Day 2 – Aug 5 – William’s Lake to Anahim Lake

Yesterday we drove from home to William’s Lake and today we travelled over 350 km to Anahim Lake where we will stay for five nights.  We have taken a road trip/geo-caching holiday for two weeks.  Anahim Lake has four “power trails” nearby with about 525 caches.  We hope to find quite a few of them.

We left our hotel about 10 am, bought a few groceries for our lunches on the trail, then took the turn onto Highway 20 West.  We decided we had time to find some caches along the way.  I had loaded all of the ones in the area onto my GPS (cell service was gone about a half hour out of William’s Lake and won’t return until we get back to the same spot in two weeks) so if I located one near the road we would stop and try find it.  Many of the caches along this highway are on hiking trails or quad trails and they would have taken us too long to get to – presuming we even could.

We accidentally drove by a few but we will try pick them up on the way back.  We did find seven.  Some of them were quite a hike into the bush so they took awhile to find, log, and return to the truck.

  Becher’s Pond

Crossing the Chilcotin River on a one lane bridge.

We drove off Highway 20 to go find a cache that was “a short distance” off the highway up a hill that offered a lovely view of the Chilcotin River and Valley.  Well,  the ‘short distance’ was about 15 km up a gravel road. And we searched all over the place without finding the cache.  The view was nice though.

Walking off into the wilderness in seach of a cache.

We had never seen a cache container like this before. You had to pull down the plunger on the bottom far enough so when you released it the force of the plunger would eject the log container out the top; where you had to be very quick to grab it or it would drop down again.  Very ingenious!

One cache was hidden over 300 meters into the forest at the exact confluence of Longitude 52 and Latitude 125. Why someone felt the need to put one there I am not sure but we discovered sand dunes in the forest and after climbing to the top of a very steep hill we located the cache.  Fortunately John has a very good sense of direction so we were able to walk right back to the truck.

It was getting on into late afternoon so we decided to just drive the remaining 40 km into Anahim Lake without taking the time to find more caches. We didn’t want to get in too late for dinner.  The lodge has set hours for each meal and there are virtually no other places to eat.  Anahim Lake is NOT a big place.  However the next cache showing in my GPS was hidden at this log cabin; and it was right beside the road – so we stopped to find it.

We are spending five nights at the Eagle’s Nest Lodge located 11 km west of the community of Anahim Lake on the lake shore.  It is a gorgeous, quiet spot with a lovely view across the lake.  We enjoyed a delicious dinner for our 44th wedding anniversary and then headed back to our room to log our cache finds of the day, check pics and write a blog.

 I don’t promise to write everyday but I will as often as time permits.