I’ve been meaning to get this video footage up also. Back in late August, I took a trip up to NW Montana. I stayed up in Whitefish and went into Glacier National Park one day. The next I headed up to Eureka and did a scenic tour along Lake Koocanusa.
My dream for many years has been to move up to Whitefish or in and around that area. There is just something about the mountains up there that I have always loved.
Anyhow, I took Tristin and Dakota with me, we loaded up the slide-in camper and had a great time wandering around and geocaching.
Here are the 3 videos I managed to get done. I still have a couple more I need to do but you get the idea
Here is my latest pieced together geocaching video. I had to cut out a few sections because I was over the time limit for You Tube.
The round trip hike is about 3 miles if you go to Beaver Creek and back to Hauser Dam. It’s a nice workout but nothing too strenuous if you’re in relatively good shape. The hike goes along the Missouri River and lots of people head to this are for some blue ribbon trout fishing.
During the August month, Kokanee Salmon migrate to the Dam where they spawn, lay their eggs and die. The Osprey are heavy in the area during this time because it’s a feast, along with Bald Eagles. If you’re lucky you’ll catch a glimpse of Mountain Goats. Plenty of deer in the area and lots of bird watching and small critters scampering around.
I really enjoying hiking out here and many times I just hike along the river because I love the sounds and the scenery. Cache Across America is also located along this hike and is the toughest cache to get to because of all the boulder/rock climbing.
I know I enjoyed getting out and spending time with mother nature, I hope your weekend was pleasurable also.
The above is a small picture and video clip of the Ophir Cave geocache I accomplished today. Now in order to complete the whole experience, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the adventure and post a few more pics of the entire trip.
I spent my Friday evening doing research on some geocaches and what was suppose to be about a half hour time limit turned into a couple hours as usual. I get so engrossed in reading about these remote or neat caches that I just keep looking at the next one and then I’m trying to decide which cache I should do. This Ophir Cache has been on my ‘to do’ list for well over a year.
There are a couple of really neat things I loved about this cache before I even got there. The first thing is it was published in July 2001 making it one of the oldest caches as far as geocaching is concerned and it’s not archived! Second it involves a cave and third it’s way out in the middle of nowhere up in the mountains. This is a tsun cache if there ever was one.
The geocache is located northwest of Helena. My GPSr says 26 miles but that is very misleading. The drive from my place is a good 45 minutes. The easiest way to approach the cache is head west out of Helena on Hwy 12. When you get to a very small town called Avon, you’ll take a right onto Hwy 141 that goes to Lincoln, MT. After about 2 miles, you’ll turn right onto 3 Mile Rd which is gravel and pretty nice for the first couple of miles. As you start climing the mountains it gets a bit rocky and rutted in places and it is best if you have a high clearance vehicle or 4WD.
Now I’m not familiar with this area so I took a wrong turn on some dirt road and climbed higher into the mountains. Hey, my GPSr was pointing left and it said 1 mile to the cache, so I took the road. I drove about .30 miles and the gate was locked showing I had about .78 mile left to hike. Now I printed off the description and it said I should only have about .40 mile to hike. In my mind, I thought well this doesn’t seem right but I’ll hike it and see if I can find the trail. Well, I didn’t find the trail I was suppose to see and when my arrow started pointing straight up the mountain, I said no way, I must have missed something! Back to the truck after about a good half hour of hiking uphill already. I decided I’d get back on the main dirt road and head a little farther in to see what the GPSr would read.
I traveled about another .5 mile when I saw a road that said Cave Gulch, that makes sense right? I took that road and drove about a mile up to the locked gate and I saw the trail! On our hike up the side of this mountain, it was a moderate hike up a few switchbacks. There was a nice breeze and decent shade from the forest. The mountain flowers were in full bloom and Dakota and Tristin were loving life. I had to stop a few times to catch my breath, you figure at 6500 above sea level is enough to make everyone breath a little heavier.
I finally arrived at the cache and it wasn’t what I had envisioned in my mind at all. You know how you get an idea in your head of what something is going to be like? When I got here, I thought it would be the typical cave we all think of; kind of a u-shaped entrance into the side of a mountain but this was a smaller hole into the ground. This is probably more typical than I realized but hey, I like my little fantasies. So, now I’m at the cache and I pull out my cache description and it turns out I need to hike further up the hill over the cave to get the cache. I silently groan and climb the last 140 feet, sit down and grab the ammo can (Yeah an ammo can!). I read over some of the previous logs where most people mention being too chicken to go in. I root through the cache hoping for something good but alas people leave cheap junk. I’m going to admit I’m like a kid when I open an ammo can, I always hope to score something cool and 99% of the time I’m let down with stupid junk. I didn’t take anything but I did leave one of my Cowgirl coins in the cache and I left a nice log for the owner.
