The cache is small and covered with camouflage duct tape. It is in plain site if you are looking right at it! It contains a log, but no pencil. You can follow trails to get close to the cache, but you will have to bushwhack in at least 150 feet. Most of the buckthorn in the area has been mowed down so finding it should be easier. When there are leaves on the trees/shrubs and mosquitoes in the air, this cache is HARD to find. Download a trail map.
Standing at the cache site, you will notice holes (actually depressions) spaced about every nine feet going west and south. If you follow these depressions, you can walk the perimeter of Nike Missile Installation M-96 as shown in the drawing below. This location was the launch site for the missiles. The radar control center was located across the railroad tracks within the current U.S. Army Reserve Training Command.
This Nike site was part of a ring of eight sites that encircled the city of Milwaukee. Nike missiles were designed to protect cities from long-range bombers. Keep snooping around and you may find the foundation for a small building and old sidewalks. Looking southwest from the cache, you will see a large kidney-shaped berm that partially wraps around a smaller straight berm. The berms provided protection to the Nike site during refueling operations. The large rectangle just west of the berms is where the three underground Nike missile magazines were located.
These photos were taken at Havenwoods sometime in the late 1950s. In the background of the first one, you can see the smokestack from the prison and the tops of the 3-story prison cells. Between the missiles and the prison, you can see the earthen berms described above.
The missiles were tested daily, but they were never fired. In 1996, the Army Corps of Engineers collapsed the magazines and filled them with concrete and soil. Peaceful prairie grasses now blow where the missiles used to wait.
The cache was created by map turtle in 2009.
This cache is part of Trek Through Time,
a geocaching adventure at Havenwoods.
Find out more!
Note: The Geocache Notification Form has been submitted to the Wisconsin DNR. Geocaches placed on Wisconsin Department of Natural Resource managed lands require permission by means of a notification form. Please print out a paper copy of the notification form, fill in all required information, then submit it to the land manager. The DNR Notification form and land manager information can be obtained at: http://www.wi-geocaching.com/hiding