Friday,
August 14, 2015 I MADE IT! Everett, WA
Talk on the porch at the rustic
hotel was of additional road closings as the Oregon wildfires spread. Later I’d
learn from Maggi that they had made the news and the smoke was visible on her
national weather map. Last night I’d laboriously determined that Rt. 26 would actually
take me closer to the Original Stash Tribute Plaque, my next must-have
geocache, than I-84 would have. This morning the topic of conversation was Rt.
26 being closed somewhere west of the town of Prinesville, some fifty-plus
miles away.
I walked down to the town café and
enjoyed a breakfast of two huge blueberry pancakes with bacon. Chatting with
the locals, I was still wondering what to do. Back to Plan A, I decided. If Rt.
26 was still closed, Rt. 97 and Rt. 197 led north from Prinesville to I-84.
Then I’d turn on the Garmin and let it guide me from there. Of course,
Prinesville is about the southernmost Rt. 26 goes, and the distance to I-84
from there was as far as I’d already come on Rt. 26. But you can’t argue with
closed roads.
About an hour later I got to
Prinesville, and, sure enough, Rt. 26 was closed west of there. Smoke was clearly
visible, a low-lying haze everywhere, thickest to the west and south. I turned
north, and veered left onto Rt. 197 in a few miles.
This has got to be the worst, most white-knuckle
stretch of narrow, switchbacked, terrifying pieces of rough roadway ever built.
For someone with acrophobia, I can only say that I longed to give up, pull
over. Two things stopped me: I was mostly on the outer edge of the road and
pulling over was either not feasible (no shoulder) or, at the few emergency
pull-outs, it would just take me closer to that breath-stopping drop. And,
number two, I knew that I would either have to eventually move the car down the
road, back up the road, or die there in the pull-off afraid to move. This was,
apparently, the Deschutes Gorge. I’ve heard this river is great fishing, but I
never want to go back there as long as I live. It was only marginally better
climbing out than descending in. The drivers behind me were exceedingly
frustrated by my cowardly 20 MPH all the way through that stretch. As one might
guess, I sure didn’t make time getting to I-84 and the horrid town of The
Dulles. Or something like that. There, when I stopped for gas, some kind soul
pointed out I had a good reason for my handling problems on those switchbacks:
my left rear tire was almost flat. I’d been watching that one for several days
and just kept forgetting to top it off.
My nerves were totally shot, I was
weak and shaking, and no matter how many quarters I pumped into the air
machine, I just could not hold the air nozzle firmly enough to the tire stem to
get any air into that tire. The service station guys were singularly unhelpful.
At last I admitted defeat and programmed Minerva to lead me to a AAA repair
shop. Heartbreakingly, she led me back east to the very intersection of I-84
and Rt. 197. And the guy couldn’t do anything.
Well, not exactly. He gave me very
exact directions to a place called Shwab’s Tires and they were just as good as
he’d promised. I waited less than half an hour, they did not find a puncture
but replaced the valve stem (and cap, which I’d absent-mindedly stuck in a
pocket) and had me on the road again before 4. (This is now Pacific time.) The
highway now was running along the Columbia River, which is one of the most
impressive waterways I’ve ever seen. The brisk wind which has been spreading
the fires so rapidly was churning up whitecaps on water that was already wild,
wide, and fast. Fish in THAT? No way. The Hood River came in after awhile which
augmented the flow and calmed it, just a little. This was very beautiful, but I
was in no mood to appreciate it. I had one more cache to find, and a film
festival in Seattle this evening.
I turned on the Garmin. 143 miles to
the cache. Motor on! An hour later, we were very close to Portland and I
checked again. Still 143 miles, and due north! How was that possible?? I pulled
off and checked my settings. Somehow the Garmin had switched destinations to
the Headquarters Cache in Seattle. Re-checking, I found the Original Stash
Tribute Cache was twenty miles south.
Now came the infuriating business of
following the GPS compass needle many miles on unfamiliar roads. I found Rt.
26, but turned onto another freeway that seemed closer to the line, but
actually veered east shortly. Then I zigzagged back through small towns and
semi-rural neighborhoods, thwarted by roads that turned the wrong way or led
down into some remote area and ended. At one point I glimpsed a river, and with
the Garmin reading 3 ½ miles in that direction I knew the cache was across the
water. I had to find a bridge. Then I had to find a road going roughly the
right direction. I got within a tantalizing mile of the cache when the road
turned west again. Expanding Minerva’s map showed an intersection and a
parallel road. Finally the numbers were steadily counting down, switched to
yards instead of miles. I confidently made a left turn onto a
hairpin-switchbacked rural road. Yards turned to feet, and I spotted a pulloff
ahead with three cars and just barely room for Bruce. This was it.
Geocaching’s
History page describes it thus: “On May 2, 2000, at approximately midnight,
eastern savings time, the great blue switch controlling selective availability was pressed.
Twenty-four satellites around the globe processed their new orders, and
instantly the accuracy of GPS technology improved tenfold. Tens of thousands of
GPS receivers around the world had an instant upgrade. For GPS enthusiasts, this was definitely a cause for
celebration. Internet newsgroups suddenly teemed with ideas about how the
technology could be used.
