ELK RIVER GEOCACHES

I had been planning another major geocaching adventure ever since Jack left. Actually, the Elk River caches had been on the back burner for some time. I went up last summer for a day (that’s when the 4 wheeler came off the trailer into the back of the pickup on the way out) and once the summer before. Almost all the caches in the area are owned by tatbs who looks to be a young man in his twenties. He doesn’t geocache himself, he just hides them. He must live in the area because his bio says he is in the back country up there every week from June through Sept. He has logged only 1 cache but owns 23. He places them in a length of white pvc pipe 4” in diameter by about 15” long. Most are hidden in a stump. He doesn’t mean to make them hard to find once you get there. Getting there is the challenge. That coincides with my philosophy.

I began this trip from the farm leaving at 5:30 am Tue, Aug 5th. I crossed the river at Orofino and took the Wells Bench road to the Dent bridge. It’s very steep but paved all the way. The first two caches were along the south side of Dworshak along the Cold Springs Trail. They were the only ones not belonging to ttabs. They required about a mile round trip hike and I thought they would be pretty easy. Turns out one wasn’t because the coordinates were off 50 or 60 feet and I wouldn’t have found it without the explicit hint in the description.

Then I crossed the Dent bridge over the reservoir into ttabs’ territory. The pavement ends and the road to Elk River is called the “Back Country Byway”. When I came to the road into the first cache I unloaded the 4 wheeler and set off. These side roads are blocked and have signs saying they are restricted to motorized vehicles wider than 48”. After quite a journey with a couple of wrong turns, in spite of my meticulously placed waypoints, I could only get to within .16 miles of the cache. The rest was a steep ascent to the top of Green Mountain through thick brush. I did make it and was only the 3rd person to log it, the last one being over two years ago. As this was the only cache in the area I loaded the 4 wheeler back on the trailer and proceeded to Elk River.

The first batch of caches was quite a ways from Elk River but I unloaded the 4 wheeler there because I intended to make a kind of circle and besides, the 4 wheeler gets much better mileage than the truck. The next cache was called “Captain Crunch” and it was the scariest one I did because of the road (?) I took. It was a road on the map but in actuality is was a washed out stream bed with huge rut-like ditches going up a steep hill. If I had turned over or gotten hurt I don’t know how I would have gotten out. I turned around twice thinking it must be the wrong road but since the sign at the fork had said “Captain’s Cabin” so I figured it must be the right one. Finally I came to an intersection with a main gravel road which I could have taken if I had known its condition. On the map the roads looked equal. After getting on that main road I had no trouble in finding the cache.

I proceeded finding 5 more caches all of which had not been found in over a year. I could not find the right road on the last cache and ended up climbing almost straight up a mountain through thick brush to get to it. Then, of course, I had the problem of finding my way back to Elk River and the truck. You cannot imagine the maze of little 4 wheeler roads in that area. Fortunately I had enough waypoints marked on the map that I was able to make it back without too much trouble. By the time I got back to the farm it was about 8:45 pm. Nine caches logged and no “no finds”. The only bad thing on this trip was somewhere on the way back I lost one of the 4 wheeler loading ramps off the trailer. No pictures this time because I was afraid to risk the new camera after losing the other one on the backpacking trip. There are still at least 5 caches up there that I didn’t have time to get. I guess that means another adventure.