Back down the mountain I went and into the cave to explore. While the video gives you somewhat of an idea of what the cave is like, it doesn’t even come close to actually being there. Dakota was the first one in and if you look closely at the video when it first starts, you can see her kind of crawling in the beginning. The opening is kind small and it’s real slick and rocky and much more steep than it appears. I have a bad back so bending down and back up made me wince a bit in pain but once in, there was plenty of standing room. I had my camera in one hand, one headlamp on and another headlamp in my other hand because it was so dark once you got in a little ways. You can hear the water dropping in the background and other than that, it’s cool inside and very quiet. I admit as I climber further down I got a little creeped out. First off I was alone in a dark place, lol and secondly when I studied abroad in Belize, I went cave exploring with local experts. We went miles into these caves and some of them required swimming throughout the entire journey and going through very tight places. The Mayans believe ina creature called a ‘Dwende’ which is a small black spirit type creature and they supposedly hang out in the caves. If you are a bad person they can mess with you. Now I was privvy to a number of dwende stories and as you can imagine my mind kind of ran away with itself, lol.I didn’t see any dwendes in there or bats for that matter. Once I saw the first shaft than I decided I had went far enough and was more in fear of my dogs dropping into one of them and I wasn’t too keen on looking down one all by myself cause there may have been a dwende waiting to pull me down
The climb back up was tougher than I thought it would be. I had to stuff my camera in my shirts pocket, put my other headlamp on and climb back up to the entrance on all fours. It was much more slick going up and nothing to hold on to. I think part of the problem is the recent snow melt as there was a little bit still on the ground and the melt off was running down inside. Remember what I am about to say right now cause at the end of this story you’ll head something kind of funny but something more to consider; I was glad I left a message on my parents telephone letting them know an approximate area I was going to be exploring in.
After the exploring of the cave, if was a hike back to the truck and downhill the whole way! It was easier breathing but tougher on the toes pushing against the front of my hiking boots. Once to the truck, we took a water break and then were headed to the next cache about 2 1/2 miles away at the very top of the mountain. This drive was even rockier than the last and I got to thinking; I sure hope I don’t get a flat tire or my truck breaks down because I’m totally hosed if something happens.
As I got about a half mile from the cache and closing in on the top of the mountain, I could see snowdrifts in places. Yet everything was lush green and the meadow was full of various purple flowers in full bloom. I could see the snow-capped Garnet Mountain Range and I hadn’t seen a soul or another vehicle all day, it was heaven! At about .30 of a mile from this other cache, the road was blocked by a huge snowdrift that I knew I couldn’t get through, so I decided to save that cache for another day. The dogs and I got out and walked on the snow and I just took in the sights and smells of a beautiful summer day. I snapped a couple more pictures and decided that saving the cache for another day was a good choice because I could see the thunderstorms being made about the Garnet Mountains and I don’t like being on mountaintops where there’s lightning involved.
We made he long trek back to Helena, the dogs were completely out not long into the drive. Once I got back into town, I stopped to grab a bite to eat prior to heading home. While I was in the Arby’s drive-thru, my mom calls me. She say’s; “What was the message you left? I accidentally erased cause I thought it was an old message.” I think I thanked God right on the spot for getting me home safely cause no one would have any idea where to even start looking for me. She apologized and I told her I was going to start leaving other instructions when I head out because she scares me, lol.
So in the end it was a wonderful day and here are some additonal photos for you to look at. Enjoy and I hope you had a great weekend! ~ tsun
I hope that everyone had a great week and a fun weekend. It was a beautiful weekend here in Helena, Montana. We saw some mid-80’s temperatures so I spent most of my weekend outside working in the yard weed whacking, planting phlox and pansies, and a bit of raking. I even spent a part of the evening drawing some new designs which I haven’t done for a couple months and that felt good.
