GC1FWC9 Mount Vigil
Type: Traditional | Size: Small | Difficulty: | Terrain:
By: ColoradoPaul @ | Hide Date: 09/01/2008 | Status: Available
Country: United States | State: Colorado
Coordinates: N38° 43.625 W104° 55.330 | Last updated: 08/30/2019 | Fav points: 0

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Mount Vigil is a craggy summit with great views south of Old Stage Road.

Call Bear Trap Ranch at 632-0740 for permission to park in their parking lot and to use their trailhead to climb Mt. Vigil and San Luis Peak. The signed turnoff for Bear Trap Ranch off Old Stage Road is 38 44.369 104 54.915.

The trail starts at the bottom of their facility up some timber stairs behind a log lodge. The trail forks at 38 43.820 104 55.351. The south fork goes to Mt. Vigil. The west fork goes to San Luis Peak. After the fork the trail climbs steeply.

Another possibility, if you are coming from the west after climbing San Luis Peak, is to follow the trail from San Luis Peak to the fork and then up to Mt. Vigil never going down into Bear Trap Ranch. A key waypoint to access the trail down at the top of San Luis Peak is where the trail crosses the rocks at 38 43.559 104 55.944.

There is also a trail along the stream to the north at the bottom along Old Stage Road that generally connects the starting point for Knights Peak cache and Bear Trap Ranch. You may be able to use this if you plan to make a loop hike.

This cache is also one of a series of five caches (GC1FWA2, GC1FWAH, GC1FWAZ, GC1FWBB, GC1FWC9) all in the same area that contains a necessary clue-sheet to solve Crypto Cache # 10 – ENIGMA (GC1G01E). The following information relates only to Crypto Cache # 10 –ENIGMA and is not necessary or related to finding this cache.

PLUGBOARD
The plugboard is located between the keyboard and the first scrambler. The plugboard allows the sender to insert cables between pairs of letters that have the effect of swapping each letter prior to them entering the scrambler. For example, if the C and G letters are swapped, essentially you could think of it as whenever you type C on the keyboard, it would follow the path through the scramblers that previously would have been taken by G. And when you type C, it would take the path that one would have expected G to take prior to switch. Prior to sending or receiving a message, both parties need to know which pairs of letters are swapped on the plugboard. Swapped letter pairs are written as follows: C-G, M-Q, T-Y. Which letters were to be swapped was detailed in the daily keycode. Typically, ten pairs of letters were swapped in the German military codes (in this geocache seven pairs are swapped).

07/03/2015 By MountainBear
This one was a fun one that Javachip and I found while getting wet from a passing rain storm. Luckily there wasn't any lightning!!! TFTC!

09/16/2014 By OR85OR450
I had a blast getting the last! Somewhere in all the logs I thought there was a mention of staying generally north of the ridgeline ... I did and was 'rewarded' for being a bit leery of the ridge occasionally dead-ending in dropoffs. It is a rough hike in angle and downed timber, but safe steady progress all the way. There was a tad of moisture issue at the decon but I got straightened out best I could. The hide is back with some small rocks; pretty nearest the largest of the "3" mentioned in the hint.
Egress back to the start was pretty straight line... gradually contouring westward and downhill across the north slope and negotiating the timber. Soon the gpsr was showing Gold Camp Road (the gpsr map's words, not mine). Tthe road I hit was closed to motorized's, and I was downhill from my ride, but it was WAY better walking

06/01/2013 By vorticity
Snailman and I came west to east, but we got the sense that all the caches were placed from the other direction. It seemed we always had an extra obstacle to get around. Bean is doing much better being let down off cliff faces, so all in all it was not bad, but due to our approach we made it a lot harder that it should have been. Cache is there in great shape. Vort.

06/01/2013 By SnailMan1
Not sure what the best approach for this cache is, but I am pretty sure that it wasn't the way that Vorticity and I went. We stayed on the ridge line the best we could and the last set of rocks that we had to cross was quite difficult. We looked around for a way to descend and we finally found a route that seemed nearly straight down. We had our 4 legged friend (Bean) in tow and we slowly made our down the rock face. We finally made it to the bottom and I decide that I was not going to go back that way! Anyways, it was a short distances to the cache and this rock field seem trivial compare to what we just crossed. This was the hardest cache of the day! Thanks for bringing me to all of these caches today. It was all new for me and at the end of the day I had a great time on this hike.

04/14/2013 By Bee Gee & co.
Didn't look for too long. Looked in what I thought was the best place (before and after reading the clue) and didn't see it. It's probably there, we just didn't spot it.