I look forward each year to my family reunion in Boardman, OR along the shore of the Columbia River. Beside the obvious “reconnect-time”, it’s a welcome break from the summer wind and fog of the coast. Several parks and trails to explore. And, of course, there are usually new geocaches to hunt. This year didn’t disappoint!
Each year in June my family gathers in Boardman, OR (Morrow Co.) to camp and generally catch up on each others lives. With todays plethora of social media tools keeping us informed – by the minute it seems – these reunions are becoming less about catching up and more about maintaining personal contact. Hugs are soooo much better than tweets! Walks along a river-side trail are sooooo much better than Google Earth virtual tours! Know what I mean?
With that sentiment in mind, my geocaching hunts for this trip took the form of short, nearby excursions with family members yielding good conversation, reminiscing and yes, signing the occasional cache logbook (if we found it!).
One morning walk with my folks took us along the Columbia River Heritage Trail. This is a twelve mile recreational trail paralleling the Columbia River and connecting the communities of Irrigon and Boardman. It was developed as part of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial commemoration in 2003 and may expand to 25 miles connecting Umatilla and Gilliam county. An impressive sight along the path was the historic Captain Al James tugboat (built 1939) permanently dry-docked. We found a small geocache at this location.
Another walk further east along this path brought us right down to the river edge where we spotted large American Pelicans, killdeer, Great Blue Heron and Egrets just to name a few. Slightly more than a mile from camp was our turnaround point where a geocache lay hidden in a pile of rocks. On the return trip we spotted the nest of a Bullock’s Oriole hanging in typical fashion from a branch of a poplar tree.
Hat Rock State Park
My wife Pat and I struck out one morning by ourselves to nearby Hat Rock State Park for photo ops and a couple of geocaches. The central feature of this refreshing green oasis is the 70 foot basalt monolith for which the park is named. It is an impressive site and must have caught the eye of the Lewis and Clark expedition party. I did find one of the two geocaches in the park. It was a short distance off a trail tucked under some sage brush. I was quite surprised and amused to find in the log book the signature of a fellow geocacher from my own town of Coos Bay! Small world! He and I had a good chuckle about how different itineraries sometimes place people in the same location looking for the same geocache – even 400 miles from home.
Hat Rock State Park
One afternoon the family chit-chat began to wane with the growing heat – or was it because we were beginning to repeat our stories? Whatever the reason, my dad and I decided to take a short drive to find a cache that had intrigued us with it’s title – Hybrid Cache. Hybrid? What’s up with that? We followed the GPS right to “ground zero” (GZ) and began searching from bush to bush. I finally made a lucky poke with my hiking staff and heard the familiar clunk of wooden stick hitting metal ammo can! We had found Hybrid Cache and soon realized why such a title. The container was a “hybrid” between a common Tupperware-type box with the lid of an army surplus ammo can glued to the top and with moss, leaves and sticks glued to that! It was very difficult to see even when looking right at it – well done, cache hider. Now we had a new story to tell back at camp!
Captain Al James Tugboat in Boardman
We are looking forward to next years reunion to further explore the heritage trail along with another trail I spotted at Hat Rock. In addition, there is a place a few miles away that showcases Oregon Trail wagon ruts preserved from pioneer times. Very Cool Stuff!
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Oregon is such a diverse state!
I miss geocaching!