Day 151: I first visited Sulphur Creek Falls in 2005. I learned of its existence through geocaching. It took me two tries to get there, the first failing when I tried to follow the instructions provided on the cache page and wound up in a tangle of devil's-club, but the second successful after a friend counselled me to "use your woods sense" to pick my own route. You see, there is...or was...no trail to this magical place at the end of a box canyon. Elk and deer trails criss-crossed a steep hillside, but as animal trails have a wont to do, they often disappeared without warning. Natural hazards abound here: mud, thickets of devil's-club and salmonberry, fallen trees and so on. But once I had attained my goal and found the cache, I kept going back every year. Very few other people even made an attempt to reach the cache. The cache owner disappeared from the GC website and finally, after several years of maintaining the cache myself, I petitioned to adopt it. It was a long process, but eventually GC turned it over to me.
That said, every subsequent year brought new obstacles. There were landslips, more fallen trees. And there was evidence of human activity which I did not like: litter, and ropes put in place to make the descent to the base of the falls easier. Every time I went in, I cleared it out. If a little old lady didn't need a rope to get there, the young bucks (human) who were partying at the site and leaving their beer bottles behind could certainly make it without assistance. Then a flood came and changed the landscape even more. I had to relocate the cache about 150' from its original location. However, even that site was not secure. Last year, a large cedar tree slid down the hillside, its massive root ball coming to rest when it hit the two trees my revised cache was between. The cache was still accessible, but barely.
A few days ago, I made a decision to archive the cache due to two factors: increasing erosion (both natural and human-caused), and my age. You don't see very many tiny women at the three-quarter century mark prowling around in trailless and somewhat dangerous terrain. But I had one last mission which took me to Sulphur Creek Falls again yesterday: remove the cache container. After a year of voluntary lockdown, I hoped I still had the steam for the trip. "Slow and easy," I told myself time again as I struggled up the slopes using roots and branches and the occasional clump of ferns to leverage myself up one more step, mindful that the muddy ground was likely to give way and send me 50-100' down to creek level if all three of my anchor points failed. "Bush-belays" are not my favourite climbing tools, but I'll use them if nothing else is available. I went nose-to-mud twice before I reached the base of our local version of the Devil's Tower, but the challenge didn't end there. Once up to safe ground, I had the descent to cache level ahead of me, perhaps the most dangerous part of the trek. In fact, I had to find an alternate route from my usual, owing to yet another landslide. I retrieved the cache container and then made my way from this point (photo) to the base of the falls, up and around that pile of lumber behind me, and then back down again. One more "up" took me back to the base of Devil's Tower, from which I descended without incident (not counting a muddy bum) to the nice, flat South Swofford Trail, continuing there on a leisurely walk for a mile and half almost to its end, glad that my multiple missions were all complete. It is unlikely that I will return to Sulphur Creek Falls again.
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