Friday, January 28, 2011

Saturday road trip

     One Saturday in May of 2007 we wanted to see what the countryside looked like around Great Falls.
     We started by driving to Fort Benton and found a geocache at the overlook of the Missouri River just outside of town on the the highway.
     After a quick drive through Fort Benton we crossed the bridge over the Missouri and drove East.
     We drove past Geraldine and continued south past Square Butte where we took a side trip through Denton to see where a good friend from Idaho grew up.
     Along the highway near a creek we found a geocache and placed a travel bug for the next geocacher to find.
     A travel bug is an item that has a tag attached with a serial number that can be tracked on the geocaching website as it moves from cache to cache.
    Traveling south we came to Stanford where we turned back on to Highway 200 to head west back to Great Falls.
    There was a geocache on the roadside rest stop near Stanford and another next to Belt Creek at the Armington junction.
     The trip took us most of that Saturday and we saw a lot of different country along the way.
     Once we got home we logged back on to geocaching.com and logged 10 geocache finds.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Geocaching at Ryan Dam

  There are a number of caches hidden near and around Ryan dam on the trail that borders the Missouri River.  
  My wife and I parked at the trailhead near Ryan dam and hiked for several hours one Saturday to find a number of the geocaches that were hidden.
  This picture shows my wife Danice reading the logbook of a cache that was hidden in this old stone house that can be found a short walk from the trailhead.
  We followed the trail and eventually we found ourselves sitting on a cliff overlooking Ryan dam, as can be seen from this picture.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Geocaching in Havre

  One weekend we decided to visit our friends, the Hillsteads, in Havre and introduce them to geocaching.
  In the fall of 2007 the town of Havre had only about 15 geocaches hidden in the area by local geocaching enthusiasts.
  We made a list of all the coordinates in the Havre area and spent about six hours with our friends looking for all of the hidden caches.
  This picture is of a chimney located on the shore of Fresno reservoir about ten miles northwest of Havre.
  We drove our cars over about five miles on some very rough and rocky roads to find a geocache inside this chimney.

  The Hillsteads have since purchased a GPS device and started going on their own geocaching adventures.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

A day of Geocaching out to Augusta

   Danice and I spent one of our first Saturdays in Montana looking for geocaches that were hidden between Great Falls and Augusta.  It was in February of 2007, a cold sunny day for a drive out to the Rocky Mountain front.
   We drove through Fort Shaw, where we found a cache at the military cemetery just outside of town.  After that we drove out to Augusta and found several caches in town.

   On the way back to Great Falls later in the day we followed a trail of geocaches leading up to the Ulm Pishkun buffalo jump, now known as First People's Buffalo jump.  This picture shows a clever cache hidden in a container placed inside a hollowed out rock at the Visitor's Center.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Our first geocaching adventure

    


    On the second weekend after moving to Montana we took a 200 mile geocaching trip out of Great Falls and found some geocaches in interesting places.
    This old jail near Square Butte had a cache hidden just inside the door.

The Isaaks start to explore Montana

     When we moved to Montana in 2007 we decided to use the game of geocaching to explore all of the beautiful places that Montana has to offer.
     Geocaching is a game invented in 2000 by a couple of guys in Oregon using a GPS receiver to hide a container in the woods and post the coordinates on an internet blog site in hopes that someone else will find it.
     My wife Danice and I had been geocaching for about two years and found that it was a good way to go to places that we would not normally go and see unusual things.
    In the first few weeks of our life in Great Falls we decided that it would be fun to try to find all of the caches that are hidden within the city limits.