vituperation

December 22, 2002

Congratulations are in order for reader Teresa, who correctly told me that the glaring problem with the rejection letter was that my book isn’t fiction. Many thanks to all who entered.

I’d wanted to take another hike up on Monte Sano mountain - there are tons of trails up there I haven’t been on - last weekend, but the weather forbade it. I spent this entire week planning to go yesterday, not only to take a long hike but to find three geocaches and place my second geocache. Despite some bad weather Wednesday and Thursday, Friday was dry and sunny, and yesterday morning dawned beautiful.

Besides, a little mud just makes the hills more interesting.

Since my plan was to be on the trails for two or three hours, plus the fact that I’m a super-duper geek, I packed my backpack nearly full with things I thought I’d need:

• three 24-ounce bottles of water
• the geocache I planned to place
• a book to read if the urge to sit on a big flat rock and read struck me
• a small metal tape measure to trade for booty in geocaches I found
• an apple
• an orange, cut into quarters so I could eat it and make funny faces with the peel in my mouth
• two chicken sandwiches and some paper towels in a sandwich container
• printouts of descriptions of the three geocaches I was looking for
• a map of the Montesano trails and a pen, in a Ziploc bag so they wouldn’t get wet
• my GPS
• extra batteries for the GPS because it would truly suck to lose power in the wild
• a digital camera for pictures

And I was never a Boy Scout, believe it or not.

Before I left, I unfolded my homemade map of the trails and, using the descriptions of the cache locations, plotted a course to hike. My path would take me from the parking lot at the top of the map, down the Alms House trail to the Railroad Bed trail and the first cache. From there, I would straight-line it cross-country to the Bluff Line trail to the Dry Falls, where the other two caches were hidden. Tantalizingly, there was an admonition on the map around the Dry Falls that said "Difficult hiking". I couldn’t wait.

I went into the garage to get my walking stick - which I fondly refer to as my staff, as in "I sure like to walk in the woods holding my staff in my hand" - and hiking shoes, and then I was off to the mountain.

I have a long, beautiful, and erect staff, do I not?

After a stop at my dad’s house to drop off the roaster he let us use for Thanksgiving, and to receive my normal dire warnings from him about falling off the bluffs, I made my way up to the parking lot and the Alms House trailhead.

The trip down to the first cache was uneventful. The first portion of the Alms House trail is a blast, very steep and rocky, but the Railroad Bed trail is flat and mostly boring. Finding the geocache took about five minutes of searching. It was near a dry creekbed.

When I looked in the log book, I found something pretty cool - someone else had already found the cache that morning. I took nothing and left nothing.

Finally, it was time for what I thought would be the second most exciting part of the hike: the cross-country jaunt to the Bluff Line trail, which was about two tenths of a mile and increased in elevation about three hundred feet.

Most of those three hundred feet were near the end, I found.

I hiked along the Bluff Line trail for about half a mile until I came to the offshoot that would take me down to Dry Falls. I took pictures, but no picture can do this segment justice. It’s about two hundred yards long and very steep. The path is on a little finger of land probably about eight feet wide, and both muddy and rocky. To either side of the finger is something akin to a ditch, not deadly but nothing you’d want to fall into, either.

I made my way slowly and carefully down, until the ground levelled out. At the bottom of the hill I encountered two men and about six small children, who’d come in via a different path and were eating lunch spread out across this path. We chatted for a few minutes and I explained geocaching to them because I figured I’d look a little strange climbing around them and staring a a small electronic device in my hand.

I made my way over to Dry Falls and the section labelled "Difficult hiking" on the map.

Holy fucking shit.

Unfortunately, I was so stunned by what I had to climb down that I failed to take a picture of it. I did, however, have enough wits about me to get the camera out at a point about halfway down and take a couple of pictures of Dry Falls. The pictures should give you a bit of an idea what I was climbing down. My dad would most likely have a heart attack if he knew what his only son was out doing.

The worst part is that one geocache was hidden very near where I was standing when I took those pictures, on the sheer face of a super-steep hill. The other geocache was on the other side of Dry Falls which meant I had to climb back up, cross the falls, then climb down the other side.

I spent about an hour and a half looking, and found neither. I took another picture as I crossed over the falls.

Note the way the ground gently slopes to the water in the distance.
It was nothing like that where I had to go down, because I was going
down right next to the 70-to-100-foot drop of the falls.

At 1:45, I decided to give up and start back to the car. I was tired and hungry, and frustrated because I hadn’t found two of the three caches. I got out of the valley, climbing back up that narrow and treacherous path, and made my way along the Bluff Line trail until I was near the top of the mountain.

I picked out a nice flat rock and ate my lunch in solitude. Afterwards, I wandered far back into the trees to hide my geocache because really, hiding it right on the path is just boring. I found a hollowed-out old tree that was perfect for my needs.

The view from where the cache is is pretty, and would be prettier if not for all the dang trees.

I made my way the last 1.5 miles to the car, and came home.