We were up in the Tinkham area grabbing A Drive in the Woods #2, (GCJKHY) a road we’ve been up many times in our Jeep. While looking at the map we noticed there weren’t many caches in this area. Being long time Jeeping fanatics, we thought we should place another cache up another perfectly bumpy road nearby.
The cache is a .50 cal ammo container, placed on the side of one of the many ridges overlooking Humpback Mountain. The view from up here is breathtaking, and at sunset just plain beautiful. It’s far enough from I-90 that you can’t hear the cars, but close enough to get to fairly quickly.
The road up is passable most of the way by your garden variety vehicle, but a mile or so from the top it gets pretty rough and rocky and I’d recommend a rig with clearance of at least 8” unless you don’t mind beating it up. Mind you I’m not saying 4 wheel drive is necessary, it’s not that bad, just bouncy.
Once you get up to the top (You’ll know you are there when you run out of road.) you will be about 180’ from the cache. It’s pretty much straight up the side of the hill, there’s no trail, but the terrain is just some rocks, thin brush and the occasional small trees as this was logged some years ago. This last 180’ is probably about a terrain 3.5 or so. <Edit> There is now a gate a little before the rocky and rough road part of the journey. Cachers have reported that this adds a bit of a hike, though the hike is still up a road. I'm increasing the difficulty by one star, to match the guidlines that Geocaching.com has for terrain difficulty.
GPS coverage up here is amazing as you are almost close enough to touch the satellites. When we placed the cache the GPS was showing an accuracy of 8’ and I had 12 satellites and full DGPS. Probably the best accuracy I’ve seen on this GPS.
In the winter there’s going to be snow, so I’d say the terrain probably jumps to 5 as soon as it’s snowed in. You’d need a snowmobile or some serious persistence and some snowshoes to get up here once that happens. You’d probably have to be a little nuts too. :)
