Instead of placing a new geocache yesterday, Mark and I spent almost the entire day just finding a single cache. We left Price at 7:00am and arrived at the base of the Big Flat Tops more than two hours later. I knew we were in for a steep hike before starting to plan the trip, but actually looking at the hill leading up to the top of the plateau gave me second thoughts. It appeared much steeper than the topo map showed, but that wasn’t the worst. The entire north slope was covered in snow, which I didn’t expect at all. On the drive south, I kept thinking that anytime now, all this snow will give way to dry desert, but it never happened.
I drove my truck as close to the base of the hill as I could, but cross-country driving isn’t as easy as I expected. I only got 400 feet from the main road before giving up and parking. We hiked another half-mile to a place where we could clearly see what the uphill hike would entail, and promptly turned around and went back to the truck. It would have been ok if the ground was dry, but the snow was just too much.
Instead of placing a cache there, we drove another 35 miles further to Moonshine Wash to find the Sheep Bridge cache. We hiked in from the east side, crossed Moonshine Wash, then hiked north along the west side of the canyon until we reached the sheep bridge and the cache. I’d never actually been this close to Moonshine Wash before, and it reminded me of the Black Box, only on a smaller scale. I found the Moonshine Wash cache last year, but it’s in a side canyon, and Mike and I couldn’t make it further down into Moonshine without climbing gear.
The sheep bridge was interesting, and I was really tempted to cross it. Moonshine Wash is about 60 feet deep and only 10 feet across at the bridge. It seemed stable enough, and logic was telling me that I’d have no problems just walking across, but my instincts were telling me no way. Mark and I spent about 10 or 15 minutes standing around the bridge, trying to decide if we were stupid enough to try it. In the end, it wasn’t worth it just to shave a mile off our return trip, so we followed our footprints through the sand and the snow back to the truck.