Llamas, Horses, and Water - Geocaching in Abbotsford

Brother Ken AKA MrTJ and I spent the day geocaching in the north part of Abbotsford enjoying one of those sunny days that alternate with the rainy days that early Spring brings. Most of north Abbotsford is rural, split between full fledged farms and small hobby farms where people enjoy a bit of freedom to raise chickens, goats, horses and what ever else they fancy.

Click on any picture to see them full sized - then you'll get the full magic!  :)

Many of these hobby farms have a llama or two mixed in with the herds as llamas are excellent protectors against predators like raccoons, coyotes, and other creatures that fancy an easy meal.

We started the day just outside of Fort Langley, well, truth be told we started the day in Fort Langley as MrTJ required some fortitude in the form of a coffee and a cookie. Having got that out the way, we headed just outside of the historic town to find our first cache which was located on a small suburban trail. We had actually been here before finding another cache that has since been archived, so we knew the closest parking and entrance point to the trail. We only had to go a few hundred feet up the easy gravel path, but we took a few minutes to once again enjoy a hobby farm that was situated on a small hill above a pond that came fully equipped with Canada geese, Mallard Ducks, and your own canoe to slip among the water fowl.

  This was a good trail to stretch out the muscles and to get the blood flowing - easy walk to the cache, not far to go, and no coffee was spilt on the way. Best of all, a quick find was an omen of good luck on the day!

The next few caches brought us back down to the Fraser River's edge and took us along River Road as we picked up caches heading east away from Fort Langley.It also brought us down into the Glen Valley region of Langley. This is a pocket of flat land sandwiched between the uplands and the Fraser River. It's also one of the earliest farm land areas utilized by Europeans in conjunction with the operation of Fort Langley when it was a Hudson's Bay Trading Post.

The land is now diked to protect it from flooding, and a long irrigation canal operates as both a source of water for the fields and a drainage mechanism during high water levels. We found a couple of caches in the area and took time to read the nature information boards posted at this popular walking area.Always love reading these as that's how you learn about your local world; not just the present day, but the history of the land and the people that lived here.

 The next cache of significance brought us to Two Bit Bar, site of a historic farm house and now part of the long, linear Glen Valley Park. This cache is called "VTMP # 59 Two Bit Bar"
VTMP stands for Vancouver Transit Memorial Project and it highlights a now defunct type cache known as a "moving cache". The ideas was you would find the cache, pick it up and go hide it in another location within specified geographical boundaries.This one had a wide range - anywhere in the Greater Vancouver area, that's a big area to hide it in! Once you hid it, you would post the co-ordinates on the cache page for the next cacher(s) to race to find it and re-locate it again. I myself have one of these memorial caches hidden in east Maple Ridge at Arnold Falls in Kanaka Creek Regional Park.

 The next cache was deja vu, as it was hidden at a location where I had hid one a few years before. My cache was called "Bob's View" as my work buddy Bob lives right across the river and this is the view he has of the river.
The boat shed in the picture above belongs to Bob - his house is on the hill to the left, partly hidden by the brown building.
My cache lasted for a couple of years before an extremely high spring runoff floated my cache downstream to disappear forever, or so I thought. A year later I received an email from a fellow geocacher, whom worked in New Westminster on the log booms as a log sorter, stating he had found my cache floating in the Fraser River among the log booms! WOW! I met him at a geocaching meet up a couple of weeks later and he returned my cache; he also said that this was the second time he had found a geocache that had run away and ended up in the log booms.

River traffic provided many a picture opportunity and I think MrTJ was getting a bit bored after a while as I was more about the pictures and less about the caching. No worries MrTJ, I can do both "cause I'm a guy"!

We picked up a few more river side caches and then retraced our steps a few miles back to head to the uplands of north Abbotsford known as Bradner.
Bradner was another historic area situated right atop the hill with a commanding view of the Fraser River, and well above the annual flooding I might add.

