Patricia and I are in Portland this weekend primarily for a meetup with some PNW photographers and their annual Christmas photo print exchange but will get in some visiting with daughter Kim and her husband Andrew in addition to a full day excursion with photographer Darren White as he shows us around “his stomping grounds” across the river in the forests NE of Washougal and Battle Ground, WA.

Our photo shoot day started VERY early! Picked up Tracy Fawns at her motel then headed for sunrise shooting at Cape Horn east of Washougal. From there, Darren White led us into Dougan Falls on the Washougal River, Lucia & Moulton Falls on the East Fork Lewis River and finished the day shooting at a very cool old grist mill east of Woodland, WA. Long day for sure, but very fun! It gave us a taste of the sites and now we want to go back when we can spend more time at a slower pace exploring the scenery.

I was able to find a few caches as well:

WaSucally: Dougan Falls
Fishnic Park
Salmon Run
Big Foot Muggle

For a little background on what the Geocaching Triad is…..check out this blog post and the video found there.

Patricia and I had an opportunity to spend some time with our 10 year-old grandson recently while in the Seattle area. He has accompanied me on many geocaches from the age of 5 to the present and I knew he would want to help his ‘popop’ find the remaining two Triad caches. I had already found ORIGINAL STASH TRIBUTE PLAQUE in 2007 for my 1000th milestone cache as noted in this post. This trip I would get Mission 9: Tunnel of Light and Groundspeak Headquarters.

On our way to the APE cache

Yesterday we got up early and headed out of Seattle in the direction of Snoqualamie Pass for a hike to Mission 9: Tunnel of Light . This is also commonly called the APE Cache (click the link for more info). We saw lots of people on the Annette Lake trail but very few were going up toward the cache and tunnel as we were. Actually finding cache was a bit anticlimactic but it allowed us to take in the great scenery in the Snoququalamie Pass area.

Today we made our way down to Groundspeak Headquarters with time to have lunch at the much talked about Red Door before our 2pm appointment. A small group was already gathered in the Lily Pad lobby when we stepped out of the elevator. Grandson and I had a great time checking out the huge treasure chest of goodies and playing around with the interactive, live giant geocaching screen. Didn’t spot Signal the Frog but we had a very nice visit with the greeters and other visitors. Some of them were also there completing the Triad.

Very satisfying to have this geocaching accomplishment under my belt! Now if I could just finish off Oregon’s County and DeLorme challenges!