Flathead Lake

This past week Jeni and I went out to Montana for a wedding. While Jeni was helping slow the bride to be's inevitable nervous breakdown, I went up to Flathead Lake to vist my friend and drummer/pianist/folk mandolinist extrodinaire Seth. We went out to hunt for two caches. Here's a pic of Seth finding the first cache, or maybe putting it back.

The lake is really cool, along with being really big and really wet.
Next we tried to find a cache in a park in Kalispell but had no luck. We did however find these ducks and geese.

Missile Site Cache

So it's Sunday night at the end of a weekend which could have been spent doing all sorts of great geocaching, but instead Jeni and I had been stuck inside for two days. I won't give you the exact reason, but it rhymes with Parry Hotter. Anywho, as Sunday drew to a close it became clear that we needed to get outside otherwise we'd melt the next time we were exposed to direct sunlight. Jeni called Dr. Mike and Teri and we met in Deer Park to hunt for the Missile Site Cache. The cache was located in an old missile site, as you could probably guess by the name, which the local Boy Scout troop had cleared trails into.
This is Andy, our geocaching bloodhound/terrier mix. (Ok, he's probably got a little more terrier than bloodhound in him.)
The cache. You can't really see it in the pic thanks to the flash, but that funny shaped white thing is a vertabrae which we traded for an army man.

Tuesday: Fifty-Fifty

Alright, so the first cache of the day, the appropriately named I Smell Gas, was a success!
Hey no one ever said this wasn't dangerous.

Anyway, the second one we tried, The Last Picture Show, was not a success. We couldn't find it even with the hint! Boo.

Pirate Booty Cache

Check it out! We decided to hide our own cache in the back 40 of Whitworth and fill it with Pirate booty. It just got accepted today and there have already been 4 people there!!! Yay!!!

Let us know about your ideas of good themes for our next hides.

Forest Fire

Jeni got done with work today and what do you think she wanted to do? Go geocaching, of course! We loved Riverside yesterday so we headed back for more today. Here's me at Kodi's Cache, a cache dedicated to a pet who has passed away.Ok, we aren't really experts at this yet. Click on this picture to view it full size and notice our car on the right and the trail heading off to the left. When the arrow was pointing at a 90 degree angle off the road we hopeed out and headed for the cache. If we'd have just driven a little firther and taken a look around, we'd have had a much easier time getting into the cache.
Went on foot to this next one, the Riverside Forest Fire cache. The cache was hidden under this burned tree.
Jeni and the cat toy we left in the cache. Note the stylish shirt.
Here's a shot across the river form that cache. Notice the burned trees on the other side of the river as well. The fire actually burned so intensely thatit jumped the river.
No luck at the next cache site. The place still looked devastated from the fire, which was in 1994.
This whole plain was burned out. It used to be treed as thickly as the area in the panoramic photo we posted yesterday.
Coordinates pointed us to this ominous looking broken burned tree, but we couldn't find the cache.
The Cachemobile.
The next one was straight up the hill on the right. No luck at this one either.
Well, 2 out of 4 isn't bad, and we got to see this sunset. A few of these pics make awesome desktop images, feel free to take any you want.

Riverside Park

One of Spokane's coolest features is the river that runs right through town. The heart of downtown is Riverfront park, 100+ acres with the river running through the middle. Just to the west of town is Riverside park, a large natural conservation area. This is where we went treasure hunting today.
One of the great things about Geocaching is that you get to see a bunch of places you'd have never thought to visit on your own. Riverside park is one of those places. It's beautiful. Jeni asked why she'd lived in Spokane for 4 years and had never been out here.
Here's a 180 degree panoramic of Jeni by the river.Ok, after some sight-seeing it was time to get down to busines and start searching. The first thing we found was this pair of SpongeBob sandals. However, since we weren't looking for them and there was a chance their owner would be returning to retrieve them, we let them be.
Our search took us away from the river and into the wooded park. Here's a 360 of the woods partway to our goal. You wouldn't believe from that picture that we were just half a mile outside of a major metropolitan area, would you?
Kidz Cache, full of toys and in a very hip ammo can with an official Geocache sticker. Quite cool.We started to head back from Kidz Cache when we spotted another cache on the map. Just 500 ft. away we found Pretty Plese. (These flats are called the Plese Flats.) In case you're wondering how accurate this whole GPS thing is, the pic shows just how close it got us to the cache. And yes, Jeni did have to uproot that tree bare-handed.The char marks on the trees puzzled us at first, but then we learned from the logbook that the parks service uses controlled burns to keep the undergrowth from getting out of hand. There are a few caches elsewhere in the park dedicated to a bad forest fire that happened some number of years ago.

On the way out, we found a coyote skull and vertabrae!

By the way, if you want larger versions of either of the panoramic shots, just leave a comment and I'll email you one.

Two More Today!

Well, we're new at this (and we have a lot of free time) so we've still got the bug in our system. We got up way early (6:30a.m.!) and picked up Mary and her housemate Beth to hunt out a few before Mary had to go to work. We headed up to Pine River Park to look for London Bridge, but had no luck. Found the bridge but couldn't find the cache. Then we headed to the Little Spokane River Outlook and scored! Mary found this one. Later in the day Jeni and I stopped by the Indiantrail Roadside Cache and picked up a quick one. We also drove by the Lucky Coin Cache to scope it out. It looks like a pretty serious climb/bushwhack. We'll probably do it in the next few days, I've got a Canadian nickel to stick in it.

In other news, we've got a Whitworth Back 40 cache in the works which we should plant in the next few days.