Cache Visited: Virgin Gorge #4 I-15 Rest Area
Saturday, 2 March 2002 - 5:55 P.M. MST (-0700)

I was pleasantly surprised that this cache hunt included a very short hike up the hill. I guess I didn't read the description or comments of others very carefully. I was expecting one of those drive-right-up-to-the-cache type hunts. I should have known better, having visited Drifty's two north overlook caches.

When we exited the freeway at the Cedar Pockets (a trio of hunters, myself, my brother, and his friend) after having found the Black Rock Exit # 27 cache, the sun getting low (and down in the gorge, already hidden from view), my brother, the navigator with my G.P.S. pointed northwest, so we turned up the same road that not many months ago we'd traveled to visit the nearby Rocky High cache. We knew that this cache couldn't be far. And it wasn't long before the G.P.S. was pointing west, perpendicular to the road, so we turned off the dirt road, into an area worn by many other vehicles who used this spot to turn around, or park, or picnic, or whatever else.

There was one track that even headed right up the steep hillside, and crazy person that I am, I put my vehicle in four-wheel drive and tried to follow it. About a quarter of the way up the hill, my wimpy tires (I don't have those big, dirt-and-rock grabbing tires many other four-wheel-drive vehicle owners have, just lowly, wimpy street tires) couldn't grip the loose dirt well enough, the tires just spinning, dust billowing. So I backed down, put it in low gear, and then tried again, with a bit of a run. This time we made it one-third to one-half of the way up the hill before we could go no further. I think that if I'd kept at it, I could have made it, but I wanted to find the cache before dark, so I parked right there, on the steep hillside. I'm sure that had anyone come by, they'd wonder what insane person would park there, like that. Getting out of and in to the vehicle felt like climbing out of and in to chairs in the Space Shuttle or a rocket on the launch pad.

The three of us barreled out and ran up the hill, and I was soon trailing, huffing and puffing, since I do carry considerably more mass than my younger, leaner compatriots. At the top of the ridge we'd tried to climb in my vehicle, I gave up running and decided to settle for a steady, slow pace, since we still had to follow the ridge as it sloped uphill towards the cliffs of the gorge.

I managed the climb, not too far behind the others, and when my brother called out from 30 feet above, I'm at ground zero, I paused and looked around. There, not ten feet away, was an unnatural array of rocks that I instantly knew hid the cache. As the other two came back down, I exticated the box and began examining the contents.

As with our earlier cache find, the Black Rock Exit cache, the three of us were unprepared for cold, in our shirt sleeves, so the steady breeze made the chilly air cold, especially once we stopped hiking, so my log entry was abnormally brief. I added the flag I'd taken from the other cache, and took a Newberry Honor book (I'm a sucker for a book, especially children's or young adult literature, and in particular, Newberry award winners or honor books).

What a rugged, pretty place, this gorge carved by wind and water. Truly a badlands if ever a place deserved the name, and truly beautiful. I can appreciate how early settlers might view such places as anything but beautiful, since to survive back then, one had to toil and struggle to grow food in the midst of a barren desert. But in modern day abundance, I cannot help but view such places as ruggedly beautiful. And I suspect that some, or even many settlers and natives did view such places as beautiful, even when daily survival was more difficult.

Thank you, Drifty, for yet another high caliber cache site, and a very fun, if short, hunt.

-Astounding
St. George, Utah