The county road is nice and smooth up to the Forest boundary, but then it gets kind of rocky in places, but no big stuff. I placed the cache via a 2-wheel drive car and if that's what you're in, you just have to take it slow and easy when you get to rocky places in the road. The road goes back and forth from rocky to smooth. You can also park in the flat area and hike to this.
We're taking a break from the 8th Annual Billy the Kid GeoFest, which focuses on the Lincoln County Sesquicentennial, to cut 150 years in half - that is to say, this is the 75th Anniversary of the Smokey Bear icon (#SmokeyBear75) and April 2019 was his 69th Birthday (my birth month and year too). This is one of those stories, that really chokes you up, time and again, especially when you visit the Smokey Bear Museum in Capitan. So a fire has roared through Capitan Gap and there's a badly burned bear cub clinging to a tree just on the north side in the Gap and a little to the east.
The right bear cub - the wrong place - the right time when a fire crew from Fort Bliss, Texas comes across him and thus, the Iconic Rescue. Walt Disney artists already had the Smokey cartoon figure, and the word went quick across America about this save, and soon Smokey was in the Washington, D.C. Zoo as our national living symbol for wildland fire prevention
Saddles and gaps are particularly bad places to be in a wildland fire - funnels the wind and flames through at a high rate speed - an incinerating fire for sure.
BTW, you can say either Smokey Bear, as that's what the firefighters found - a bear cub whose fur was literally smokey; or Smokey the Bear, which comes from a poplar 1950's song about Smokey!
Oh yeah - Remember, Only You...