Ringing Rocks Earthcache and Death Cave Cache in Montana

Had a great weekend with the family.  Ventured beyond Idaho into Montana.  Did an Earthcache called Ringing Rocks.   Yet another cool place we discovered because of geocaching!

Montana Earth Science is a site with great information about the Ringing Rocks formation which sits within the Boulder Batholith region in Montana (about 20 miles East of Butte.)  There are only 5 known sites like this in the world. 2 of these are in the United States.  Pennsylvania has the other U.S. site.

We had a great weekend caching our way through the trip. Because we did not follow a set route and were often in areas without cell service I found it challenging to do paperless caching on the fly. Probably could have bagged more geocaches if I had covered a big radius and downloaded several pocket queries, but we bagged a half dozen caches and had only one DNF at Death Cave Cache (GC17Y5D).

In regards to the DNF.  Here is one gem of a tip that will save  iphone geocachers  from the pain of a DNF in remote and tough terrain. When you are looking up cache information, ALWAYS, ALWAYS save for offline use as soon as the information downloads. It was very frustrating to lose both cell service, thus access to the hint,  (which we later needed) and gps coords (satellites got knocked out because of the canyon walls.)

This was an amazing area and we had a great adventure in spite of not finding the cache. Considering our kids have NO experience with either free climbing or hiking on scree, they did well with their “by fire” intro to both.

We’ll go back and pick that cache up next time we are in the area!

Happy caching!

Share this Post