Vacation with family

For several years now, we have tried to take a week-long vacation together with our kids and grandkids. We have been to McCall, Idaho, Bend, Oregon, Lake Tahoe several times, Lake Almanor, and Mammoth Lakes. This year we chose something close by to keep the travel time for the little kids (and their parents) shorter. We rented a house in Dorrington (just east of Calaveras Big Trees State Park) from friends and found lots more to do in the area than I thought was available.

We hiked the easy trail at Big Trees, so the twins came along in their double stroller, and 2 year old Chase walked it. While not the largest redwood trees by any means, they are still truly impressive. After returning to the cabin, Dan and I set out for a short geocaching hike down by Arnold. This turned out to be more than we bargained for because they weren’t easy to find. In fact we came up empty on the one puzzle cache Dan was after. The puzzle gave two ways to check the answer, and they were inconsistent, so Dan wasn’t confident he had the right answer. We came back to find it on another day.

We drove east a little ways to Lake Alpine. Since Mark and Annmarie had just been there on a family camping trip weekend, they knew exactly where we could find a nice picnic spot next to a shallow area for the kids to splash and swim. While they did that, Dan and I hiked up to Inspiration Point for a couple of geocaches. An easy trail leads up, but one of the caches was placed along some cliffs that required some care to get to. The cache seemed to be missing (at least it was missing from where we thought it naturally belonged), but just before we gave up I checked 20′ or 30′ feet below and found it lying in plain sight. Evidently the wind, or a critter, knocked it out of its hiding place. Inspiration Point is well named because there are some incredible views of lakes and peaks and the Dardanelles.

After returning from the hike, a swim (or waist high wading) out to an island for one more cache felt good.

We drove down Board’s Crossing road to Sour Grass (where the road crosses the Stanislaus River) and played in the river for a while. Later, Dan and I came back for a puzzle cache that required us to go to Sour Grass first, and then down a narrow dirt road to the real Board’s Crossing to find the cache (we did).


We visited Elephant Lake and had a picnic lunch while we hiked around it. Elephant Rock dominated the skyline. After getting back to the cars, we split up and most went back, but Mark and I stayed to try to hike to the top of Elephant Rock for a cache. We knew from the description that it would be tough, and it was. We think there was only one way to get up without using ropes, and we found it. Still, the last 30′ or so were pretty exposed and I wasn’t confident enough to try. Mark made it to the top though.

We drove back down to Parrot’s Ferry road (almost back to Angels Camp) and hiked down to the natural bridge, which is more like a cave with a creek running through it. Dan has wanted us all to go there for years, so I’m glad we finally accomplished it. We swam through and back a couple of times (it is over my head in several places), and it was pretty cold. Carolyn and Elizabeth could tolerate being tummy deep in it for about a minute before they began to really shiver.

Later that day, Dan, Janet, the twins, Karen and I went back for the puzzle geocache near Arnold that we hadn’t found on a previous day. Dan did verify that he had the correct coordinates. The cache was hidden in the middle of knee-high bushes, so the only way to find it was to start a search grid. This was frustrating, but we finally found it.

With Mark and Annmarie, we rented two tandem open cockpit kayaks and went paddling on Utica Reservoir. Cortnie and Audree sat in the center of each kayak, and Chase sat in Annmarie’s lap. The lake has several islands, and we paddled around them, landing every so often for lunch and a geocache hunt. We all had fun.

One evening after dinner, Dan wanted to go find an unfound geocache that was a significant drive on dirt roads. I was tired, so Dan and Mark took my truck. They didn’t get back until about 10pm, and were frustrated because they kept running into locked gates. The next day Dan and I tried again first thing in the morning. We didn’t hit a locked gate, but a dead end, even though my GPSr indicated a through road. I think there was only one road option left, the one we didn’t try.

Links
—Dorrington vacation photo gallery