Glenn County High Point

It turns out that on my last trip into the Mendocino National Forest west of Orland, I didn’t go far enough west to find a geocache on page 65 of the Northern California Delorme map. I remedied that today with a fun trip into the remote parts of Mendocino National Forest. My destination was a cache on top of Black Butte, which is also the high point of Glenn County, but I intended to search for a number of other caches along my route.

I headed west out of Willows on highway 162, which turns into Alder Springs road. This eventually becomes a well-graded dirt road, but it does continue west all the way to highway 101, through Covelho in Round Valley. I found a couple of caches along the pavement part of the road before hitting the dirt. Black Butte is just about 60 miles from Willows.

A dead-end track leads up the side of Black Butte, then it’s about 0.5 miles of easy hiking to the summit on a clear use-trail. The geocache hadn’t been logged since July, 2007, and apparently folks were having difficulty finding the cache and were signing the summit register instead. I found both the summit register and geocache together in plain sight. Unfortunately, I could not open the cache. PVC pipe with a screw plug just seems to get welded together as time goes by.

I drove a little farther west to Mendocino Pass and then turned north to join up with route M4, which I roughly followed back east to Paskenta.

As I was approaching one cache location, I paused at an intersection to consult my GPSr and a forest service fire crew rolled by and stopped. One of the crew hopped out to inquire if I was OK—ie. do you know where you are and how to get out of here? I assured him I was fine—really. I’m not sure he completely believed me. Anyway, I made the turn I wanted to the next cache, which described the Nome Cult Trail—a “trail of tears” of sorts for the Maidu Indians around Chico. Four hundred and sixty one Indians were forced to relocate from Chico to the Round Valley Reservation on foot through this rugged terrain. Only two hundred and seventy seven survived the trip.

In the late afternoon I was getting pretty tired, but wanted to find the last caches in a series. They were harder to find than I had hoped, and then I came upon this large rattlesnake sunning itself in the road. After taking a few photos, I decided I didn’t want to poke my hands into any more rock crevices, so I called it a day.

I got a hamburger at Burger King in Corning, which was unremarkable except it was the slowest service I have ever had at a fast food restaurant. Finally got home about 10pm—it was a long day.

Links
—Glenn County high point photo gallery