A name says a lot about a person or group. Sometimes it shares personalities, other times it depicts heritage, or origin.
Our name was birthed from the desire to have excitement. To share in an experience that was many times more than we could hope for. As we brainstormed about traveling coast to coast we began to realize we would be sharing one amazing adventure after another. That two families would be experiencing all that both countries had to offer for an entire year. That we would be visiting the ocean bordering both sides of our continent. From sea to sea. That's when the thought came. What if we had a name that shared our excitement, our longing for adventure and our goal of traveling from country to country or sea to sea. The idea began to take shape, morphing from a "sea" to a "C" and realizing the explosive connection of having four "C"s together. Thus C4 Adventures was born.
Of course we realized that we were thinking coast to coast, country to country, sea to sea and that we'd also be visiting the Arctic Ocean as well, adding yet another C, but we just couldn't get our heads around the mathematical equation that would be 7 C's (Arrr, that sounds like a piratey reference). Seven of them? We thought, "How would that fit in with a catchy name?", so we went with just the four.
We did realize that a name like C4 could be a bit explosive, but we thought hey, if we're going to get our name out there, we might as well do it with a bang!
As for the motorhome and a truck pulling a fifth wheel going over the edge, we tried to incorporate our two rigs into the logo and were thinking about how we took a wrong turn and got the motorhome stuck in the mud on our Geocaching adventure, but we couldn't think of how to show that easily in a logo so we thought, what if the truck was pulling the trailer right off the edge. It seemed to work so we went with it.

It all started August 2009 right after I was in a fatal 3 vehicle car accident. A young lady in her twenties was texting and driving when she failed to stop at a stop sign. She died shortly after the accident . My oldest daughter Kelda and I were in the truck at the time and it deeply affected both of us! I missed a bunch of work and had whiplash and post traumatic stress.
 In the midst of all that our good friends invited us to come to Haines to get away from it all for the August long weekend. After much persuading we agreed to go. Since our truck was being repaired we borrowed my in-laws truck and camper.  

That trip was a great time . We fished crabbed and shrimped and put aside the difficulties of the car accident for a while. After that weekend we decided to make a tradition out of it. We go every year if we can on the August long weekend.

One morning I decided to try the fifth-wheel oven since I have not really tried it that much. I proceeded to make Cinnamon buns, however, since its a propane oven, I cooked them a little close to the burner and burnt the bottoms to a crisp. One of our friends said, "I am going to have to cut the bottom of off these to eat them." Kaysa quickly replied, "I'll eat the bottoms!" We all looked at the pickiest eater in the room and asked if she liked burnt food? She replied by saying, "We are going to live in here for a year, I might as well get used to it!" We all laughed as she proceeded to eat two burnt bottoms!

One of the things we did while we were in Haines was Geocaching. We got 9 out of 11 Geocaches there. We are participating in the 7 souvenirs of August to see if we can get all 7 caches that are available! If we do, we will earn the achievement award! Since we do not have a letterhead cache in the Yukon we needed to get it in Haines. 

In the evenings we sat by the fire and made Smore´s and such. One evening we even made cones with marshmallows, bananas and chocolate chips that we grilled on the fire. Of corse we had Norwegian waffles for breakfast one morning as that has become tradition as well.
Both on the way in and out to Haines we stopped at Frosty's for ice cream as we all love our ice cream.

The oldest geocache in the Yukon is the Scout Lake Road Cache.  I have a goal to find all the geocaches in the Yukon and I was curious which one was placed first.  When I looked it up I noticed that it hadn't been found for 5 years and knew that we had to get it before anyone else did.  So we started planning. 

We decided to make a weekend camping trip out of it and planned to go out Father's Day weekend.  We packed up all of our gear and an ATV and drove out to Scout Lake. The lake itself is about 21km (13 miles) from Whitehorse and then the cache is a bit further in. We stopped on the way and grabbed a couple more caches: Castle Cache and Just How Cold Is The Yukon?  Both were fun caches to get. 

We didn't hang around too long though as we wanted to get up the hill and see if we could find that cache.  We had no idea what condition the cache would be in so we had brought along supplies to repair or replace the cache and cache items. 

The geocache description said that there was a climb to get to the cache itself but that it was an easy climb. I am thinking that they did not have young children with them when they made the climb.  First, we had to get to the hill.  There didn't seem to be a clear path anywhere so we started bushwacking.  We walked through quite a few spider webs before we got out of the trees.  Then the climb up.  The hill was grass covered with just a few small trees growing on it.  We ended up a couple hills over from the right hill so there was a bit of up and down but it wasn't too bad.  The last hill was much steeper.  The older kids were able to climb up on their hands and feet.  The younger kids were carried up on the backs of parents.  The hike up didn't take that long, about 45 minutes.  Finding the cache at the top ended up being very easy.