Anyhow, the reason for my post; today I forced myself to go to town because I needed groceries and I hate shopping even if it is for food. So since I decided I best get to town and get things done, I made myself a little list of things to do. I loaded up the cooler and headed to town. First stop Target, then off to the brother’s place to say hi to the family, Costco was next where I bought my ice and loaded the cooler to keep my groceries cold and then off to the geocache listed in the title and last stop was Valley Farms Nursery before I rounded out my trip back at the tsun ranchette
I did a little research to pick a geocache that would be worthy of a stop before I hit the road to go home. Crazyhorse cache seemed like it might be somewhat interesting. It was on the outskirts of town, a regular size cache (my favorite) and it had showed a geocoin logged in. Normally I look for pictures that people post to see if it might be visually pleasing to go there. Yes, I admit I’m a geocache snob, I don’t enjoy going to caches that don’t have something worth seeing. I’m not saying I’ve never done a roadside cache but those are saved for traveling to other towns or states, I’m not purposely going to hunt a cache that is quite frankly; boring. Ok, I think you get the idea here
So about Crazyhorse cache; it was placed on Memorial day 2008 for Troop E, 163rd Cavalry nicknamed “Crazyhorse”. This Montana National Guard unit has alot of history and can be read at the geocache page. The 163rd Cav was deployed to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom III on Jluy of 2004. Sgt. Travis M. Ardnt lost his life in Iraq and shortly after returning home another soldier was lost to PTSD (Spc. Christopher Dana). Troop E was highly decorated for their Iraqi service receiving 4 Bronze Stars, 3 Purple Hearts and numerous other awards. Inside the cache you will find a small photo album with a few pictures of the unit (see pics below).
The geocache is located on federal property now owned by the Montana National Guard but can be retreived without actually going through the gates. The property that is gated/fenced off is an old pioneer log home and pioneer buildings. There is a big sign that talks about the “Head Ranch” and cattle ranching which Fort Harrison leases to cattle ranchers. I really would have loved to explore the building and get a better picture of the sign but I wasn’t willing to climb the fence and trespass on military property. With my luck, I’d climb the fence and I’d get caught and the ice in my cooler probably wouldn’t stay that cold while I sat in jail for the evening
Ok, so here are some pictures and enjoy! ~ tsun
Head Ranch - old pioneer days buildings
Some more pioneer buildings of the old Head Cattle Ranch
I haven’t done much geocaching lately, unfortunately I have been so busy doing other things that I haven’t spent much time doing the things I love. Now that my life has settled down a bit I decided it was time to get back out in the great Montana outdoors and see what she had in store for me. So today I headed for the beautiful Beartooth Wildlife Management Area which is located north of Helena, Montana and close to Wolf Creek.
I did a little research and found a geocache in the area (GC1E6ZJ) called Beartooth Overlook. I downloaded the coords to my GPSr, loaded up my dogs (Dakota and Tristin) and a small daypack and off we went. The weather here was a pretty nice; partly cloudy and sitting around the upper 60’s. To me this is shorts and t-shirt weather! Boy did that sun feel wonderful after a long Montana winter. Everything is turning green, the birds are out and making nests and the flyfishers are floating the rivers. It doesn’t get much better than that.
The area that I was headed to is near Holter Lake and boy were there a bunch of people out with their boats, ATV’s and campers. I’m not much on crowds and I was starting to wonder why I had picked an area where everyone and their brother was during the holiday weekend. However, I was soon to have my spirits lifted. Once I got past all the camp grounds and the road turned to gravel and about 4 more miles in on a rutted dirt road, the wildlife area was pretty much all mine! Just the way I like it
Now a quick stop at the cache and a short hike up a hill, netted me my 1 find for the day. I’m not much on getting a high volume of geocaches, I prefer to grab 1 or 2 and then spending my time doing other things like hiking, looking for wildlife (birds, elk, deer, bear, mountain goat, etc.). Below are a couple of pictures with panoramic views from the geocache and the Beartooth WMA.
Beartooth WMA
Holter Lake
Dakota (left) & Tristin (right) near Beartooth Overlook Geocache
Beartooth (WMA)
Lone cow elk near Gates of the Mountains
Holter Lake and Beartooth WMA in the background
So after I found the cache, I headed into the remote wildlife area. Back in 1990 there was a large man-caused forest fire that burned approximately 23,000 acres and just under 10,00o acres of that was timber. This changed the habitat and landscape drastically. Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks purchased the land to provide critical winter range for a large variety of wildlife species. The area is open from May 15th to November 3oth and you can ind all of Montana’s Big Game species in this area if you are quiet and stealthy.
While in the area, I spotted mule deer, white-tail deer, a pair of Mallard ducks, some American Finches, and a variety of other song birds. I was hoping to see some mountain goats but with as warm as it was, I’m sure they were in higher elevations. I did however on my drive back home spot a lone female elk close to the Gates of the Mountains. So all in all I had a wonderful day. I took a moment to honor those who gave their lives for our country, spent time with my dogs along Elk Creek in the Beartooth WMA, got a little hiking in along with some bird watching and wildlife viewing and I’d call that a perfect day! I hope you had a wonderful weekend also. ~ tsunrisebey
As most of you already know, I am in love with Montana! In the future, I will be highlighting some of my Montana geocaching adventures here. If you can’t come to Montana yourself than you can live through my pictures and words ~ tsun
Here is a picture taken at the geocache ‘Watch the cars go by’ between Elliston and Avon, Montana. It is a great view of the snow covered Pintler Mountains.
