After attending the graduation of our grandson, we took a week to go visit friends at WishPoosh campground near Roslyn. Expecting it to be hot (it always is in eastern Washington in the summer) we were unpleasantly surprised to find it overcast, cool (in the 50's), a few sprinkles, and very breezy. Ha! If we'd stayed home in Puget Sound country the temps were in the 80's that week.We enjoyed hiking around and seeing Lake Cle Elum at it's highest. The lake holds water to be used to irrigate crops and was still full. Consequently, there was a barricade across the road to Picnic Island where we hiked last year. It takes just a few weeks of water usage for access to the island which is a peninsula by then
Didn't see any deer or bear. Even the birds were out of the area for the week - - - we found out why when a hawk buzzed our campsite. We enjoyed visiting with our friends, helped them clean up the campsites after the weekend, went out for pizza, read a lot, and geocached!In the day area, is a geocache rated a "2" for difficulty. Our handy dandy GPS took us within 4' of where the cache should have been hidden but we never found it. We went out a 2nd day with a rake to hopefully uncover the buried cache but still no luck. Guess we need a little more experience before tackling a cache with a "2" rating.Luckily, we did find another geocache in Ronald. It was hidden behind the bark in a stump. The GPS took us real close and the geocache hint from the Geocache website helped.
People have been geocaching since around 2003 when handheld GPS's were developed to be used by hikers. Read all about it at Early GPS wasn't much help to hikers and boaters as the government cranked in a varying differential to mess up accuracy so that USofA enemies couldn't find the exact position of targets. Well, programmers figured out how to calculate this differential by taken a known position and noting the difference. The government finally figured out that it wasn't accomplishing much by adding this differential so stopped it. So now the fun begins. Geocaches are as small as film containers and many are as big as ammo boxes. We've found 6 so far and got skunked on one. Of the 6, one was behind a loose stone, another behind loose bark in a stump, one in a bird feeder and another in a sprinkler box. The small geocaches have a log for finders to sign, the larger ones have "trade items" also called geo-junk or SWAG (Stuff We All Get). Many items for kids and some traveling items that a geocacher takes from one cache and deposits in another.There are 842,869 active geocaches around the world (this changes minute by minute). Within 5 miles of home, there are 248! Don't think with that number that we'll ever run out of caches to look for. It's fun to go see new places and be challenged to find these. A great excuse to drive down roads we've never been before.