“On May 3, one such enthusiast, Dave
Ulmer, a computer consultant, wanted to test the accuracy by hiding a
navigational target in the woods. He called the idea the "Great American
GPS Stash Hunt" and posted it in an internet GPS users' group. The idea
was simple: Hide a container out in the woods and note the coordinates with a
GPS unit. The finder would then have to locate the container with only the use
of his or her GPS receiver. The rules for the finder were simple: "Take
some stuff, leave some stuff."
On May 3rd he placed his own
container, a black bucket, in the woods near Beavercreek, Oregon, near
Portland. Along with a logbook and pencil, he left various prize items
(including the notorious Original Can of Beans). He shared the waypoint of his
"stash" with the online community on sci.geo.satellite-nav: N 45°
17.460 W 122° 24.800
“Within three days, two different
readers read about his stash on the Internet, used their own GPS receivers to
find the container, and shared their experiences online. Throughout the next
week, others excited by the prospect of hiding and finding stashes began hiding
their own containers and posting coordinates. Like many new and innovative
ideas on the Internet, the concept spread quickly - but this one required leaving
your computer to participate.
“Within the first month, Mike
Teague, the first person to find Ulmer's stash, began gathering the online
posts of coordinates around the world and documenting them on his personal home
page. The "GPS Stash Hunt" mailing list was created to discuss the
emerging activity. Names were even tossed about to replace the name
"stash" due to the negative connotations of that name. One such name
was "geocaching."
“Geocaching, first coined by Matt
Stum on the "GPS Stash Hunt" mailing list on May 30, 2000, was the
joining of two familiar words. The prefix geo, for Earth, was used to
describe the global nature of the activity, but also for its use in familiar
topics in gps such as geography. Caching, from the word cache, has two
different meanings, which makes it very appropriate for the activity. A French
word invented in 1797, the original definition referred to a hiding place
someone would use to temporarily store items. The word cache stirs up
visions of pioneers, gold miners, and even pirates. Today the word is still
even used in the news to describe hidden weapons locations.
The second use of cache has
more recently been used in technology. Memory cache is computer storage
that is used to quickly retrieve frequently used information. Your web browser,
for example, stores images on disk so you don't have to retrieve the same image
every time you visit similar pages.
The combination of Earth, hiding,
and technology made geocaching an excellent term for the activity.
However the "GPS Stash Hunt" was the original and most widely used
term until Mike Teague passed the torch to Jeremy Irish in September 2000.”
Yes, this activity went from zero to
global in four months. And in the very spot I was parked, that first “stash”
was hidden, starting the game, over fifteen years ago. Unfortunately, the
original container is long gone, but cachers who care about their own history
got permission to place a tribute plaque on the site, and hide a commemorative
geocache within fifty feet so cachers can log that they were here and paid
tribute. The plaque itself already has a mythos, supposed to enhance the
performance of any handheld GPS placed on it, and may even improve the owner’s
geosenses. Naturally Nermal got into the picture I took of my Garmin resting on
the plaque. I could already feel the surging tingle of my geosenses as we headed
for the actual geocache.
Or maybe that was my danger-sense.
This involved a steep climb up a beaten-dust trail, 45 degrees in the easy
spots, through the woods. I crawled most of the way, signed the log, took
another picture with Nermal, took a picture for two guys that were there (the
place was swarming with cachers come to pay homage), and dropped my ASPGBX
coin. Then amused everyone by butt-skidding the whole way down, adding Oregon
dust to the Utah dust in my poor camo pants, and completing the ruin of my former
dress Crocs.
I could not linger. For one thing,
the pull-off had overflowed and people were parked as far away as the turn-off
and were walking up that steep road. For another, Seattle was an estimated 163
miles away. Since I had no idea where I was (except in the purely micro sense
of knowing what cache I was at) I programmed Minerva with the street address of
my hotel in Washington. I immediately knew I was in trouble. Seven hours? To
drive (roughly) 163 miles as the crow flies? Ridiculous! She even gave me two
options, claiming the direct route she’d normally use had the reputation of
high traffic volume. Okay, I clicked on the “avoid traffic” route. Which turned
out to be not so low-traffic around Portland, and once I got to Washington
State, took me on a rural-road detour similar to Oregon Rt. 197 through Mt. St.
Helens and Rainier State Parks. Of course, it started to rain the minute I got
off the high-speed road, and the sun set around the time I stopped for gas and
a mediocre pre-made sandwich (my first food since those humongous pancakes) and
re-set the routing mode on Minerva to “most use of freeways.” I was guided to
Tacoma, adjacent to Seattle, and back onto I-5. There I began to have the
horrible notion that something had gone wrong with my hotel booking. We sped
past the airport, which I knew from maps was considerably north of Geocaching
Headquarters. On, and on, to finally be directed to exit in Everett, which
indeed proved to be over 30 miles from HQ, not the quarter-mile the AAA agent
had said. It was a little after 10 p.m., I’d been on the road 14 hours, and the
hotel had given away my room despite my call from Wyoming. I was furious, and I
think the desk clerk sensed it despite my self control. She ‘found’ a room in
the supposedly-booked hotel, and I dragged my luggage up the elevator and here
I am! As close as I’ll get until tomorrow. The only bright spot, if it can be
called one, is that the film festival had been cancelled because the venue was
in a park and it was both raining and windy.
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