Quick Geocaching Trip To Kamloops Area

British Columbia on the West Coast of Canada is a mountainous region and if you drive on almost any highway in the province you will see these warning signs for truck drivers. To the rest of us, this just means a steep road and spectacular scenic views the mountains afford.

CLICK ON ANY PICTURE TO SEE THE PICTURE FULL SIZE IN THE PHOTO ALBUM

Brothers Ken and Al had to make a business trip to Blind Bay on Shuswap Lake, approx. 45 minutes east of Kamloops. While pondering whether the trip was worthwhile, they decided to turn it into a geocaching trip and that made all the difference in the world.

A quick call to myself, and a couple of days later we were leaving Vancouver on the South West Coast and heading up country to Kamloops.
Bowser98, MrTJ, and TJGUY98 were on the road again ....

It was to be just an overnight trip so I researched around 80 caches, assuming we would be lucky if we hit 50 of them with all the traveling to do.
I picked mostly city caches for the first day as we got into Kamloops after dinner, so our caching time would be limited on Day 1.

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There is a lot of history in BC but often it is tucked away rather than being on full display. On the south side of Kamloops, on the steep hillside above the city core, we found a cache at a weathered historical sign board. The back alley we just drove down was once part of the Nicola Wagon Road that connected Merritt in the south with Kamloops where the last remaining Hudson's Bay Trading Company outpost was located. The route itself probably followed an ancient trail used by the Shuswap People prior to the arrival of the first fur traders in 1812.

We make an annual geocaching trip to the Kamloops area so this offers us the chance to go back and find some of those caches we could not find last time. We looked for a micro cache in the rock wall for over an hour last year and came up empty. This year we came back and within 7 minutes had the cache in hand - go figure!

 
On Day 2 we had to get the business part of the trip done, which was to pick up some business materials east of Kamloops in Blind Bay. But that doesn't mean we had to drive straight there; taking the scenic route is always an option.Blind Bay Village is one of the many that line the shore of multi-branched Shuswap Lake. Blind Bay has a small population that swells in summertime when the tourists arrive dragging their boats over the mountains from Vancouver and Alberta to play in the sun.

But in this part of the country all roads eventually lead you back to the Trans Canada Highway. Adventurous tourists with time on their hands can dip their toes in either the Pacific Ocean on the West Coast, or the Atlantic Ocean on the East Coast, and then drive the entire 7,821 kilometres to the other ocean to repeat the feat at the conclusion of their adventure. In doing so they would have driven right down this stretch of highway - "hey, there they go !!

To prove that geocaching is not all hustle and bustle, Bowser98 took a moment in time to hold up a Stop sign for MrTJ while he found and signed a geocache. Teamwork - it makes everything easy. "What was I doing you ask"? Well, taking pictures and chronicling our road trip of course.! Psst - you can't trust either one of those guys with a camera! 👎

Near the highway in a shopping complex on the outskirts of Blind Bay is an old Case Steam tractor and a small wooden covered chuck wagon. Remnants of two different eras of work vehicles used 100 years apart but both an integral part of the work force.

Boating is what Shuswap Lake is all about. The multi pronged lake forms the letter "H" which offers endless boating opportunities for all kinds of boats. The lake is usually calm so houseboats are a big hit on the lake, as are speed boats pulling water skiers and assorted inflatable ride along rafts.

With the warm spring, vegetation had a good head start on the growing season and many of the caches we would look for would be covered over with this year's growth. That's MrTJ in the bush in case you are wondering. Hidden under the bush was the high water level of the lake and MrTJ had to balance on a semi-submerged log to retrieve the cache.

The semi arid landscape of the BC Interior provides good land for growing fruit, with apples being the traditional crop.
I can still see this old pair of work partners working in tandem in an orchard. The McCormick Farmall tractor and it's flat bed trailer would haul the boxes of apples out of the orchards to an access road, then the old Fargo truck would take the load into town. Synchronicity in team work gets the job done. Just like us three geocachers - Bowser98 guides us to the cache site, MrTJ gets all dirty and covered in leaves while he retrieves the cache, and I take the pictures and write up a story to regale our friends of the fun we had while out and about. Like I said "Synchronicity"  !!

We only had time for a few more caches near Sorrento and Chase before we had to head back down to the Coast and our homes in the Vancouver area.
The Coquihalla Highway is one of those mountain pass highways mentioned at the beginning of the story. Average winter snow pack at roadside is 8 feet. The snow that falls during the winter is not measured in inches but in dozens of feet. The highest summit the road crosses is 4,738 feet, which is only 500 feet short of a mile high.

Even in late spring and early summer there is still plenty of snow to be seen. There were patches of snow at the edge of the road 3-4 feet deep in places.The 22 degree weather we enjoyed all day dropped down to 8 degrees as we crossed through the mountains.

