of Vernon to Okanagan Landing to visit our brother Wayne and his wife Inga. Okanagan Landing is an historic site in itself; is was the landing site for the stern wheelers that plied Okanagan Lake. Paddlewheel Park now occupies the site where the CPR had a ship building operation and a major terminus where steam ships met trains that took passengers further south on their voyage to places like Penticton. There the passengers could continue their train travels on the Kettle Valley Railway east to Midway or south to Kelowna.

The new day found us still in Vernon while we finshed up our list of caches; some of the interesting locations we found was the old BX ranch where they raised horses for the stage coach company that ran a route into the Caribou region and another from Priest's Valley (Vernon area) to Cache Creek and Okanagan Mission (present day Kelowna). Francis Barnard, founder of the B.C. Express and Stage Line, commonly known as the Barnard Express, sent his men to Mexico in 1868 and drove back 400 horses that he had bought as breeding stock for the stage lines. The ranch he founded 5 miles east of present day Vernon became known as the BX ranch.ABOVE: Plane on the roof of the Vernon legion

We also found a cache at the local legion; doesn't sound too interesting you say? Well, this legion has an old airplane mounted on it's roof! Now that's something you don't see every day...

The next day found us in Kelowna with still a whole whack of caches on our list; as usual I had printed off way more than we would be able to do. But by doing so I had ensured we would not run out of caches, plus if we had to change plans we had some spare caches to search for. Those that were not found would go back on the pile to be found next time we come this way.

In Kelowna one of the areas we spent some time in was the Mission Creek area; this is a linear park that follows Mission Creek as it flows through the suburbs of town. The park has something for every one; in areas there are playgrounds and open grass areas for playing on; another area has a small fish hatchery incorporated into the creek for the benefit of the local community to enjoy the wonders of the natural cycle of salmon.

Other areas are left in a more natural state and good walking trails take advantage of the stillness of the dry forest land. We found 7 or 8 caches all together along the length of the park, and we enjoyed each area we visited. ABOVE: Sibell Maude-Roxby Bird Sanctuary on the shores of Okanagan Lake in Kelowna

A few more caches in town brought us right to the heart of Kelowna on the shore of Okanagan Lake. One of the caches was in a bird sanctuary where an elevated boardwalk built over a marsh adjoining the lake let you enjoy the area with out disturbing the environment. Another cache brought us into a wet lands area a few hundred feet from the lake. The wetlands are no doubt affected by the rise and fall of the water table at the lake as the whole area is basically at lake level.

It was getting late in the day and we wanted to do a few more caches on the way home, so we skipped the other caches on the pile and started the long trek towards Vancouver. We did a couple of caches along the Connector that runs from Westbank to Merritt, but these were mostly stop and grab caches, nothing exciting here other than a chance to stretch your legs. ABOVE: Small family cemetery in Merritt

In Merritt we did a cache that turned into a combination rest stop and history lesson. This cache was at an old grave yard just on the eastern edge of town; the grave markers here were all made of wood which indicated that most of the people buried here were poor. It is a family cemetery were 6 or 7 of the Moses family are buried; they died during a smallpox epidemic.

After finding the cache we took a look around the small cemetery, so rich in history, and then piled into the truck for the long drive home.

We put approx 700K on the truck over the 4 days, and found approx 100 or so caches; we could have found a lot more in two days if we stayed in Vancouver, but there is so much history and beautiful land to see in B.C. that you do yourself an injustice by staying in town. Over the 4 days we did many caches that I did not mention, as that would be too ponderous for me to write and for you to read. I incorporated the ones that stood out from the others, the ones were the cache owners brought us to a beautiful view or shared a piece of history with us. For that we say thank you!

Driving the KVR With Scruffster Riding Shotgun

2008-09-26T23:08:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Engineers Road in Manning Park

Last Saturday I did one of my favourites drives in this corner of B.C., and as an added bonus I had Scruffster (Stu) along riding in the shotgun seat.

Stu is basically a city boy who doesn't often get the chance to experience the wonders that B.C. has to offer, so it was with great pleasure that I was able to offer him a ride for the day to enjoy the scenery.

The goal today was to follow the route of the old Kettle Valley Railway (KVR) from Princeton north through the Otter Valley, then hang a left approx 30 miles up the valley and head west to the old railway stop of Brooksmere.

