After an exhausting three days of watching both of the boys while Traci was up in Sandy doing her thing, I spent today relaxing on a 3.2 mile, 3 hour and 20 minute hike. 🙂 I started in Spring Canyon at the old townsite of Peerless and hiked up to the Peerless mine. They’ve done some reclamation work in the canyon, but there are still railroad ties, rails, rusted cables, and various other pieces of junk scattered everywhere. There were even a few structures intact below the mine, this one being the most interesting–it’s hard to get a sense of scale from the picture, but the door is only about three feet high. Because of the way it’s built back into the surrounding bedrock, I think it was a dynamite shack.
The mine itself and what appeared to be a few other exploratory shafts were all filled in, but just above the mine and to the east was a tunnel dug back into the hillside that was covered with boards. It can’t be seen from near the mine–you actually have to hike up the hillside southeast of the mine to see it from a distance. Considering that the boards haven’t been disturbed, I’d guess that the reclamation workers missed it, and apparently so has everybody else that’s been up there (hunters, drunken locals, etc). I didn’t see it until I was on my way back down from finding a geocache that was another half mile further up the mountain. If I hadn’t been too tired, I would have climbed up the hill to check it out. But then again, places like that spook me out, so maybe being tired was just an excuse.
Getting FTF on the cache was nice–it’s been sitting there unfound since December–but it was in such a random place. The guy who placed the cache didn’t even hike in from Peerless–I saw his footprints in the snow leading away to the east, so I think he came all the way in from Castle Gate, which is a much longer hike than I did. Most of my hike was up the south slope of the mountain, but once I reached the top and started heading down the tenth of a mile to the cache, there was knee-deep snow to contend with. After finding the cache, I skirted around the top and avoided the snow.
There’s one other cache in the area that nobody has found yet, and I’m hoping to find it someday this week after work. I’ve already tried once, but it was too cold and windy, and I think my approach was the wrong one. This time, I’ll bite the bullet and take the long way which should be about 2.5 miles round trip.