Melody is in the center of the group of people in the background of the photo above, in the green raincoat. At first I was ticked that the camera focused on the leaves in the foreground, but then I thought it looked kind of cool after all. After the hike, we paused for a picnic lunch.
Melody brought some fried rice in a plastic bento box, and I shared my blueberries and strawberries with her. She also ate most of my pistachio chips I got from Costco. And yeah, she's wearing one of my knit hats (Foliage).
Before arriving at Thurman Flats, I stopped at a ranger station and bought an annual Adventure Pass, which is required for parking out here in the boondocks; I later found out that my brother had two and could have given me one! He used to work in Big Bear, so of course I should have asked him first...
After eating, we had time to go looking for about three geocaches. I had the girls take turns using my GPS device to try to locate them. The first cache (a microcache with just a log to sign) was right on the highway stuck in a reflective pole behind an "ICY" sign. Maybe half the cars that passed by honked at us; I wasn't sure if it was because there were eleven of us standing on the side of the highway, or because the majority of us were teenage girls. The second (another microcache) was stuck in a railing overlooking a creek, but because the girl with the GPS was having trouble reading it, Melody was almost ready to climb down the cliff towards the creek. For the final one, the GPS coordinates were off by about 10 feet, but the girls were pretty excited when the cache was found, because this one was an ammo can full of trade items, tracking bugs, and geocoins. Melody took two geocoins and hopes to deposit them in a new cache when she travels to New York in a few days. In exchange she left some Mardi Gras-type beads that she picked up from another cache earlier this year.
It would be another day and a half before the first big storm of the season finally arrived, bringing snow to the higher elevations.
The storm had a break Tuesday, and then revved up for Round 2 on Wednesday. Whenever I take a photo of the snowy local mountains, I usually try to get a palm tree or two in the shot. :-)
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