The four part video may be viewed on my YouTube channel here. Look for the videos titled "Princeton-Coalmont-Tulameen With Scruffster" and start with Part One

We started off in Maple Ridge at 7.00 AM where Stu dropped off his car and climbed into the Jeep with just a bit of a buzz happening with the expectation of things to come. Stu had been out just the other weekend with me as we did the Harrison West FSR Geocaching tour, so he had some idea of the sights we would be seeing and the roads we would be travelling. Even so I think by the end of the day he was awed by the scenery, and just a wee bit over whelmed by the amount of territory we covered.

We drove the 90 minutes to Hope with no stops along the way as we wanted to keep to the agenda, knowing that the day would be turning dark on us at some point earlier then we wanted it to.

Our first stop was just east of Hope on Hwy#3 at a camping spot called Nicola River Campsite. It was a campsite that I had used way back in 1980 with my brand new truck and camper as a shake down sleep over. While the rain poured down, I was having a cup of tea reading the local newspaper while the furnace kept it nice and toasty in the camper. This was a far cry from the days of sleeping in a sleeping bag out in the open at Garibaldi Lake and waking up to ice on the sleeping bag.

ABOVE: The Hope Slide

Next up were 3 caches at the Hope Slide further east on Hwy#3. The Hope Slide is one of the biggest slides in to happen in Canada; it was triggered by rain water loosening the slopes which first created a minor mud slide that blocked the highway. Then, approx three hours later, a minor earthquake triggered the larger slide that broke away half the mountain. This happened on Jan 9, 1965 and 2 people in two cars are still missing. Four people in all were killed.

At the slide the 3 caches consisted of 2 real caches and one Earth cache; the Earth cache is a virtual cache where you go to a location and find out some information about the unusual earth fomation, in this case the slide. Real caches found and the necessary information collected for the virtual cache, we moved on down the road.

ABOVE: Westgate of Manning Park

The next 8 caches were all inside Manning Park; the caches highlighted some of the natural beauty of the area. The cache locations took us from the old Dewdney Trail to it's succesor, the Engineer's Road, from rare large rhodendrons to swift flowing creeks, with highlights of beaver and mule deer environments thrown in for good measure.

Manning Park consists of over 70,844 hectares of rugged forest-clad mountains, deep valleys, alpine meadows, lakes and rivers. There are numerous campsites in the park, most drive in along with some alpine areas. There is a downhill ski area, a lodge, a full service cafeteria and store and public washrooms for the weary road travellers.

Manning Park also straddles several bioclimate zones; at it's western entrance the park is west coast rain forest with green trees and plants every where you look. Creeks, rivers, and waterfalls are the norm on this side of the park. As you move towards the centre of the park you climb into Allison Pass and lose the west coast feel; it is replaced with smaller trees and less ground cover due to the harsher winter environment.

By the time you get to the lodge and store area, you are in the midst of a high altitude environment; the winters bring heavy snow and it is reflected in the types of structures here. All of the buildings have steep pitch roof lines to minimize snow build up and you notice that many of the signs are placed at a height where they will still be visible even when the winter's snows come.

Moving east you cross from the west coast zone to the dryer Interior climate zone. Here the ground is dryer and the trees have changed from firs and evergreens to lodgepole pines and birch. Dry brownish grazing grass fills the voids between the trees and the deer population explodes in the area. Where you had to be lucky to see a deer to the west, now when you drive this section at night you have to be lucky not to hit a deer.

We exited the east side of the park, got half a mile away when Stu noticed a moose at the river's edge. "A moose"? I said, here in the dry semi-arid Interior? Well, yes there was one right there!

Moose generally prefer wet marsh areas to arid environments, so we could only surmise that this moose was at the edge of it's territory.

On we went towards Princeton picking up a couple of caches along the way. By now we were fully into the dry lands, and sage brush grew in the fields instead of shrubs; we also noticed in this environment every plant seemed to have thorns or prickles that clung to your clothing as you walked past.

Into Princeton we went searching out the caches planted in this small city; an added bonus was grabbing an FTF in the Tulameen Turtles region. The Turtles are very dedicated cachers who think nothing of driving all night down forest roads searching for an FTF at a distant cache. Their fleet includes 4X4's and ATVs, augmented with a quaff of the finest wines avilable to geocachers on low budgets. To get the jump on them is tough to do; to do so in their own back yard was particularly sweet!

ABOVE: Old building in Granite City

Out of Princeton we went to Coalmont, where the treat for the day was the old ghost town of Granite City. History buff Stu had a field day here, savoring every nuance of the old buildings and the open area that was once a town of two thousand people and two hundred buildings, of which 13 were saloons.

We wandered around the old city for a while, then went up the hill to look at the old Granite City cemetery with head stones so old some of them were unreadable.

