Saturday, July 25, 2009

Wolf Rock Challenge

I was planning a trip to Moose mountain to ride my mountain bike and find some geocaches. I had asked a friend if he was interested in going with me. He said yes. Then as the day got closer, the day I had picked was not going to work for him. Then he asked, "You wouldn't happen to have Friday off, would you?" As a matter of fact, I was on vacation all week and had been planning for Saturday because I thought he would be working on Friday. Well, he could not go on Saturday, but had Friday off and had been planning another geocaching adventure. He asked if I would be interested in doing the Wolf Rock Challenge cache. I said sure, not know exactly what I was getting into.
Here is Wolf Rock. We have to go up there!!!!???
Here is Paul, aka Pablo Mac, getting ready at the truck before we headed up the "hill".
Here is what is called the Amphitheater. We had to go up a trail to this point and then head to the left across the bottom. Then we hit another trail through the trees to the west to get to the less-technical climb.

This is just past the Amphitheater just a little ways. Paul brought his video camera to record parts of our adventure.

The trail then ends and this is the route you have to take to get to the top. This is the "easiest" route up the rock.

I started climbing first so Paul could shoot some video. Then I stopped to take some pics.

This is from the same spot, just zoomed out a little farther.
This picture kind of shows how steep the climb is, but not completely.

Here is Paul making his way up after me once he got done shooting video.
We just came up the draw that Paul is looking at. Took a break here after getting the hardest part of the climb out of the way.
Paul shot some more video from the spot we took a break. It was an amazing view from here, but we are not at the top yet.
We could finally see our goal at this spot. The last peak in the distance holds the geocache we are looking for. We had to head to the left and go around that first rock on the other side then across the middle of the next one and finally up and over the top of the last one to the cache.

We are almost there. Quite a view.
Paul with the cache. It took us a little over 2 hours to get here. We covered about 0.52 miles and climbed 900 feet vertically. This is my favorite cache of all time!
This is looking down the north face of Wolf Rock. Those are old growth trees at the bottom and are probably 150 feet tall.
We were visited by a lizard up at the top. He was hanging on the rock in this crack near the cache.
Here I am with the cache logbook and the 3 sisters in the background.
Now we have to make our way back down!
The next ridge to the south is Carpenter mountain. It has a fire lookout on it. You are supposed to be able to rent the lookout and spend the night in it. That little building perched up on the rock is it. That would be a cool place to spend the night.
The next few pics are of some old log books that climbers have been signing since the 60's.


There are 3 different log books in the cache just from climbers covering from the mid 60's to the present. The pics I took were from the 60's and the 80's.
This log page has one log from 1965 and another one from 1966. They were very interesting reading.
One final pic of the Rock. We were standing on the top of that point about 2.5 hours before taking this picture. Our adventure took a total of 5 hours and covered 1.04 miles with 900 vertical feet of elevation gain and then loss on the way down. This is my all time favorite cache.

1 comment:

Pablo Mac said...

Wow, great pics & write-up, John. It's funny how my attitude regarding how I would feel about going back up there went from "NO WAY!" to "I want to do this again!" the moment we opened that geocache container. I have had 8 or 10 friends ask me to take them up there, and we'll have to give them an answer soon.