From Skyline to the Sea

I embarked on a very cool adventure with a group from the GBA : an overnight hike starting at Saratoga Gap on Hwy 35 (Skyline Boulevard) and ending up at Waddell Beach, 30+ miles further down and going through Big Basin where we would spend the night.
This was my first backpacking experience and I had a blast.
It seems to be all downhill but we actually climbed more than 1700 feet total.
The first day was the mot challenging one, with most of the uphill and a very long downhill to Big Basin HQ on some exposed trails and hot sandstone formations. Only 2 caches found since I already found most of the caches along the trail months ago.
The camping part was very enjoyable. I learned a lot from the "pros" there.
The second day was a nice stroll in beautiful redwood groves, past Berry Creek Falls, and along Waddell Creek. It ended up in the marsh near the Ocean. We all grabbed the dozen or so caches along the way, including the "Big Basin to the Sea" challenge cache from 50sumtin who was hiking with us the second day (he actually initiated this section of the hike before it turned to a backpacking trip for some of us).
The weather was perfect, I was tired at the end but was feeling rather good. I'm totally ready for the next one!

1000

I found my 1000th cache this weekend.
For this milestone, I chose to hike up to Trenscendental Elevation, a cache at the top of a Big Sur peak, by Touchstone. Brutal was a word Touchstone used in the cache description, and brutal the hike was...
BuckyD, Kealia and British Invasion decided to join the fun. In short, the hike was about 11 miles long and featured an elevation gain of about 4300 feet. It took us about 9 hours. It started along the ocean on US 1, followed a very peaceful creek with lots of huge redwood, before it climbed to one of the ridge overlooking the creek. The elevation gain quickly became quite important and switchbacks appeared... An enormous numbers of switchbacks just to reach the Old Coast fire road that would lead us to Anderson Peak. Thriving poison oak and bugs made it even more challenging. It took us 4 hours to reach the road.Once there a nice easy walk led us to the cache. We left the road 2 hours after having reached it and did the whole hike down to our cars in about 3 hours. This was fast and fun for the first 2 hours but the last one was a real killer. The bodies were extremely tired, knees were no longer collaborating, minds were on autopilots and cramps appeared. After having waken up at 4:30 am, and hiked to the peak and down, the sight of our cars was really comforting.
This was a beautiful hike with gorgeous views of the ocean. A perfect memorable cache for an important milestone.