STAIRMASTER

Do you know about the public stairways in Lewiston? Regardless of specific history, they all represent a by-gone era when folks walked to town as a matter of course. I think it was 1989 or so when Mike and I took Milo, Clinton, and Hallie for an afternoon hike on Normal Hill to locate all the stairways.

There’s a new geocache, “Stairmaster,” that celebrates six public stairways in Lewiston and ends in Clarkston. Mike and I undertook it yesterday. The idea is that you climb one set of stairs and near the top you find the cords to the next set. It starts with the ones at the old Carnegie Library which are now condemned. Mike readily found the cords to the next stairway, and we set off in an easterly direction. However, as we began to think it through, we both realized that the cords in hand would take us beyond the next logical set of stairs. We stopped in our tracks. Discussion ensued. The cache appeared to involve a circuitous eastward route that would necessarily have to bring us back to the park. To my surprise, Mike was willing to avoid the walk. “We know where the stairs are and we know the cords are near the top, so we can do this intellectually,” Mike said. [Hallie truly would love this, I thought.] So we went to the stairs on the other side of Pioneer Park – the ones that come out on New 6th – and sure enough, we located cords without cords. But now we’re not interested in traveling east, knowing we will have to return to those stairs on the west. So we crossed the park again to the Vollmer steps on 5th Street across from the old library [photo right] and found the cords at the top of the steps. Those cords took us to the steps off Prospect [see photo left] and there we gained the cords to the stairs at Beachview Park where the cache was located. We then drove to Beachview. Finding the last set of cords to actually locate the cache was a bit problematic but we managed. Chalk another one up for M/W.

We didn’t find bottle caps but Mike did spy a set of lifetime dog tags on the ground at Beachview. He was able to contact Bob, the owner, and he came for the tags. Nellie recognized this stranger as a dog lover and friend even before we opened the sliding door. She and Bob were fast friends immediately. Bob said that he takes dogs from the animal shelter, some of them badly abused, and trains them for eventual adoption.