AUGUST 2020 MOTOCACHING TRIP - DAY 1

 

 

For almost a year Yancey, Clint and I had been planning a trip to the Black Hills. The plan was for Clint and me to leave two days before Yancey and meet him in Chadron, NE, which is just south of the SD border. However, Yancey has been having such severe back problems that he could not make the trip. So at rather the last moment, Clint and I decided to make a loop somewhat closer to home and in what we hoped would be cooler weather. That part didn’t happen.

We departed July 31^st traveling up Highway 12 along the beautiful Lochsa River. As we had a long way to travel this day (our longest) and I had logged most all of the caches on past trips we made only one stop before Lolo, MT. This cache was just a short distance before Lolo and one that I had wanted to try for years but just hadn’t taken the time. It was called “Books in the Woods:Spooky Ft. Fizzle”. It was a large size (5 gal bucket) which is very rare. It took a little hike out in the woods and turned out be a repository to trade books. As we didn’t have any books we took only a Travel Bug to move it on.

We refueled at Lolo and ate our lunch. It was a beautiful day but began getting really hot. We turned down Highway 93 and didn’t stop again until picking up a cache a little south of Darby.

We veered left on Highway 43 and had a beautiful ride up Lost Trail Pass. One of the few times I’ve ridden it when it was dry. We continued on 43 to Wisdom and Hwy 278 through Jackson. This is high rather open and beautiful country and gave us a little respite from the heat. We hit I-15 a little south of Dillon and stopped at a wide spot in the road in Idaho called Dell to get gas. Clint was running on fumes. We took a break on a bench in the shade at the convenience store and had a cold drink. It was really hot now. (I wonder why I keep repeating that)

After that stop our only other one was for a cache at the Dubois Rest Stop. There was no shade at this Rest Stop and it was super hot. It was 97 degrees in Idaho Falls where we stayed. That’s incredibly hot for that mile high town. We stayed at the Super 8 which was about the worst one I’ve stayed in – never got the WIFI to work, locks of outside doors unusable due to no batteries, no screens on the windows, just to name a few unpleasantries. However, there was really cold water in the shower. We hiked over to a Jimmie John’s for dinner. This was to be our longest day having traveled 540 miles and picking up only 3 geocaches. The only picture we took was at the Dubois Rest Stop. (To be continued) M/W