Green Mountain Cache Machine

Seattle from the summit of Green Mountain 12X zoom

My goodness what a stressful few weeks we are having. My husband has been diagnosed with severe emphysema and started oxygen this week. My husband is also just one write up away from losing both his job and his health insurance. My puppy broke her leg and my uncle has been diagnosed with metastasized prostate cancer in his brain. Then there was the stress of Christmas.. sigh....

It felt good to get out hiking this week and spend some time with a really nice person. They had a cache machine event on the Tahuya peninsula and I was invited to join. The Tahuya peninsula holds many memories for me, some wonderful, some unspeakable. I generally avoid the place, but today I went there anyway to hopefully make some new good memories out there.

logs a cache

I was picked up at 10 am and off we went. We only did two of the cache machine caches and then we headed for Green Mountain. First we went for the summit cache. I had searched for that cache before and not found it but today we found it.

My geodaching partner has excellent navigation skills and he led us around in a 8 mile circle around Green Mountain where we picked up several geocaches. This was his first time on Green Mountain and I thought I would be doing the guiding! It was nice to be able to just follow him around and not have to think too much. The last cache we grabbed was "bats in the belfry", I'm glad to have finally found the bats in the belfry cache and I'm so glad it was not in the cave, as the cave had about a foot of water in it. We got sundowned on the way out but we both had good headlamps and we were able to navigate the last 1.5 miles on unknown trails to get back down to the truck.  Oh my what an adventure we had up there.

Deep water in the scary tin mine at bats in the belfry cache

My ankle flopped over twice but did not hurt either time, my burned foot gave me no trouble at all. After the hike we went to the post cache machine dinner event but we got there late and only a few geocachers were left. The folks who did the cache machine got up to 60 caches! Frisbee and I only got 6 caches but we got away from the crowds.

After dinner,  we went to my  home and my husband brewed my geocaching partner "the best cup of tea" he has ever had in his life. Amazingly the house was clean and nothing had been destroyed while I was gone.

8 miles with about 1,400 feet total elevation gain.

A nice loop loaded with geocaches

our up and down route