As I logged my cache finds last night I realized that I had hit the 1000 caches mark, so when we found our first cache this morning John took this photo to immortalize the moment – even though this was actually cache 1003.John is only three caches behind me so we documented his 1000th find at cache #137 of the Beef Trail Bypass.The Beef Trail Bypass runs roughly parallel to Highway 20 but joins the highway east of Anahim Lake at a sawmill.  We had come up to the back side of the mill last night on our way back to our hotel only to find a chain across the road so we had to do a longer detour to get back.  We were hoping the road may be open on a Monday morning but it was chained on the highway side as well.  John tried to find a small local road that cut across to Beef Trail Bypass, but had no luck, so we had to drive all the way back through Anahim Lake and take the Kappan Mountain Road to the junction and then go down Beef Trail Bypass to the sawmill to begin our caches of the day. This whole process took about 40 minutes so we didn’t find our first cache until 10:45.

There are 140 caches hidden along this road and we started at number #140 and worked our way down.  This would put us on the west side of our resort so we wouldn’t have so far to drive back at the end of the day.

We made really good time finding the first 45 caches but then we discovered that a different type of tape had been used to tape the wire to the bottle for hanging  (we were back to the little purple-lid pill bottles again) and it did not adhere as well as the camo tape we saw on the Kappan Mountain Trail.  We used our new roll of duct tape to re-tape ones that were in danger of falling and also re-hung some that had come free of the tape altogether and were lying on the ground in the open.  This first aid exercise decreased our find rate significantly. It was a beautiful day today; bright blue sky and fluffy white clouds. This small tree had broken off and was leaning against another one squishing the bird’s nest –  but the cache hanging on it was still okay.At cache #34 we branched off the Beef Trail Bypass and drove about 3 km up to The Precipice and Hotnarko Falls.  The Precipice is called a mini Grand Canyon by the locals.  The cliff walls are 1000′ high in places.  The waterfall at this time of year is usually a trickle but with all the rain it was roaring as if it was spring run-off. The really cool thing was you could walk right up to the spot where the falls drop off.  They tumble down into the valley below through a narrow cut to feed into the marsh/river below.  Really amazing. There was a short series of caches on this little road called the Cookie Crumbs.  We found #11 at the parking lot and discovered that there was another cache called The Precipice that was on the other side of the waterfall gorge.

The cliff you see here is where we were standing at the top of the waterfall.

1oo meters or so down the road you could see two huge culverts that the water was diverted through and there was a blue-tape marked trail that led you to the other side of the waterfall and along the cliff face to the cache.  It was very cool to be able to stand beside the top of a waterfall, walk a short distance and then be able to clearly see the waterfall drop. I loved the patterns of the foam in the water on the valley bottom. By the time we found the other 10 Cookie Crumbs caches and rejoined the Beef Trail Bypass it was after 6 o’clock. We called it a day – total of 117 finds – and headed back to the Eagle’s Nest and dinner.