2013-05-29 48 -115

Location

On a road at the mouth of the Bear Creek drainage, immediately southeast of McDonald Mountain.

Participants

Plans

Access Bear Creek Road from US Highway 2
Follow Bear Creek road through a small labyrinth of national forest roads and old logging paths to reach NF-4784. (278>4783>4784)
Speed through hashpoint, or in case of gate, run.
Complete previous steps in reverse order

Expedition

A quick check in the morning found the geohash to be in a familiar, readily accessible area. Much to my delight, it was even on a road! Over the rest of the day, I mulled over bagging the point. Fuelled by the possibility of getting the Speed Racer badge, I decided it was worth a try.

Thinking I could squeeze it in after work before my busy evening began, come 1700 I was tossing gear and burning rubber. As I had to be somewhere by 1830, no time was wasted. I made it to the road labyrinth with quickly and with ease, though I had become paranoid about missing the navigational solution to my hashpoint. I was unable to print a map off before heading out, so I was navigating by memory. Unfortunately, I made nearly made it to to 4783 before taking a wrong turn--a result of nervousness caused by watching the clock a little too closely. I remember thinking to myself, this is a nice road (considering), but I'm getting farther away from the point! My navigational error cost me about eight minutes.

Back on the correct road, the hash point grew tantalizingly closer. Suddenly, my hopes of a shiny new Spead Racer Badge were dashed: the road was gated. With the sudden realization that time was running out, I jumped out and ran the remaining .36 miles to the geohash. After initially overshooting the point due to super geohash-induced running speed, I backtracked and tried to get 0.00 distance on the hash. I am quite convince that my GPS receiver is camera-shy, because every time I try to document the screen, the distance-to-point increases inexplicably. Rather than waste the evening dancing on the point, I snapped a satisfactorily low number before running back to the vehicle with 28 minutes to go. Disappointed I couldn't build a small cairn, I climbed in and sped off.

The way back was rather fun in that I was able to indulge in on of my favorite Montana games, "Dodge the Pothole", at speeds in excess of 40MPH. Kids, don't try this at home. Stopping only long enough to fail photographing a great view with the small camera (no time for tripod and DSLR goodness), I was able to make it back only a few minutes late.

Mission Accomplished.

Difficulty Rating 1/5 Annoyance Rating 1/5 Percentage of road inhabited by potholes ~35%

Photos

The gate blocking my Mach 5.
As close as the shy GPS would allow a camera to see.
Attempt to show approx. location and time.
What I actually paid attention to instead of the road while speeding along terrible roads.