Piper Ranch Multi-Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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Start from the Crosier Mt trailhead in Glen Haven. Piper Meadows is on the way up the mountain. To reach the cache, you'll have to maneuver through a barbed wire fence, or you may prefer to do the Anderson House cache first and then make your way cross-country to Piper's homestead. It's easy going (there's a faint track), and you'll have to go that way if you're on horseback. The coordinates are for the milk house, and that's where you'll find the clue to the cache itself. Bring a compass.
Harry Piper came to the area from Illinois in 1913 and raised dairy cattle and chickens. He married a girl from Greeley (Helen Jones) and had a son, but mountain life proved too much for her and she went back home, taking their son with her. This broke Harry's heart as he loved children. The house he built for his family burned down in 1923 when Harry was in Estes, possibly from a lantern in the window that set fire to the curtains.
At the bottom of the meadow are the ruins of the milk house where he lived alone after the fire until his death in 1932. Farther up the meadow, you can see the last standing wall of the barn and even farther up was Harry's ranch house. I tried looking for some foundations, but only saw a couple of suggestive mounds and depressions. Between the barn and milk house is a spring that feeds a watering trough. To the west by the stream is the old boiler Harry used to clean out his milk cans.
The milk house sometime in the '60s or '70s
This cache is part of a geotrail of historical caches in the Glen Haven area. Retrieve the codes from the 14 physical caches and find the virtual to receive a commemorative geocoin. The cache list can be found here: Historic Glen Haven GeoTrail.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Guvf ebpx vfa'g yvxr gur bguref.
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
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