Back on the road to the town of Tulameen and home of the Tulameen Turtles which we hoped to surprise. But alas our timing was off as Mrs. Turtles had dropped by my house with some CDs of a recent trip we were on, and found out that I was headed to their territory. Mr Turtles was not home either, but had left a note for us to make our selves at home.

We wandered around the yard for a few minutes thinking how lucky they were to have the cabin to escape to on the weekends.

ABOVE: Old Kettle Valley Railroad trestle at the south end of Otter Lake

We did a few more caches in the Tulameen area, the best of which was the old train trestle from the days of the KVR. The trestle is at the southern end of Otter Lake and you have an excellent views of the lake from the old train bed and the bridge.

ABOVE: Old barn in the Otter Valley

Back on the road we headed north up the Otter Valley stopping at many viewpoints to admire the view and capture it on film and video. We had also changed bioclimate zones again; we had left the dry Interior area and where now in a wetter grass lands area as we travelled the valley bottom. Tracts of cattle ranches were the norm now as we climbed into onto the Nicola Plateau. This was home to historical ranch names like the Nicola Ranch and the Douglas Lake Ranch; these ranches made their fortune on feeding the hungry men who laid the steel rails of the railways and selling horses in Western Canada to the growing population.

By now it was early evening and we were beginning to run out of light; we made the run up the Otter Valley as far as the turn off for the Brookmere Road, which took us west towards the old railway town of Brookmere near the Coquihalla Highway. As we cruised along the old rail bed turned-back road we couldn't help but think of the old whistle stops along here and the pioneer men and women who lived on isolated ranches far from one another; the only way to town was a very long and bumpy wagon ride, or the luxury of the KVR trains.

Our last stop was at Brookmere, where a cache was placed at the only remaining water tower still standing from the KVR line. These water towers were unique in that they were multi-sided and not round like the other train lines built.

We exited the KVR route back onto the Coquihalla Highway and once again we were in another bioclimate zone. Now we were back into the high passes of the mountains were winter comes early, stays late, and dares you to drive the highway any time of the year. This is one of those mountain highways were it's not unheard of to have snow in August!

By now we were in the dark, we were way past our allotted day light hours, and we made the drive back to Vancouver in the dark accompanied by a steady mountain downpour. We had managed to miss the rains that enveloped the coast during the day by the fact we were on the other side of the Coast Mountain Range. Once we reached the Coquihalla Summit and started down the mountain pass, we ran smack dab into the bad weather that Vancouver had been experiencing in our abscence.

We arrived back in Maple Ridge at Stu's car around 10.00 PM, meaning we had been on the road for 15 hours, all of which flew by in what seemed like minutes.

Stu headed home to crash, I headed home to clean up the Jeep and pack for a 4 day geocaching road trip that started at 6.00 AM the next morning!

Thanks Stu for riding shotgun for the day and being such good company!

Caching Along Harrison Lake West FSR

2008-09-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

On Saturday Sept 13 I had the pleasure of hosting a geocaching event for some of the local members of the BCGA. I lead a group of people in five 4X4s as we cached north along the west side of Harrison Lake.

We met at the Tim Hortons in Mission in the central Fraser Valley where we all enjoyed a large morning cup of coffee to help wake us up; the breakfast sandwiches were pretty good too!

After ensuring we were all the folks that were going to show up, we picked a rendezvous point at Weaver Creek Fish Hatchery where we would drop off some of the cars, move the ride alongs over to the 4X4s, and find our first cache!

A total of 14 caches were found on the trip today that stretched more than 50 miles from Harrison Mills in the south, to the Tipella logging camp at the north end of Harrison Lake. By my total we were on gravel roads for approx 110 miles; roads that were at times good graded gravel that you could only curse due to the dust, to no road at all as the road was washed away by the water running down the old road bed. At times we struggled to see over the hoods as the front end was pointed decidedly uphill towards the sky!

Rather than go into all the caches we found explaining their names, locations, etc, I can show you! This time out I took my new cam corder for it's inaugural outing, and I put it to good use. I shot off 45 minutes of film, which I have edited down to about 30 minutes.

You can view the videos here on YouTube; look for the three part Harrison Lake FSR Tour videos. Or you can search Youtube for tjguy98 to find my channel.

Start with Part 1 (of course), then Part 2 and Part 3 to keep the story line in order.

Enjoy the videos and hope it makes you feel like you were right there with us......minus the dust....and the heat.....and the bumping around in the washed out sections of road.....and the crashing through the bush to find the caches getting all scratched up with what I'm sure is poison ivy!!!!!

Other than those little differences, you'll feel like you were there!

