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Post by SSO JOAT on Mar 29, 2013 1:56:48 GMT -9
I have pondered for several years the idea of putting out a series of caches in the Caribou Hills on the Kenai Penninsula. There is a lot of state and university land up there with a well-established set of trails on public ROW for access to the area from multiple directions. Since I've started caching, there was only one cache listed in the region and it was in a very remote spot that was difficult to get to. That cache appears to be missing and only has a single find over the years.
I've hesitated to put out any Caribou Hills caches based on the lack of effort that anyone has made to find that one cache. The region is predominantly winter accessible by snowmachine or dog sled, though some areas can be reached in the summer via ATV from Oil Well road out of Ninilchik. The other downside is just how much of the area was dessimated by the fires a few years ago. It's not very pretty anymore and it will probably be a couple decades before a young forest is reestablished.
I guess the root question is, "if I put some caches up there, will anyone come?"
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Post by ladybugkids on Mar 29, 2013 8:49:31 GMT -9
Scott, Caribou Hills is one area I wish I'd visited when I was living on the Peninsula. My range would be limited by how far I could skijor or mush my sprint dogs or trail run/mountainbike in a day since I don't own any mechanized access tools of the trade.
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Post by akgh519 on Mar 29, 2013 10:45:28 GMT -9
I would go for them if I was closer. Put out a couple and see what happens
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Post by NorthWes on Mar 31, 2013 7:06:22 GMT -9
The areas long been on my winter visit list. If caches were designed for winter accessibility I'd come down. It's a cool area to ride!
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Post by SSO JOAT on Mar 31, 2013 7:27:05 GMT -9
I have 5 spots on my list of nice places to hide a cache. Only one of them would end up winter only (unless you want to take a 5 mile hike with waders on), and the others would be year-round access via any snowbound transport or ATV in the summer (though the area is certainly walkable from Oil Well Road in the summer if you don't mind all the bears). Of course snowmachine is primary winter access, but there are a lot of dog sleds running those trails as well. The groomer keeps the main drags such as Centennial and Glam Gulch trails wide and flat. They are like super highways. You'd be limited only by the speed of your dogs on a skijour trip, though the distances are significant. Last weekend I put in 62 miles on a fairly short trip in and out and most of the main trail was easily traveled at up to 60mph with an elevation gain of about 1800 feet from parking lot to the top.
I've pinged a message off to the president of the Caribou Hills Cabin Hoppers, who are the trail managers. They have placed some really nice trail signs at all the crossings with solid 4x4 treated wood posts topped with large blue aluminum street-style signs. I've asked him about cache placements at some of those signs, but haven't heard anything back yet. The property layout is a little tricky. The main trails are public ROW across a lot of state and UAA land, but there are also large blocks of native corp land along the way where you can't get off the trail. Hard to tell who's land you're actually crossing out there in the field, but there are some good property ownership maps for the area. Once up in the Hills themselves, you have a lot of private property on the west littered with private cabins, but once you're east of the main powerline from Homer to Soldotna, you're on state land. But east of that is the boundary of the KNWR. So the "cachable" strip in a skinny run of state land between the two. That area should be wide open to cache placement.
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Post by SSO JOAT on Apr 7, 2013 8:02:27 GMT -9
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Post by NeverSummer on Apr 9, 2013 14:02:06 GMT -9
I think it would be great, but I don't know how much they would get visited. And, would you want to check on them once a year to make sure everything is ok?
There are geocachers with ATVs or snowmachines, but how many ATV/snowmachine owners are geocachers? Not that many. Save for some local organizations like the Snomads organizing an outing with an intro to geocaching, I don't know how much they'd get visited.
I would like to go grab the lonely cache out there, but I, like LBK, don't have any personal access to the tott for a trip like that.
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Post by SSO JOAT on Apr 9, 2013 18:31:36 GMT -9
I think visitation would be very low. CO Maint isn't an issue as I frequent the CH during the winter.
That lonely cache up there is gone. Or at least I was unable to find it via snowmachine. It is certainly not on the lonely tree cluster at GZ, which is on an exposed ridge above the general treeline. One side of the tree is heavily wind burnt. There was maybe 2 feet of snow on the ground around the site when I was there and the cache that is pictured in the photo gallery is not on that tree. If it was blown off, perhaps you could find it in the summer somewhere on the hillside below the tree.
You can get to that cache in the summer on foot. Drive to the end of Oilwell road and you'll be about 6 miles away from it. You can walk, mountain bike, or ATV over to the north fork of Deep Creek. You'll have to cross the creek, then climb up the big hill and through the burnt forest up toward Ptarmagan Head until you get to the cache site. You'll have 2 notable valleys with water crossings to make. Due to the forest fire, getting through the forest in the summer would suck with the criss-crossing deadfall that is waist high.
The best route would probably be to run the 5000 road down to Gold Hills Trail and use the logging road water crossings to get over Deep Creek and up to the hills south of the cache, then you can work north along that hill until you reach the site. Might actually be a fun ATV trip and I have just enough curiosity about that cache just lying on that hillside somewhere, that I might attempt the trip this summer by ATV.
I think the point is, that lonely cache is in a very difficult to access location, regardless of season. With the old snowmachines we were running 20 years ago (and prior to the forest fires), you couldn't get to that cache site in the winter. Today, it takes a lot of guts and horsepower to get there. We had to do a number of course alterations and spent some tense time down in the bottom of Deep Creek hoping we'd be able to get back out of that steep valley. Horsepower and huge mountain tracks managed to beat the terrain on that day, but it could have been a really bad day.
The area I'm looking at is actually year-round accessible without going through such extreme terrain. It would be a very easy snowmachine access on the nicely groomed trails (a snow-park-n-grab) as well as accessible by ski and snowshoe, easy ATV access in the summer, and still doable by foot or mountain bike if you can cover a couple miles from parking on Oilwell Road.
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Post by NeverSummer on Apr 10, 2013 8:11:01 GMT -9
Sounds like a plan. If I can, I'll get out to grab them once they're out there!
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