Gotta Find: Geocaching and More

It took a while, but Bill eventually found his cache just off a trail several miles up the Trout Creek Road yesterday afternoon.  

Trout Creek flows from Trout Peak, one of the mountains east of Sandpoint overlooking the lower Pack River flats, part of which is public land, known as the Trout Creek Wildlife Management Area. 

I had never been up the Trout Creek Road in the spring time, and, after yesterday's trip, I must say that the experience was total delight.  

The crystal-clear stream, as it meanders its way over a rock and moss bed and rolls over numerous mini-waterfalls at a pretty good speed on its trip down the mountain, offers a continuous series of sights to behold this time of year. 

So, when we went looking for a geocache, we found a whole lot more, which is the usual result with pretty much any geocaching trip. 

With geocaching, it's not so much the end result, but it's also the journey that makes the worldwide GPS-driven sport so appealing. 

Before the actual cache discovery, came the wildflowers, bursting with artistic and colorful abundance alongside that stream rushing along its way, letting everyone in hearing distance know that it was on a mission to get from the top to the bottom. 

And, on this journey, the excitement of Trout Creek's white foamy falls splashing about into the air gave a sense of the playfulness of spring. 

After parking the pickup several miles up the road, we walked through some patches of leftover soft snow, imprinted by large moose tracks and much smaller deer tracks.  Of course, the owners of the tracks also left a few deposits on the road, some fresher than others. 

When we approached the trail head where the cache was supposed to be, Bill announced that this cache, planted by "Huckleberry Hound," offered no clues and that other cachers had reported it as a bit hard to find.  

The challenge came because of the heavy tree cover which sometimes sends the GPS bonkers.  

Bill also remembered some other cachers telling him that when they could not pinpoint the hidden treasure with their GPS, they simply started looking for where someone might hide a cache.  That knowledge led them to the "find." 

The same happened with Bill as he searched both sides of Trail 57.  While I spent my time, carefully maneuvering along the soft, mossy and tricky stream bank in hopes of good camera angles, Bill kept searching and eventually yelled over the stream noise, "Gotta find!" 

Then, he announced and acknowledged that this one was supposed to have good items inside and that it was important for all future finders to bring a nice item to add to the cache. 

Indeed, the cache contained some quality keepsakes, but Bill left them all in the cache rather than "putting something in to replace something taken." 

Our two-hour outing proved to be a wonderful and productive experience with lovely spring weather and an abundance of fresh and spit-shined beauty which we thoroughly enjoyed from start to finish. 

If you've never geocached, this is a great time of the year to start, and with this sport, there's definitely something for everyone who likes to go on a good search while enjoying the beauty of Mother Nature.  

To learn more, visit www.geocaching.com    where you can learn in 75 seconds what's involved. 

Happy Saturday.