PS For those of you who really wanted to come along but didn't, read the write up right after you have dumped the bag from the vacuum cleaner all over your hair. THEN you'll get the idea of how we felt at the end of those 110 miles of FSR travelling.

Messing About in Maple Ridge

2008-09-07T22:04:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Trailhead for the Canyon Trail in Kanaka Creek Park

I made time for myself this week end to get out and do a little caching.; only the second time in months that I've been out playing.

As usual I fired off a few pictures, (you're lucky this time, only 20 or so) and I've put them up on my Flickr page to view. Click here to be magically swept away to Eddie's World.....

Maple Ridge and Richmond

2008-08-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Golden Ears Bridge under construction

Haven't made a post in a while as I've been working in the back yard most of the summer, that is after coming home from Paris! And after having pneumonia knock me down as well..sheesh.

Annette and I went for a leisurely drive out to Richmond and I snapped off a few shots of the Golden Ears Bridge under construction, as well as a couple of pictures of float planes.

Have a look here ........

Eddie's Theme Song

2008-06-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

Every body has a travelling song and I guess I should have one too! Click on the sound bar to start the song and sing along as you watch the slide show.

The Family in Paris

2008-06-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: View of the Place de Trocadero from the top of the Eiffel Tower

All pictures can be viewed on my Flickr site here; (right click on the link and select "Open in New Window". Then you can view the pictures while you read the story). You can also start up the slide show option and then click on the "i" in the centre of the first picture to view the captions so you know what you are looking at.

We had the great opportunity to go to Paris this year, and to make the trip even better we took along the girls! Our girls are now 22 and 24, and speak fluent French. So not only did we get to share a wonderful part of the world with them, we even had our own translators!

To be truthful, every one in Paris speaks English or speaks enough English to converse with you, so travellers should not worry about the language issue.

On the first day we got to the hotel late in the afternoon, and we were all tired from the plane trip. Even so, we dropped off the bags, freshened up, and went out on the street for a short walk and grab dinner.

To see the street our hotel was on, click here and select the Vaugiard camera from the list. This web cam was right outside our balcony doors. We could actually reach out and touch it. We should have put a sign in front of it saying "Hello from Paris"! LOL

ABOVE: View of the Seine River from the top of the Eiffel Tower

Second day, which was Saturday, we visited the Eiffel Tower, took the tour on the Red Bus, (one of the double decker tour buses that have a hop on-hop off policy), visited Notre Dame Cathedral, walked down the Avenue de Champs Elysees, and visted the Arc de Triomphe.

ABOVE: the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etolie

Did you know there are two Arc de Triomphe? The better known, and larger one, is actually called the Arc de Triomphe de l'Etoile. The matching, but smaller arc, is located at the climax of a vista seen the length of the Champs Elysees ending at the Tuileries Gardens, where the second arc is located. This arc is called the Arc de Triomphe Carousel. They were built at the same time in 1836; the arcs are dedicated to the glory of Napoleon's armies.
ABOVE: View of the Eiffel Tower from the top of the Arc de Triomphe
(No it's not leaning, my angle was slightly off)

Sunday was a day spent at the Louvre Museum, and you need way more than just one day to see it all. The Louvre was created as a rampart in 1190 to protect the city of Paris from Anglo-Saxon attacks. It later became home to various Kings; in 1882 the palace ceased to become the seat of power, and it was devoted almost entirely to culture.

The Louvre is fantastic!! No other way to put it; each and every painting, statue or bust in the museum is a classic work of art unto itself. We spent 5 hours at the museum, covered about two-thirds of the floor space, and probably only really seen 25 per cent of the art in the museum.

ABOVE: Inside the Louvre Museum

Highlights for us were the Venus de Milo statue, the Mona Lisa, the Egyptian area, (as they had some rare artifacts that other museums don't have), and the great halls of modern statues that were awesome alone to view.

After the Louvre, we were all pooped out, so a sit down was in order. Part of our tour package entitled us to a one hour tour on the Seine River in an open top boat. We took advantage of the good weather and sat outside along the side railings and enjoyed the summer breeze as we cruised along the historic river past places from the past.

ABOVE: The Isle de Citie, the island which was the birth place of Paris

One of the areas we went past was the Isle de Citie, the island that the Parisii tribe lived on until they were conquered by the Romans in 52 AD. On this island is located the Notre Dame Cathedral.

Monday was a day spent entirely at Euro Disneyland located 30 miles east of Paris. Every one has been to a Disney land some where, so not much new to tell you there....