Before we knew it Day 2 was over and we were back home late in the evening. Although it was a quick trip we still manged to find 51 caches and seen a lot more of Super Natural BC.
On top of all that, the three brothers got to act like teenagers again instead of respectful husbands and fathers - good times!  :)

ALL PICTURES ON THIS TRIP CAN BE FOUND HERE ON MY FLICKR WEBSITE

MANY MORE PICTURES FROM PREVIOUS TRIPS CAN BE FOUND HERE ON AT MY MAIN FLICKR PAGE

B.C. Geocaching Road Trip - Part 2

The long awaited part 2 of the write up of our late summer geocaching road trip to Merritt - Kamloops - Vernon.

Click on any of the pictures to see the full size version

Day 3 we awoke in Kamloops and cached in the city for a while as we picked off a few in the south part of the city near our hotel. Eventually we headed north towards the Thompson River area and then east as we followed the river out of town towards our next destination of Vernon.

We have cached several time sin Kamloops and I have many photos and enough video already so I opted to not repeat material from past posts and instead will pick up the storytelling in Westwold.

Westwold is a small community on Highway 97 as you run south from Kamloops down to Vernon.
Our first memorable geocache was located at a business named Wildrides Hotrods. It is a combination garage/car servicing and restoration business, as well as having some old cars and trucks out front to entice folks to stop by for a view and a bite to eat from the small cafe the have on site.

We got to have a look around at the old cars and find a cache at the same time, not a bad two for one stop on the road.

We cached our way steadily south through small communities with the highlight of Falkland being the "big" city on this highway. I had planned a route that was heavy in Kamloops and lighter on the road so we could make time as we headed to Vernon to visit another brother and his wife As the day wore on we realized that we had to stop caching and start making time if we were to keep our "dinner" date with Wayne and Inga so we put aside the GPS and put the pedal down so we could spend some time visiting family.

Day 4 and the last day of the road trip we spent the morning caching in urban Vernon enjoying the downtown core on an early Sunday morning before the crowds woke up.
This gave us the opportunity to see some of the murals in the core area representing the history of Vernon. Transportation seemed to be the theme with multiple murals depicting some sort of travel method.

Seems like where ever you are in Vernon you are not far from a lake...whether it be Okanagan Lake or Woods Lake or Kalamalka Lake one of them is always in your view.

As we headed south out of Vernon back down towards home on the Coast we opted to take the scenic route and cached along a back road named Commonage Road that straddled the high ground between the big waters of Okanagan Lake and some of the smaller lakes.

Here you see a good division of work between brothers...sorta like the well oiled caching machine we are. MrTJ works on some potato chips, tjguy98 runs the video camera, and Bowser98 does the work of finding the cache and signing the log book. Works like a charm!  :)

  
Further south you are back on the shores of Okanagan Lake in aptly named
"Lake Country". This is one of those areas where every driveway has a boat and/or seadoos to go with it. A truck to tow the boat is the typical family wheels, no travel trailers or RVs to be seen here.

Lake views and cool breezes from the lakes are the normal experience when you are in Lake Country. We were a bit late in the year for the crowds but a few die hards were still out enjoying the last days of an Indian Summer before they had to put the boats away for the winter.

Into Kelowna we sailed picking up a roadside cache here and there as we continued our return trip home. One of the caches we stopped for was in West Bank at Paynter's Fruit Market where a local farming enterprise had a large market-type operation that was obviously well appreciated by the local residents. Many types of fruit and vegetables were sold outside  and inside many locally produced food items were available...tempting enough that we grabbed a few items off the shelf for the long lonely drive home.

But I digress...we were here on a mission to find a geocache and the old tractor on display made a convenient location to place a magnetic cache box hidden from muggles but a quick find for cachers.

On our last leg of our journey we headed along the Coquihalla Connector, which joins West Bank to Merritt, picking up new caches since our last run down the highway. We were now in "make-up-time" mode as we grabbed a few caches right off the on ramps/off ramps of the highway never straying far from the main thorough fare.

The last three caches were all along the same short spur road, which was actually part of the old Highway 5A. A yellow middle line on the pavement and an old brake check sign told us we were standing on an outdated piece of motor car history.

The very last cache we found was jsut east of Merritt on the long downhill stretch into Merritt . Some joker has left an old toilet as if they came here to use the open air facilities while enjoying a magnificent view of the Nicola Valley with Merritt as it's centre piece.

This was also the place where, after 4 days of crashing through bush and scrambling up and down hill sides, MrTJ decided to gash his leg open on the old potty...ewwwww....

Watch the video and you will see that MrTJ, trooper that he is, found the cache first and then tended to the gash on his leg. Bowser98 and myself  had the same geocaching dedication so we signed the log book and then tucked the cache back away in it's hiding place before we went back to the truck to render first aid to MrTJ.

This was the last cache of the day, the last cache of the 4 day road trip through the Interior of BC, and my very last video shot of the trip.
The sun came out from under a dark cloud and bathed Merritt in a blast of sunlight. The scene was so pretty I expected to hear angels singing.

I realized the video shoot was something I couldn't top so I put the camera away and we jumped into the truck to make a run for the Coast and back to our home sweet homes.

Four days on the road netted us 160 caches, a visit with a brother and his wife, and a load of new memories for the memory banks. A pretty satisfying road trip for the Jeep Brothers once again.

Watch the video below by clicking on it or by visiting my YouTube page here.

