Trying to capture the beauty of Oregon’s premiere coastal botanical garden draped with 275,000 lights – at night – is a difficult challenge for photographers. My wife wanted an evening to work on her skills in these lighting conditions and I wanted to hunt a newly placed geocache nearby,  so armed with our respective “equipment” …. off we went.

View of the Gardner's House at Shore Acres

This is a great place and time of year to look for geocaches. The daytime hours will present nearly 50 caches  to hunt in some of the most spectacular scenery along the entire Pacific coastline. Some will take you to rugged cliff overlooks, some down to sandy beaches and some along trails through thick spruce forest.

Make sure to return to the gardens a few minutes before sunset for that magic 30-minute window when the beauty of the carefully trimmed vegetation in the fading natural light is enhanced by the brilliance of Christmas lights making for photo’s with detail and a crisp “pop”!

Shore Acres Performance Pavilion

By the way, I did find that geocache – it was the only cache in this vicinity I hadn’t already found. The name of the cache, Berliner’s Big Bifurcation, has unique meaning in the south coast geocaching community. Berliner is the name of one of the pioneer geocachers in the area and he taught the rest of us many new botanical terms in his geocache descriptions …. like bifurcation (basically a forked tree). This cache was recently placed by another cacher in the very spot Berliner had one hiding before it eventually went missing.

We had a fun afternoon at one of our favorite places. After all, it was at this same garden we exchanged marriage vows now these dozen years! For the curious, you will find the exact spot when you see the “salmon” circling a large tree trunk.