Three day weekends are just wonderful - just a whole different pace. Decompression is the order of the day.
Long weekends in Alaska have a special flavor - everyone leaves town. Those of us who stay behind are left with a quiet, lazy little community.
Or that's how it usually works. The weather forecast for this weekend was rain, rain, rain, and more rain. So most of the migrating hoards decided to stay home. And guess what? It barely rained at all! Which meant that it was a perfect weekend for geocaching!
I cached each of the three days - but Sunday was the hands down winner! The Ski Boy, Mary, Joe, and I did an epic three stage multicache that started in Anchorage's small boat harbor, went up to high high Bear Valley and then down to East Anchorage.
The Bear Valley stage was just killer fun. Bear Valley is at the base of the Chugach Mountain range. The homes up there tend to be homesteady abodes and the critter count is very high. It's not called Bear Valley for nothin'.
The cache coordinates took us in deep into the brush - which normally I avoid during the summer. Most bear-on-people attacks occur in thick brushy places. You can't see the bear and the bear can't see you until both of you are on top of each other. And you won't come out the winner in that little surprise encounter. As a result, I have a pretty rock solid policy about not doing heavy brush during the summertime.
However, I admit that on Sunday, I violated my policy - it helped that Joe and Mary were along - Peter stayed back to guard the car. The more folks stomping through the brush, the better. Bears don't tend to attack larger parties.
Anyhoo, we dived deep into the brush which was thick with the evil Devil's club and bugs. I was somewhat jumpy - there was bear scat absolutely everywhere. Fortunately, none of the piles were steaming.
Early in our bushwacking, I was separated from Joe and Mary and I managed to, all by myself, spook a big ol' grumpy snorty moose. Actually we spooked each other and we each jumped about 40 feet. The moose was decidedly unhappy with the encounter and I don't blame him. The brush is not a friendly place for anyone.
Anyhoo, we finally made it to cache without any further scary encounters - other than with all that devil's club. The cache was absolutely brilliant. We were greeted by a large blue plastic coffee mug hanging from a tree. We thought we'd nailed the cache. But when we opened the cache, nothing was there. Other than the spool of fishing line that was used to hang the mug. sigh...
So, we figured the mug was a decoy and spent the next 30 minutes looking high and low for the cache. Finally we went back to look at the mug and its suspension system. As we looked at it more closely, we saw that high up in the tree where the fishing line looped around a branch, there was a carabiner. We then all at once saw the fishing line leaving our tree and traveling about a hundred feet across a clearing to another tree. And lo and behold, there was the cache - suspended in the other tree! But how to get it down?
Mary saved us with a brilliant insight - the fishing line spool in the mug was probably what should be used to lower and then re-raise the cache. Ta da!!!!! We were able to lower the cache, sign the log, get the coordinates to the next cache, re-raise the cache, and skedaddle out there!
So, we were happily victorious and did not turn into bear food. Although the mosquitos definitely feasted on us.
Below are several pictures from our little adventure:
My spooked grumpy moose. He is definitely big:
Another grumpy moose shot - note the hackles:
Recent bear scat. Oh My!!!:
Mary and me at the coffee mug:
The cache in the tree!:
Grabbing the cache:
5:24:39 PM 
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