As oldsage said to me, “The legend is much more romantic than the reality.” That is definitely true but many thanks to him anyway for the following information. And many, many thanks to David Crockett for the history and the picture!!! Without your help we would all still be making up stories. Following is the real story of the Hermit Home and how it came to pass:
Lou Domrose (The hermit’s cave) by David Crockett.
Lou Domrose was my second cousin; his mother and my grandmother (Carrie Hansen Crockett) were sisters. Lou’s mother died when he was quite young and he did not get along well with his new stepmother, consequently he spent a lot of time as a child in my grandmother’s home.
He did farm and ranch work off and on during his life, but not long term. He liked to live alone, sometimes camping in a lean-to shelter for months. He would just “live off the land.” He liked to fish and hunt. In later years he shot several deer with a bow. He sometimes tanned buckskin and made clothes with it, all hand sewn. He preserved meat, rarely wasting any part of a deer. Lou would bottle deer bones and fat for “soup stock,” to be used in winter. Lou dried fruits and made jelly from berries and rose hips. Extremely frugal, he did not spend much money for anything. For years he lived in a tiny trailer house behind my grandma’s home. I heard him tell my dad once he wanted to irrigate and do a little farm work till he had earned $600. That’s all he wanted for the whole year – so he wouldn’t have to file income tax.
He lived in Nevada quite a while mining for gold. In this occupation he gained a lot of experience digging holes, though he never found much gold. His home there was a dugout in the ground.
When in his fifties he started digging the home now called the “hermits cave”, just ¼ mile west of my mailbox on Rock Creek Road. It took about three years with pick and shovel to get it ready to move in (that’s just a few hours of work per day).
At least once a day Lou walked to my grandma’s house, watched a little TV, sometimes took a bath, and then carried a canteen full of water to his cave.
He raised a small garden near Grandma’s house – the year he died, he had raised one big tobacco plant, since he liked to chew and hated spending money.
In the doorway to the cave he had a small screen covered hole in the sidewall for keeping fresh vegetables.
I visited Lou a number of times in his cave home. Each time I visited, Lou would show me some new additions. Lou Domrose passed away in 1966, after living in his cave for approximately five years. He is buried in the Pioneers Cemetery on Rock Creek Road approximately 6 miles South of Hansen.
When you enter make sure you have a flashlight to explore the whole place. Also, when I placed the cache I didn’t encounter the new “family” that now lives here. I have seen them in past years but thought they had long since left. Please respect them and leave them alone. They have a nest in the back room and I believe they are quite used to “visitors” so as long as you leave them alone and give them some distance they will leave you alone and we can all enjoy this treasure.
I have been coming here for years and thought that it was time to share this unique area. The cache is far enough away from the home so you should be able to find it without attracting too much attention when other people are at the home. Please keep this in mind; the life of the cache directly relates to how well you can hide it to make it look as natural as possible with the surrounding area. If you make a wonderful U.R.P. it won’t last long. Please hide it as well as you can and make it look as natural as you can.
The cache is in a black ammo can with the general assortment of treasures and a logbook and pencils. You can easily drive the family car to within .22 miles of the cache. If you have a high clearance 4X4 you can drive to within a couple hundred feet of the cache. Either way you will walk right past the Hermit Home to find the cache. Park by the pavement if you have any doubts what’s so ever. It’s not a bad hike, except when it’s 100+ degrees out, or raining, or snowing, or freezing, or your being chased by local law enforcement for that silly little joke that involved…um…never mind, enjoy and be safe!