Mortaine’s Blog

John and I went on another geocache today, to Echo Lodato. This one was a real hike! Whew!

Echo Lodato is in Scotts Valley. It’s one we’d planned on going to on Monday night, but it was late, I was tired, and when we rescheduled for Wednesday, it rained. Which is probably good– this is no trail for a night-time cache.

We left the house at about 10:00 with the dog and stopped on the way for breakfast and dog food supplies. Hammer stole a biscuit at the feed store, so we ended up buying a pound of those biscuits. Hey– he seemed to really like them!

The first part of the hike was kind of okay, although we had to be vigilant about poison oak, and I had to tread carefully because of the whole ankle/shoe situation. I have decided that I need better shoes for this kind of adventuring. Also, the GPS kept losing reception in the trees and hills. Yes, this was a very hilly trip.

The cache was somewhere on a .6-mile (or thereabouts– we’re pretty sure the sign lied about the distance) hike around a looped trail. But this was, for me, one heck of a steep trail. Yikes! Anyway, John of course had no trouble, but Hammer and I were both panting by the time we reached the road.

Yes, road. Near the top of the trail, there’s a road. No, we have no idea where it came from, but it seems to lead to the water tank facility for Scotts Valley. So, yes. We were tramping around suspiciously near our municipal water supply during Orange Alert Status/wartime. Whee.

Not that I care, you understand.

Anyway, we discovered that the cache had to be up on a little hill (very hard to get through the low-hanging branches), so we went off-trail a bit to get to it.

John found it fairly quickly and we opened it up to sign the log and perhaps trade for the lump of fool’s gold I’d brought.

John found a deception dollar. I’d seen someone logging these as a trade item, but wasn’t sure what they were. Apparently, it’s a kind of subversive anti-war trade item. John thought it would make a nice artifact from these dark days of American history. So we traded it for the fool’s gold, which was a very appropriate swap.

The hike back out was much easier going, and shorter (of course we took the long way around!). We ran into a person with her two off-leash dogs on the trail. Dammit– put your fucking leashes on your dogs, so I don’t have to worry about mine baring his teeth at yours. Yes, Hammer, rather tired from the trip by now, bared his teeth at one of the dogs. Well, the teeth he has left. Hammer does have the big ones in front still, which means he can still get into a pretty awful fight, you know.

Anyway, we quickly ignored/lost the woman-and-dogs and got back out to the parking lot. Where we promptly ran into a group of 4 people heading out for a geocache. And lo and behold: one of them was John’s former boss! So we had a quick little meet and greet, then went merrily back to the car (still there), and then home.

Hammer is already sacked out on my floor. I doubt he’s going to wake up for the rest of the day!