Cache Creek Wilderness Area

We decided to take a 4 day/ 3 night trip through the Cache Creek Wilderness Area, Nor Cal. We traveled the Red Bud trail into the Wilderness Area.

The trail seemed quiet with no else on the trail, until we got to Baton Flats. Here we came across four guys and two dogs spending Thanksgiving out on the trail. We spent a good 45 minutes shooting the breeze with these guys before pushing onward.

As you can see from the picture a more impressive group of beards would be hard to find.

The trail then led on into Wilson Valley which is where we spent our first two nights. This gave me the opportunity to teach Kat some basic camp craft. From setting up a tarp shelter to some basic camp cooking. In fact it gave me the chance to try something new on the culinary front. Camp Fire Corn Bread. This came out far better than I had expected. Now I feel like a true american frontiersman (Nah not really).

Where we camped is obviously a popular spot as there were a number of abandoned fire pits. This went against our philosophy of "leave no trace", but we used one of these fire pit and when we moved on we returned the area as close to natural as we could.

Upon exploring the area Kat discovered some strange stone towers built by someone with time and energy on their hands. There were a number of them near the waters edge. Kat couldn't help herself and had to add a stone to one of the towers.

This was only Kats second over night stay in the outdoors. Although it is the last few days of November the day-time weather was still warm enough for t shirts with the night-time temps getting colder each evening. On our final night out our drinking water had frozen and frost covered all our gear, but we still had a comfortable night sleep.

After a little instruction, Kat navigated us to our final camp site. This was the first time she had used map and compass to find her way. Although nervous at first she succeeded in finding our destination without a single wrong step. So BIG well done to her.

Not far from our final camp site we discovered that some beaver had been busy constructing a dam across the creek. This was my first experience of beavers as we don't have them in the UK. In fact there were a number of first for me in the Cache Creek area. I saw my first bald eagles, found bear sign near the water and added to that our nightly visits by coyotes who always stayed just out of camp fire range.

It was a fantastic way to spend a long weekend and something that we will be doing again soon.