Touring Grass Valley

October 25, 2008: It’s been a while since we have posted any of our geocaching experiences. We have certainly been looking for caches all this time, I just haven’t written about anything. Today we are off to cache in Grass Valley and Nevada City. Cynthia & Mike (Geo-Jeeper) are joining us. It should be an adventuresome day.

We never know what we might encounter in this area. PO and rattlesnakes will be at the top of our alert list. Let’s hope we don’t encounter either. So far we have been lucky. Only the berry bushes have attacked us. We have followed some of the back roads into some interesting places. The environment is woodsy and you think you are far away from everywhere--not so. There are an incredible number of houses in this area. Still, we found beautiful countryside and plenty of places to find hidden caches.

The caches we have found are interesting. Some were challenging. One was a rifle shell. It was in a hole drilled in the bottom of a 1+ inch branch. The branch was placed in a hole drilled into a pine tree. We finally spotted the branch and pulled it out. The bottom of the branch was covered with pitch. So much pitch, in fact, we almost missed the rifle shell stuck in the bottom. Once we cleared away the pitch, we had to use brute force to pull out the shell. Eventually we were able to sign the log. This was a challenging hide. Fortunately, we were up for the challenge.

We were driving on roads such as Clover Valley, Dog Bar Road, Rattlesnake road, town talk road (the early leaders of Grass Valley and Nevada City would meet here to discuss town business), burma road (no burma shave ads), whispering pines, and many many more. They all led us to Round Table Pizza for a geocaching event. Like all the other events, we were able to visit with fellow geocachers and learn more secrets to finding caches.

The day is ending and we are heading home. The wine and dinner awaits us. We will be back tomorrow to see what other roads we can find. We will have to wait to see where they will lead us.


October 26, 2008: We came back! We covered more back roads. We discovered some of the most interesting areas on these back roads. We chatted with alpacas, drove by llamas, donkeys, and horses, and passed field after field filled with horses. We also wandered through old structures. At one point we were looking for a cache along an old wall made of rocks. On the other side of the road was another wall made of rocks. Do you think the road now goes through what used to be an old building? We tried to figure what type of building it could have been. Or, was it two separate buildings? We actually prefer the idea of one building--makes it more interesting that a road runs through it.

We covered the area south west of Grass Valley all the way out to Penn Valley and back. At one point we heard gun shots as we located a cache on a back road. We hollered and they hollered back and the shooting stopped. (It’s deer season you know). We quickly signed the log and headed back to the major roads. We avoided the real back back roads after that.

The day turned out to be worth the trip in more ways than one. At one of the caches, we met another geocacher (Alpha-super Dog). We asked him about a couple of caches that we were unable to find. He provided a few hints. Back we went and we were able to find the caches. We even rechecked some we didn’t have hints for and managed to find those as well! All in all, pretty fun day! Unfortunately the camera was back home!