Our second find of the day was Trecking with the Dinosaur by RattlerClan (GC1D0G5). It was near the Interpretative Center we were at two days ago, but had not been part of my pocket query. This cache involved a little bit of a walk, and the animal bones all over the place were a little disconcerting. I had read the hint earlier and had forgotten about it until I saw the cache location.
Soon we were in Baker City and made quick work of three micros that we missed on our last trip. Since it was still early, we headed over to the Baker Truck Corral for breakfast. It is a long-standing tradition of mine to stop there while in town and order corned beef hash and scrambled eggs. The hash is the best I've ever eaten.
Our next destination was Phillips Lake Reservoir. This is a popular boating and fishing area located aobut 16 miles southwest of Baker City along the southern part of the Elkhorn Scenic Byway. The first cache on the list was I'm All Washed Up! by cache-n-dash (GC18WGN). This was an interesting puzzle cache I had worked out the day before. The container was different than I expected (it was recently replaced). After finding the cache, I asked my Dad if he thought we would see any bears out here.
The next cache was My First Moun10bike Geocoin #19 by cache-n-dash (GC13ZTW). This involved a solitary hike up the side of a mountain while my Dad waited in the truck. There was supposedly a trail, but I didn't see it.
It took the good part of an hour to get up there and back, and since I had no cell signal, my Dad worried that I'd get lost. No such luck, though. I used the GPSr track log to find my way back to the truck. Our third stop was interesting, in part, because my Dad had never seen a cache hide like it. The Dump Station by rednil (GC15PGD) was out in the middle of a field to the southwest of the reservoir. We both got a good laugh out of the hiding place. Think porcelain. There was another cache on the east side of the lake, but once again, I didn't have the coords for it.
That was all of the caches for the Phillips Lake Reservoir area, so we headed back north along Hwy. 7 to a side road that would take us off into the mountains. I kind of dreaded this part because some of these Forest Service roads would be in pretty bad shape and my street maps might not be good enough to get us around. The first cache in the area was simple enough - My First Moun10bike Geocoin #20 by jeron (GC1500K) was practically a park and grab. Next, I plotted a course for 6513 - Elk Creek Weather Station by cache-n-dash (GC1CP26). The road for this was not on my paper map, but surprisingly my GPSr gave us a route. Since it didn't show all of the FS roads, we had to backtrack a time or two. We saw a fast-moving coyote near the coords. There was no swag in this one, so I left a witch doll that I had taken form the previous cache (it was too full to close). We spent some time admiring the view of the valley before heading off.
I had one more cache on the list, but although we found the right route, the road was impassable with our truck, so we decided to call it a day. Even though I had a trackfile, we nearly got lost winding our way out of the woods. Once we found our way back to the highway, however, it was smooth sailing back home. We did make a side trip to La Grande, where I treated us to some Dairy Queen ice cream and we got the truck washed at a place where attractive young women do the washing.
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Looking back at the area now (7/24), I see at least 7 new caches in Baker City and two near Phillips Lake Reservoir. Cool!
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