Here's your chance for a little adventure! Make your way across the river to find a secret cave with some old pictographs.
We had a recommendation for this spot from some friends of Patudles. She had heard about this cave all her life, but never knew how to find it until now. The instructions on how to get there were fairly general, so we didn't know if we would be able to find it. A lot of research went in to it. We were happily surprised when we managed to find it right away. We felt like a couple of explorers, maybe a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or Tomb Raider.
To log this cache, please take a picture of yourself or if you don't like pictures of yourself, take a picture of a proxy (gps, stuffed animal, etc.) As an alternative logging task: if you don't have a camera or phone because the river crossing makes you nervous, you can take a look at the old sign that is in front of the pictographs. The sign front is gone, but someone wrote some words on the sign backing. What is the date written there? Email me the answer.
When we visited this site, we used the first parking coordinates posted in the additional waypoints. You will need high clearance, and if you do not have four wheel drive, you may get stuck in the soft mud at the end of the road. We launched our kayaks from there. It is only .4 miles to the cache from that put in. If you want to use a boat or don't trust the road, there is a very nice launch site for small vessels about a mile south. Those are the second coordinates posted in the additional waypoints. There are about 10 parking spaces, and a toilet. If you are in a kayak, the journey on the water will be longer from there.
Please be extra careful at the cache site. There are many fallen loose rocks on the ground, and lots of poison ivy. Someone has been coming in and cutting away the poison ivy, because it keeps growing on the fence that is protecting the pictographs. Be careful not to touch any. There are also some stinging nettles farther up the hill. Also, there are ticks at the first put in, and there could be rattlesnakes under the rocks at the cache site.
Before the dams were put in, the river was a lot lower. There were many spots along the river where pictographs and petroglyphs were covered up by the rising waters. Some were buried, some were collected for display in parks and museums, and some others were fortunately high enough above the waters to be preserved.
Virtual Reward - 2017/2018
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between August 24, 2017 and August 24, 2018. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards on the Geocaching Blog.