B.C. Geocaching Road Trip - Part 1

As the year wound down myself and brother Al and brother Ken did our yearly geocaching road trip to the Interior of the BC province. We usually head up through Merritt, Kamloops, loop over to Vernon, and then decide which route to take home depending on how many days we are away and where we end up on the second to last day of the trip. This year we more or less stuck to tradition and did the route described above. One of the good thing about looping through Vernon is then we get to visit one of our other brothers Wayne and his wife Inga.

The first day we cached our way from Maple Ridge up through the Coquihalla Highway famed for the TV show "Highway Through Hell" so named as the winter pass received huge amounts of snow making this main provincial artery one of the hardest and most dangerous roads to travel. We were travelling in early Autumn so the weather was good but high volumes, high speed, and wild life combine to make this highway dangerous any time of the year

We got off and on at various exits along the highway as we picked up caches in tucked away spots with sign markers that highlighted this main route of today and yesteryear. From cattle drives before the railway to the coming of the mountain railway itself this route through the mountains was full of history.

One of the geocaches had us scrambling up the side of a loose shale hillside to get to the top of a bluff where the geocache was hidden. While the two brothers risked their life slipping and sliding up the hillside (can't wait till they come down) I stayed below and recorded it all on video in case something terrible happened and I should need to post the video to YouTube.I immediately realized I had the wrong attitude about them hurting themselves up there.....here I was down on level ground, there they were up in a dangerous spot and I thought to myself.....those buggers have both the keys to the truck!

A few more caches along the way and soon enough we were in the big town of Merritt. We checked in at the motel to confirm our room for the night, then headed off to cache around the city for the rest of the day. We cached for a few more hours into the dark and then headed off to the local Tim Hortons for a late lunch/dinner combined before we meandered back to the hotel for the night.

DAY 1 - 12 caches and a couple of hundred miles under our belts...

.Day 2 had us up early and finishing off the local caches in Merritt before we headed north-east out of town. The first cache was only a couple of blocks away from our hotel - it was close enough that MrTJ was still eating his breakfast banana as Bowser98 and myself found the cache just a ways in from the road. Banana finished and the rest of the local caches found, we headed out of town along Highway 5A into the the north end of the Nicola Valley and alongside Nicola Lake.

We approached the southern end of Nicola Lake where it the lake ends in a marshy drainage area that is a home for a myriad of water fowl. Many species of birds overwinter here - in the past I have seen huge rafts of various types of birds from American Coots to Common Mergansers and everything in between. As it was still only September and Winter was not any where near yet, summer songbirds like the Red Winged Blackbird could be heard singing their daily songs.

We picked up caches along the east side of Nicola Lake as we slowly sauntered north towards our goal of Kamloops for the night. Along the way we were reminded that this is Cowboy country and not that long ago in the scheme of things wagon trains and stagecoaches were the transportation choices rather than cars with rubber wheels.

The Quilchena Hotel built in 1908 in the small settlement of Quilchena replaced an earlier hotel that was not up to the standards of Joseph Guichon when he purchased the property. The Guichon name is synonymous with the "history" of the region and you will find the Guichon name in many historical and present day contexts.

One of the geocaches we found,located in the hills above the Quilchena Hotel and ranch land, was part of the Gold Rush series of caches hosted by the a number of towns in this area of the province. They were designed to highlight the history of the various regions and at the same time act as a centre piece to attract tourism to the towns whose local economies have suffered as the logging and resource industries have died down. This has been a very successful campaign over the years and I know of many geocachers whom have spent their holidays in the area. Including us!  :)

We eventually left the Nicola Lake area as we continued north along Hwy 5A coming across numerous lakes situated in a north-south axis where Ice Age glaciers had carved grooves in the land. Stump Lake is one of the bigger lakes in the area and like most of the lakes had a major ranch operation on it's banks. The Stump Lake Cattle Ranh was established in 1883 and today boasts of 80,00 acres of land which ranges from rolling grasslands to evergreen and deciduous forests to lakes, wetland marshes, and high rocky bluffs.

As we were getting close to Kamloops we decided to take off onto one of the numerous ranch roads in the area to take the slow way into the big city and at the same time let us slow down and see more of the ranch life. Campbell Creek Road has a series of 25 or so caches along it's length and would drop us out on the east side of Kamloops.

So, what we would you expect to see along a road that cuts through ranch land? Why, cows of course...and we seen a lot of them along this road. The road itself was dirt but well traveled so that even cars were common along here. Not that we seen a lot of traffic...we did see a lot of cows....I think I mentioned that....there were a lot of cows.....

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One of my favourite things to explore is backroads and this road fit right into what I love to explore.But like all goods things, soon enough we were at the end of Campbell Creek Road and back into civilization.
We hunted up a few more caches in the outskirts of Kamloops and then headed into town to claim our hotel room,grab a bite to eat, and then finish the night off with a half dozen caches done in the dark.

DAY Two over - another hundred or so miles and 63 more geocaches found on the day.

End of Part 1 - watch for Part 2 to come soon.....watch the video below covering Day One and Day Two....

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

"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. One 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)