The Next Chapter in the Book . . .: Chapter 390

This was going to be a fun weekend. We haven't been out for the weekend to some random place since we bought the cabin. We used to do this all the time and his was the first weekend outing since we sold the cabin several months ago. So, figuring our best chance to find sun would be in eastern Washington we, obviously, pointed the car east.

This is the Lake Keechelus just east of Snoqualmie summit. There is still quite a bit of snow in this area.

Our big activity for the weekend was to do a bit of Geocaching. This was our first cache. Since they all run together, I don't know the name of it but I think it is in Roslyn off of Bullfrog

Flats Road. Whatever. It's just one of many random trees that Bob was rooting around in out in the woods this weekend.

The next one was Hole #2 on a disc golf course in Cle Ellum. I found the cache on the bottom of the disk golf post. Do you see it?

Yup, you are right, it was that bolt on the side of the pole.

It opens up to reveal a secret compartment...

...where the log is neatly rolled up. Here Bob unrolls it so he can sign in. He is a Geocache purist and has to sign each and every log. I figure if I found something the size of a bolt in this big wide world, I've done my job. You can't tell me the cache owner is really going to go out and compare the signatures on this teensy little piece of paper with his log site so he can void my cache check-in if the signatures don't match. I'm banking he won't.

Hansen's Pond in Cle Ellum is a man-made lake that allows for wheelchair fishing. It's a pretty little place RIGHT NEXT TO I-90 therefore it's not a peaceful place.

We walked around the pond until we got to the proper coordinates then started looking for the cache. This one was up in a tree and had to be let down by a rope to get it down to sign the log.

Next we stopped by the Cattlemen's Association in Ellensburg and checked out their cache. We also dropped a travel coin here to begin it's journey to wherever it can go.

Here's the travel coin we dropped into the cow cache:

While we were caching in the Yakima Canyon along the railroad tracks, we saw a deer skeleton. I started collecting some old rusty iron stuff for Mary Lou to use in her fabric dyeing and piled it near the skeleton to keep track of it as I collected it. By the end I had quite a bit of rusty old stuff.

The weather in Ellensburg was comfortable and overcast. No wind. If there had been wind it would have been very cold!

Bob finding a cache in a rock crevice up on a hillside. Sadly, he is not part mountain goat and this is not good terrain for him.

I've never seen the Yakima Canyon so green. Flowers were blooming and everything was uber green.

More mountain goating. We thought the cache would be in/on the concrete monument in the foreground, proclaiming this the McPherson Range.

I did actually follow a goat path to get up here. It even smelled like goat up here. This is where I knocked a (huge) rock loose and almost took Bob out of the caching picture for the day, or maybe longer.

As the sun set over the Yak Valley, it started to get cold. Fast.

We had to fight the swallows for this cache by a bridge. They were building their nests under the bridge as well as eating evening bugs from the field we were in.

We are lucky Bob hasn't had the cops called on him. Here's this strange guy, and his very nice wife, crashing around in bushes at the Ellensburg Rite-Aid on the corner of Jackson ad Main. This cache was slyly hanging in these bushes in a nearly invisible state. We spent quite a bit of time on the corner of Jackson and Main looking for this cache, plenty of time for the cops to have arrived.

We went to the Central Washington University campus to get a few more caches. Unfortunately today it was windy. And cold. Very cold.

As we headed out of Ellensburg, you can see how strong the wind is that this huge flag is standing straight out. The wind made it harder to cache, but that was ok because we saw SUN!

Look at this cool rock formation around Thorp where we were caching. You can see the wind farm in the background.

Another trip up a steep hillside on a (literal) goat trail somewhere around Thorp. This was a serious hike up a hill with a pretty view at the end. Thankfully it was a short hike.

Another deer skeleton. Apparently eastern Washington isn't a good place to be a deer.

We tried to do the three caches in Roslyn but it started raining. The cache at the mining slag pile required a bit of a hike and it was starting to rain too hard to make that trek. We settled for a cache near the Roslyn cemeteries. I really wanted to look around in the different cemeteries but the rain started in earnest by then. There are 25 separate cemeteries here representing the different ethnic and fraternal organizations that helped settle the Roslyn area. Apparently no one got along well enough to share a cemetery so each organization and ethnic race, mostly of eastern European descent had it's own fenced-off section. These cemeteries encompass 25 acres and date back to 1886. As we were leaving a herd of elk were just hanging out.