ABOVE: Jim Morrison's grave

Tuesday was more sightseeing in Paris; first up was the Cemetery du Pere-Lachaise. This is the largest cemetery in Paris; it covers 48 hectares, (118 acres) and contains over 300,000 graves. We were here to visit contemporary celebrities, namely Jim Morrison of the Doors, who died of an overdose in a Paris hotel; Oscar Wilde, the famous play write, author and poet; and Frederic Chopin, the famous Polish composer. Chopin's heart is is entombed in a pillar in the Holy Cross church in Warsaw Poland.

Many other famous French folks are buried here as well; names like Marcel Marceau, the mime, and Sarah Bernhardt, stage and film actress, top the list. It's also the last resting places of various royalty like the last king of Cicilian Armenia and the Countess of Castiglione, a famous Italian courtesan.

ABOVE: The Sacre Couer church

Also on tap today was a visit to the Sacre Couer church located on the highest hill in Paris in the Montmarte district. Further down Boulevard de Rochequart, the main street in the area, was the red light district with all the peep shows and girlie shows. No, that's not why we were here!

ABOVE: The Moulin Rouge, (the Red Windmill)

Located in this area is the famous Moulin Rouge. We just had to see it, but we didn't go inside to see the show, none of us were interested.

ABOVE: Versailles Palace viewed from the Gardens

Wednesday was another day spent entirely at a famous place that was a must on our list of sites to see, and it should be on every ones list; that is Versailles Palace. Offically it's called the Chateau de Versailles. It's incredible!

The palace is the largest palace in Europe, if not the world. The art work is something to see, as is the actual architecture and construction of the chateau. Originally started in 1664, the chateau underwent many growth periods over the next 50 years of so.

ABOVE: The Gardens of Versailles

The gardens are another must see, although the word "gardens" doesn't really justify them. The size of scale is immense, it must stretch for 2 miles from front to back and be a mile wide. It contains a 1.8 k crucifix shaped canal, as well as Marie Antoinette's palace.

Thursday was a day of recovery, and for some a long awaited day; we went shopping! We headed downtown to the Galeries Lafayette, a major upscale shopping centre. It is 7 floors tall, and has another 3 floors in an adjoining building, with another 2 floors in yet another building.

This is all one store, not many stores like a mall as we know them. This store has all the high end fashion names like Channel, Dior, Armani, and any other line common folks can't afford :)

The building itself looks like it's built around an old church, as the first five floors of the store are open in the centre and look up into a large dome reminiscent of a church. We bought a few trinkets here, how ever some of the nice looking dresses that the ladies liked had price tags like 1200 euros, kinda out of our league.

ABOVE: Replica of the flame held by the Statue of Liberty in New York
The Eiffel Tower is in the back ground

We also visted a few other stores in the area, then headed for two other land marks side by side. One was an identical replica of the flame held by the Statue of Liberty in New York. If you recall, the Statue of Liberty was given to the Americans by the French as a gift of friendship in 1886.

ABOVE: The tunnel where Princess Diana died in a car crash

It's also the site of a more tragic scene; directly below the flame is the tunnel where Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed died in the car crash. The low retaining wall at the top of the tunnel holds graffiti dedicated to Princess Diana with people from all over the world pouring out their love for her.

ABOVE: Video of light show at Eiffel Tower; sorry, it's on an angle

Thursday night was our last night in Paris, so we caught the Metro to the Eiffel Tower for the light show. At night the tower is lit up with orange lights, but on the hour starting at 9.00 PM and going to midnight, for ten minutes, thousands of strobe lights burst on the tower lighting the sky with a dazzling array of flashes too fast for the eye to follow and way too many to try to pick out just one. We spent the time on the grass lined mall late at night with many other tourists and Parisians all enjoying a warm summer eve.

Friday was a short day, as we were to be picked up from the hotel at 11.30 AM for the trip back to Charles De Gaul airport.

We spent a couple of hours walking the streets around the hotel and doing some last minute shopping in the small boutique stores.

Before you knew it we were back on the plane home ward bound, with many great memories burned into our brains.

I booked our trip to Paris with some reservations, and incorrect perceptions based on past comments made to me. Some of the comments I heard were "it's a dirty city", "lots of dog poop on the sidewalk as they just don't care", "they won't speak english if you can't speak french', "they're rude".

Well, I was very pleased to find out none of these comments are true; if they were at one time they are not now. We found the people to be very polite, they were willing to speak english if you had trouble in french, the city was clean and almost no dog poop in site! No more than what I see walking around my neighbourhood. It was a very enjoyable place to visit.

We are definitely going back some time, probably spending a week in Paris and the second week on a return trip to London. That is, when we get this trip paid off! :)