The geocache was in a plastic container wrapped in a garbage bag and flag. The flag was a mess.  It was very ripped up and extremely smelly.  The cache itself was in excellent shape.  It was whole and dry.  There was nothing on it or in it that was broken.  We were pleasantly surprised at the shape of the cache.  When we left we debated about taking or leaving the flag and decided to leave it as it helped the cache stay concealed.  

We headed back down the hill happy, hungry and ready for our camp out.  We were able to get our vehicles into our camping site the next morning so that we didn't have to hike back out.  I logged the cache when we got home and then added pictures six days later.  I was very surprised to see that two other people had found and logged the cache the day before. Boy, were we glad we had gone out when we did.  We were super excited to have been the ones to find the original geocache in the Yukon almost six years after it had been last found. 

Now, on to the next geocaching adventure!

We left on time on Sunday morning. The day was a bit slow as we worked out the kinks in traveling with our respective RV's and the children. We made it to Liard hot springs around 9:30pm without issues. 

We left Liard on time the next morning intending to get to Chetwynd, which didn't happen because... We decided to hit the geocache, Beetle, about an hour from Ft. Nelson. Tried driving up the dirt road in our 33 foot motorhome but the road was slick due to recent rains. We then tried to back out but hit a soft spot that took us into the ditch at a precarious angle. We were unable to get out. We tried Danny's truck but it wasn't able to get enough traction, we dug, scraped, added trees, branches, tried to raise the wheel with a jack. Nothing we did seemed to even help. We sent Sunniva to find cell signal to call for a tow truck who finally showed up around 10:30pm but he was unable to make it down the road due to the continuing rain making it even more slick. He said that our best bet was to hope for sun the next day and call back. We waited, slept in Danny's fifth wheel that night, surprisingly not too packed with the eight of us. The next morning, no sun. Through the night the motorhome had slid farther into the mud. 
After checking everything out Danny and I drove the 30 min to get cell service and called again. The tow service said they didn't think a regular motorhome tow truck would work and suggested a Cat or other piece of heavy machinery, preferably with tracks. I called Goodsam to see if that was covered under my roadside assistance insurance and it was, so the tow company started trying to locate a rig to send out to us, with the thought that it would be about 3+ hours to get to us and the biggest they knew about was a John Deer 450 landscaping tractor. We said we would talk to some of the rigs out where we were as well. 
On our way back we found a grader and asked if he could help. He said we would have to ask his boss who would be there in 10 min. When the boss arrived we talked to him and he said that they would help after they fixed a section of road they were working on. We thanked them and went back to cell service to tell the tow truck company who said that sounded like a more likely option and they would stand by as a backup option. 
The grader, driven by Ed, showed up around 3:30 pm that evening. Ed thought he could get down the road without problem and proceeded to back down. He started having problems about 250 yards in, so he turned around and graded it twice to try and get down to dry dirt. After failing he decided to just go for it. While it took a bit of manoeuvring to get all the way to the motorhome he did, in fact, make it. Once he got there we hooked a chain between us and he seemed doubtful. But it was our best option at the time so we decided to give it a shot. He started pulling just as I put it in neutral and immediately his six wheels started spinning. Ed used his knowledge of the graders capabilities to articulate in such a way as to get some traction. We started moving! But not in the direction I had anticipated, instead of going towards the road we cut deeper into the hillside creating huge furrows as we plowed backwards through the clay. I tried steering, but to no avail, the rig was going where it wanted and I just had to keep the wheels from going sideways and snapping under the shear power of Ed's grader. At one point I went so lateral I felt as if I were about to tip over completely but Ed plowed on, his grader writhing like a snake in a sometimes seemingly vain attempt to maintain traction. 

Several times we stopped completely, raising my epinephrine release to tremor inducing levels. All this time I realise I have get my wheels into the road before we reach the stream that caused the road to narrow, giving only inches of leeway with steep droppers on either side. Finally, less than 100 feet from the stream I was able to get on the road and keep it as close to center as possible passing with very little room on the left. After what seemed to be a half hour, but more likely was 10 min, we were clear of the road. 
I got out, shaking, to survey the possible damage, amazingly there was none, every aspect of the undercarriage caked with the red clay of the road, but I could find no damage. After being stuck for over 26 hours we were free. 

And the kicker? The geocache we were going after wasn't even down that road. It was across the street up a very well kept, wide, hard packed road. Sunniva and Rachel walked up and got it, they figured after all that we went through they were not going to leave it unfound. 

~Rian