Hiking & Geocaching: River Tillard to Sporting Mountain Rd Take 2

Another beautiful sunny day, a little cooler, -14 with the wind chill. Yesterday someone listed that they had found the two caches on the River Tillard trail. We jumped in the truck and headed to the Sporting Mountain end of the trail to go in from that direction. We headed in around 1:30 and its only about 460 meters in from that end for the first one. They haven't done anything further on that end of the trail since we were last there. We got to the location and I started looking for the cache. It is on the edge of a stream and hidden amongst some large boulders. I was just getting ready to call it in a second time when I spotted the well camouflaged cache container.

I grabbed the container and stamped the log and was going to sign it when I noticed the pen in the cache didn't have any ink in it. Martha ran back to the truck for a pen while Caoimhe and I sniffed around the area :-) We signed the log, put the cache back and continued on the trail to the waterfall cache. The person that logged the find yesterday said they crossed about 50 meters upstream from the cache. I decided to brave it and looked for a shallow spot to cross. I picked a wide slow moving spot and lucked out that the water just barely stayed below the top of my boots. Once across I made my way through dense underbrush to the salmon ladder.

The description said the cache was under some rocks at the end of a "canyon" The salmon ladder is dry now so the canyon was the concrete walls of the ladder. There was a suspicious pile of stone at the end of one of the runs so I had a look there while Martha and Caoimhe chased squirrels on the other side of the stream.

Here is one of my beefs so far with geocaching. Some people who hide caches take great care in choosing containers and logbooks and trade items for inside. Some people go through a huge effort to take you to places that you may not have normally ever ventured, like the end of a long unused salmon ladder next to a small waterfall I probably would never have seen. If you bring someone here to see your cache put a little effort into the cache. This container was an old margarita mix bucket with junk inside it. I was the second person to sign the logbook and pages were already falling out of it. I mean I appreciate the fact that the hider went through a lot of effort to put the cache there, but if you are going to bring people to your special spot why not put a bit of effort into the cache as well. It is a bit anticlimactic in my opinion to find a bucket of junk in a beautiful location like this little waterfall. I am not complaining by any means, just a little disappointed, and its not the first time.

So this is for sure a beautiful walk and I would suggest it to anyone even if they are not looking for the caches. Hopefully we will get out somewhere else this week to add another entry.