Return to Battle Lake
It’s been ten years since I visited Battle Lake, and like the last time I was here, the primary goal of the day was to find an old geocache hidden in 2001, just a year after geocaching became a “thing”.
The cache isn’t easy to get to: it’s at the top of a substantial hill. I vaguely remember that hill being a problem last time I was here, but the bigger problem during my visit back on May 22, 2015, was that I couldn’t find the cache no matter how hard I tried. I felt glum about that “DNF” (Did Not Find); but ten years is ample time for me to have forgotten all pain and suffering - both climbing the hill and not finding the cache.
Since then, I’d learned from buddies that the coordinates posted on the cache page were incorrect by a good 30 to 40 meters, and had been corrected on the cache page, so I was confident I could make the find if I visited again.
After visiting a nearby lakeside campground, an old cabin, and a geocache multi based on a local plaque describing early settlers to the area, I parked and was ready to make the trek to the cache.
That was a problem.
I started making my way up the hill, and my goodness (those are the clean words I’ll use here, but my actual words were much more expressive), that hill was steep. I quickly found that I was forced to grab onto any bush I could find as I tried to stab my shoes sideways into the dirt so I wouldn’t tumble back down the hill.
Most of the time, it was a struggle measured in single feet or less, as I (literally) inched my way up that hill. And of course, I thought of bailing, but it soon felt just as dangerous to retreat down the hill as it would be to continue on up.
The mantra I use in these situations helped yet again: “I’ve got all day”.
That helped me stop, catch my breath, scan the next couple of feet for a bush I thought would hold me, a bush that wasn’t a thorny rose bush, that is, and lunge forward to grab it for another foot or two of gain in elevation. It was lunge, rinse and repeat, all the way up that hill.
I think I’ve painted enough of a picture of the experience of that climb. If I ever return, I’ll first be weighing the cost of renting a helicopter instead.
That old cache has lured many a cacher to the top of the hill over the years, and some brave souls have hidden their own caches along the ridge to the south. I had a great time following a good trail and was able to find all the caches at the top of the hill in short order.
Now it was time to descend, and because there were cache hides along another trail that promised a more gradual way down that monster hill, I gladly took that route down. There were sections where my gripless runners were completely useless, and I had to resort to inching down steep sections of the trail on my bum. But sometimes that’s the way (pun intended).
The geocache finds were made, and more importantly, I found my way back to the trail I’d walked in on when approaching the monster hill, something that isn’t too difficult with a GPRr in your hands.
The return to Battle Lake was a memorable, if somewhat traumatic experience, and for such a relatively short hike in meters.
My Route Today#
