Sunday, June 07, 2009
Challenging Weekend - Day Two
Day two began much like day one - EARLY! Broke camp and on the road by 0545! Today’s planned route - south to Klamath Falls, short diversion east on Highway 140 to Bly Mountain then back to the coast by way of Medford.
We started the morning by taking a side-trip west to Diamond Lake where we had a nice view of Mt. Thielsen (though the peak was cloud covered this morning).
Once back on 97, we picked up a few roadside caches before reaching the highlight of our morning adventures….Collier Memorial State Park. This park had several interesting features including a logging museum, the Oux Kanee Overlook and the headwaters of Spring Creek. There were two of the Oregon history challenge caches here. One at the Oux Kanee Overlook which had spectacular views of the southern Oregon Cascades and the gorgeous, crystal-clear waters of Spring Creek below. The second cache took us down to the bubbling source for Spring Creek…complete with hoards of mosquitos!
View at Oux Kanee Overlook
Spring Creek and Meadow
Three more DeLorme pages plus Klamath county!
We came through Klamath Falls around noon and after a late breakfast we headed east to pick up one more Delorme page in the area of Bly Mountain. Rod called Bad Duck and pleaded with him to save a snapshot of us for the webcam cache located there - thanks Darren! Drove a little further east to claim a DeLorme page then headed back to Klamath Falls.
Before leaving Klamath Falls, we needed to find another history challenge cache near the community of Keno just outside of town. That required a twenty minute hike up to a viewpoint where we could see many cinder cones to the south. We made our way back to Highway 140 and began the trip home but not before finding several more roadside caches giving us two more DeLorme pages.
By early evening, we had passed by Lake of the Woods and dropped down into Eagle Point. From there we took the Sam’s Valley road west to Gold Hill in order to pick up one more DeLorme page. Found three caches in the area then headed back to Coos Bay. Arrived home around 10pm - tired!
Final statistics for the weekend:
1100 miles
Nearly 50 caches overall
17 DeLorme pages
5 Counties
4 History challenge caches
What a crazy weekend! Even though I’d rather not “speed-geocache” this way very often, it did have the benefit of piquing my interest to come back and further explore and enjoy several locations such as Collier State Park, Crooked River Gorge and Pine Mountain.