Day 273: There's a long story behind this post, but the upshot of it is that I had a need to revisit this location today because my geocaching partner is still recovering from heart surgery. As much as he would have liked to make the trip with me, it wouldn't have been wise.
When I first started geocaching in 2005, it took me a while to figure out that everyone's routes and coordinates might not be the best. Typical of Crow, I didn't want to go around lifting up lamp-skirts to sign log sheets in film cans; no, I wanted to make an adventure of caching, to seek out strange new places, to get off the beaten path. One of the first caches on my to-do list was Sulphur Creek Falls. I made a couple of false starts as I tried to follow the cache owner's instructions, but it didn't take me long to realize that he was no woodsman. Nobody with any brain tries to go up a creek bed which is likely to be choked with devil's-club, or have piles of impassable boulders obstructing progress. On the advice of a more woods-savvy friend to "follow your own forest sense," I took to a ridgeline and then shot a contour directly to the base of Devil's Tower (the Washington version). Having found the cache at the base of a beautiful waterfall, I knew then that I'd be paying another visit. In fact, I made several return trips in the company of various friends...one from New York, and a memorable group expedition in the company of Kevin, another cacher, my caching partner and Indiana Jones. Oh, yeah...that'll take some explaining. Indy was a "travel bug," a little toy with a numbered tag, meant to be taken from cache to cache and logged in. We had fun photographing Indy on the trip.
Not many people were willing to make the trek into Sulphur Creek Falls for a single cache smiley, and the cache owner moved out of the area and abandoned the hide. After several years and many maintenance visits, I petitioned Geocaching to allow me to adopt the cache. They gave the original owner time to respond and when he did not do so, ownership was transferred to me. Then when I decided it was time for me to archive my other caches (not wanting to die with a legacy of plastic and metal left in the woods), I asked my caching partner if he wanted to take over from me. He readily agreed. However, he wasn't able to visit the site again, so I kept up the maintenance runs.
Recently, someone tried to find the cache and failed. For some reason, it came to the attention of Geocaching that it had not been found since 2013 and, despite my logs showing I'd performed maintenance every year, they saw fit to send Dan a "nastygram" last week, threatening to archive the cache unless he performed maintenance. And there you have the reason for today's trip...a hike I made in the cool of the morning before I'd even had my second cup of coffee. Not much to see in the way of a waterfall right now, but in the spring (the best time to go), it comes down those rocks in a veritable river. The hike is much easier now, too. There's a well-established trail once you get through the salmonberry thicket. Admittedly, you need to be second-cousin to a mountain goat to navigate portions of it, especially the last drop to creek level, but it's well worth the effort.
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