OVEREDGE - Maphead - page 148

ing me with the kind of sour, victorious expression you'd expect from someone who just
caught a strange man examining his garbage.
“Uh, what are you doing back there?” he wants to know, and I have to admit I can see
his point.
I clamp my GPS to my ear. “Oh, sorry, I had to pull over and take this call. I sort of
wander around when I'm on the phone.”
He stands watching me with arms folded until I'm back in my car and out of his parking
lot.
What was I doing back there? Geocaching is supposed to be an excuse to explore the
world's hidden beauty spots, but I've made it from a means into an end. And because I'm
a city dweller, most of my caching has been of the decidedly unscenic urban variety: “mi-
crocaches” dangling down manholes, magnetic “nanocaches” no bigger than Tylenol pills
stuck to bike racks and garbage cans and ballfield bleachers, even one disguised as a wad
of chewing gum and stuck under a table on a sub shop's patio. I decide to broaden my ho-
rizons: I need to get out of the city.
Browsing the Groundspeak website, I discover a cache just two hours north of me that
comes highly recommended. It sits above a little-known waterfall on the Nooksack River
not far from the Canadian border. Only a handful of brave souls have found the cache: its
Geocaching.com terrain rating is the maximum five stars, which would be a first for me.
“THISISAVERYDIFFICULTSLOPE,”warnsthehider'sdescriptioninsterncapitallet-
ters. “DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS CACHE ALONE.” He also reminds me that I'm under
no obligation to seek his cache, that he assumes no liability in the event of my untimely
death or mangling disfigurement, etc. No more Dumpster diving—this is the cache for me!
Thatweekend,IdigoutmyhikingbootsandsomeoldworkglovesanddriveuptoHard
Scrabble Falls. I've never been on this highway before, so I've brought some printouts of
other nearby geocaches I might pass along the way. But the five-star cache is the first or-
der of business. The bottom of the falls is a short, easy hike up a dry creek bed from the
trailhead, and the morning is soul-scrubbingly beautiful. It's early spring in the Northwest,
the kind of day that seems gray and wintry until the sun breaks through the clouds for a
momentandrevealsthattheseeminglydeadblacktreesareactuallycoveredwithamillion
specks of the clearest, most limpid green. January to June in just seconds.
This is no Psycho Urban Cache #13, but by my standards, at least, it's pretty extreme.
There's no trail up the steep slope south of the falls; instead, some thoughtful local has left
a system of tree-anchored ropes to help visitors up the more vertical sections. I make it up
the 430-foot zigzag with much huffing and puffing but no life-threatening scrapes, and I
count the stair steps of roaring water as I pass them: six, seven, eight. By the time I finally
make it to the ninth cascade, where the cache is hidden, my arms and legs are sore. That's
what I came for, I tell myself—after all, you can't spell “geocaching” without “aching”!