THE CACHE IS NOT AT THE ABOVE LISTED COORDINATES.
You must figure out the coordinates to the cache from the clues in the poem below. The listed coordinates take you to a free parking area within walking distance of the cache. You can park closer, but it will cost you $1.
The poem below is my favorite, what does that say about me? :-) Figuring out the coordinates can be a real bear. When you go there, you will find a plaque. Email me with the title of the plaque and I will email you back with permission to log your find.
A nice gift certificate will be mailed to the FTF. Happy Hunting!
*NOTE* The clues are on the cache page in red, so if you are red/green color blind you should get somebody to help you with this one.
THE BEAR (Galway Kinnell)
1.
In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2.
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle it sharp at both ends
and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished I move out on the bear tracks,
roaming in circles until I come to the first, tentative, dark splash on the earth.
And I set out running, following the splashes of blood wandering over the world.
At the cut, gashed resting places I stop and rest,
at the crawl-marks where he lay out on his belly
to overpass some stretch of bauchy ice
I lie out dragging myself forward with bear-knives in my fists.
3.
On the third day I begin to starve, at nightfall I bend down as I knew I would
at a turd sopped in blood, and hesitate, and pick it up,
and thrust it in my mouth, and gnash it down, and rise
and go on running.
4.
On the seventh day, living by now on bear blood alone,
I can see his upturned carcass far out ahead, a scraggled, steamy hulk,
the heavy fur riffling in the wind.
I come up to him and stare at the narrow-spaced, petty eyes,
the dismayed face laid back on the shoulder, the nostrils
flared, catching perhaps the first taint of me as he died.
I hack a ravine in his thigh, and eat and drink,
and tear him down his whole length and open him and climb in
and close him up after me, against the wind, and sleep.
5.
And dream of lumbering flatfooted over the tundra,
stabbed twice from within, splattering a trail behind me,
splattering it out no matter which way I lurch,
no matter which parabola of bear-transcendence, which dance of solitude I attempt,
which gravity-clutched leap, which trudge, which groan.
6.
Until one day I totter and fall - fall on this
stomach that has tried so hard to keep up, to digest the blood as it leaked in,
to break up and digest the bone itself: and now the breeze
blows over me, blows off the hideous belches of ill-digested bear blood
and rotted stomach and the ordinary, wretched odor of bear,
blows across my sore, lolled tongue a song
or screech, until I think I must rise up and dance. And I lie still.
7.
I awaken I think. Marshlights reappear; geese come trailing again up the flyway.
in her ravine under old snow the dam-bear lies, licking
lumps of smeared fur and drizzly eyes into shapes
with her tongue. And one hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,
the next groaned out,
the next,
the next,
the rest of my days I spend wandering: wondering what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flow of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?