Sunday June 12th, 2011: Portage, Wisconsin

This was a trip planned at the last minute after finishing some chores. I spotted a cluster of 4 caches on a piece of DNR public hunting grounds near Portage, WI by Hwy 33 and I-90/94. I just packed my stuff and hit the road in the early afternoon.

Arrived at entrance to the "easy" walk in and parked by the gate.

Plenty of clear shooting at the top of the bluff. I followed a lot of deer tracks too.

The geocache I selected first across the field in the woods. However when I got to the thick stuff, I was reading that the target was still over 400 feet away. I scouted up and down the line, no real trail going that way. That's not the way then. I walked back to the wheel-rut trail I was following at first, and that led to the following area.

I large, sloping field of pine-tree stumps and leftover charcoal from a general burn of the area. As I understand, this was a 2nd growth pine forest which the DNR is restoring to a mixed deciduous tract. The good news is that I could follow the edge of the burn-field and get to a meadow that brought me to about 60 feet away from the cache.

It's hiding under that log.

A for-real ammo can geocache. The other 3 here are the same type also. At about this point I did notice a point-black tail dart under the log by the cache. Not sure if it was a snake or some vermin. I poked the area with a stick before reaching in to get the box.

The next cache was directly across the burn field, near the trees shown below.

In this case, it was hiding in a stump.

These first 2 were pretty much empty inside, just a log books. I put a toy in each.

Next one was on another end of this burn field. The 3 geocaches formed a triangle on different ends of the field.

In the debris pile next to the stump.

This spot will have a spectacular view in a couple of years, after the brush and grasses grow in more.

Last one was in the tree-line along the walk back to my parking. I intentionally walked by this one earlier to find as I returned. It's in that tree there.

The last 2 caches were stocked with goodies, so I just signed the log book in each. The first cache took me some time to get to, but once I did it only took me 15 minutes to get the next, then the 3rd 15 minutes after that, and 15 minutes again to get the last.

I'm not sure if this caterpillar was dead or not. It just didn't move as I photographed it.

Time to walk back out.

I kept finding pieces of this white quartz in the gravel. For some reason I found it interesting. Several pieces had veins of the purple/red Baraboo quartzite rock that the rest of the gravel was made of. It all came out of the same quarry.

The walk was only 2.1 miles, but the up and down hill all over made it feel longer.

It was very good to be able to do an  "old skool" series of geocaches such as this. Very few people care place these old-fashioned type geocaches anymore. Of course in the old days (2003 or 2004) you would likely see only 1 box hiding in this general location, 2 at the most.