Redwood Forest Trainwreck?

Heading to Willits California to check out the area.  BIG BEAR will be relocating here soon and starting a new job.  Yay!! A new area to cache. Ran the pocket query’s and loaded up the Garmin‘s, I recently discovered how to load more than 10,000 POI’s into my Garmin 60Csx and after I showed BIG BEAR how to do it I think he has more than 20,000 POI’s in his Garmin 60Csx.  Wherever we go we have all the caches that are nearby on our handhelds and we are ready to cache!!

Jumped into the Jeep and made  our way south on I-5 to Hwy 20 west to Hwy 101 and then North to Willits, caching all the way.

Saturday morning after taking care of the new job introductions and tours we head off towards Mendicino and find the Redwoods Series to cache, with our goal being a Waterfall Virtual that is 12 miles from Willits.  We competed the Redwoods #1 through #15: GC2W0H1 Redwoods #1 (Traditional Cache) created by Skycatcher  and then turn around to find the road that takes us to this Virtual:  GC9122 Hidden Waterfall (Virtual Cache) by vallen2

We found the Virtual and it looked like an easy walk to the Waterfall,  wooden stairs started us down the trail to the Chamberlain Creek Waterfall Trail which turned into a nice leisurely walk through the forest.  The cache page said there would be about a 200′ drop, we were on our way and could hear the waterfall,  so I was getting excited the closer we got.  We got about 100 feet down the trail and uh-ohhhh…. we found this:

Redwood Trainwreck

BIG BEAR finds the Redwood Train wreck

Well, what do you we do now?  BIG BEAR says “I think we can get over this”   I am not so sure though, I am not sure that it is safe to even try, but BIG BEAR has already disappeared, so I follow and I find him crawling over, under and through the splintered mess of Redwoods that completely wiped out the trail.  You didn’t know if you were stepping on foliage that could give away underneath you and you could drop 50 feet, so we went slow and very carefully through the downed Redwoods.  Some of the snags were pretty sharp and I didn’t want to be impaled on them. Redwoods are known for being big trees and these were not small trees!

But after about 15 minutes we did make it through and found the trail, and the Waterfall!

Chamberlain Waterfall

Chamberlain Waterfall

There was a Traditional Cache to get too and BIG BEAR and I jumped across the little stream grabbed that cache and BIG BEAR went and posed for pictures behind the Waterfall… what a fun hike, complete with all caches, waterfalls and a little of the unexpected adventure you find out on the trail when you Geocache!

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