The area was a small knit community where everyone seems to know everyone and we were decidedly the outsiders. I assume that, as this area is rural and far from the normal patrol area of the police, the Neighbourhood Watch program was in place as every where we went among the rural acreages or hobby farms we got the beady eyeball.

We really liked it around here - it was quiet and peaceful, lots of space between you and your neighbours, you can make a bit of noise or run some machinery in your yard with out the neighbour complaining. We found two caches at the local baseball fields that were part of the school, and the kids whom played in the school yard had a horse as a neighbour - granted he wasn't much on conversation, but he probably found all these rug rats running around mildly amusing  :)

One of the caches had us threading our way on a short trail that ran along the top of a ridge line in a ravine area. Doesn't look like much in the picture (go ahead, click on the picture and make it bigger) but a simple trip over a tree root or your own feet would have you rolling 50 feet down the hill.

This ravine area also showcased why they say Vancouver is in a coastal rain forest area; Muddy slopes and heavy moss on the trees indicated that plenty of rain fell here to keep the flora as green and lush as it is.

 As we headed east through the upland area we transitioned from Bradner to the Mt. Lehman rural region. At the base of one of the old local roads that winds it's way down the escarpment to the Fraser River was the location of a bygone ferry that ran across the river from Abbotsford - Mt. Lehman to the north side of the river taken passengers over to East Maple Ridge - Mission territory. I can honestly say that until I had found a couple of caches down that abandoned road I had no idea that a ferry use to run across the river here. That's one of the wonders of exploring through geocaching - learning all about your historical back yard!

The Mt' Lehman library shares the building with the Mt. Lehman Fire Department - small town efficiency, serving all your needs in one location. :)  In the days of big buildings and big libraries and bug everything, this quaint building in a small part of the world made me smile.

We picked up a few more caches as we wound our way into civilization known as Abbotsford; we had picked up most of the rural caches in the northern sector and as the day was winding down I had planned on picking up a succession of rapid fire caches in the city. One of the caches we found touched on a series of caches along an old rail way path that is now a main road that lazily traverses west from Abbotsford back into the Bradner - Langley area. Ken and I had done a cache along this path way a few years ago but we see now that some one has created a whole series along here. I've marked these ones for a definite re-visit as both Ken and I enjoy caches that highlight areas of local historical significance.

With that in mind, I saved one of my favourite type caches to last........this was another in the Mile marker series that highlights cement obelisk mile markers.

When BC highways were young, there was no Highway #1 from Vancouver to Hope; what you had was a series of local roads that took you east from the city of Vancouver to Hope and the lands beyond.
To help you know how far you had traveled on your path, a series of obelisks counting off the miles were created. Starting at the Vancouver Post Office on Georgia Street in downtown Vancouver, you went along Kingsway Street through Burnaby and crossed into Surrey to follow alternately Old Yale Road and The Fraser Highway as you headed east. Most of these mile markers have disappeared as they became obsolete, but through blind luck and restoration, some of them still exist. This one is at Mile Marker 35 at the edge of Aldergrove; 35 miles from Vancouver and another 65 to go until you reached Hope. I have found a few of these, I think the lowest I have found is Mile 30 and the highest I have found is Mile 98 just outside of Hope.

This was the end of the day for MrTJ and I, we had found 31 caches and a lot more. We had started our day in the first Provincial capital city of BC in the name of Fort Langley, then wandered through the farms that fed those pioneers, traveled along side the original highway in BC in the form of the Fraser River, climbed the hills to meander through small communities content in their quaintness, and ended the day at a relic of car travel from 1931. All in all, a very fun and satisfying day was had by all, and you can't ask for much more than that!  

All pictures of this trip and other trips can be seen here at my Flickr web site. You can also click on the link in the left margin of the blog page.

A Walk Through the Upper sections Of Kanaka Creek Park

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.......

Caching Along The Fraser River in Delta and Surrey

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.    

Car Caching in Langley

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