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

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.

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