shoot you're still here you cheater, allright
From Highway 101 in Ukiah, take the Talmadge Road Exit and head east. Turn
right at the Buddhist Univeristy and then left at XXXX road. Keep
going straight, go past the North Cow Mountain road. The road you are on will
turn into a gravel road then head up the mountain. You will see the first
staging on your right as you enter BLM property. Go past the staging area and
head to the right (you can go left if you want to get started early on trashing
your vehicle, it heads to the second staging area, just on a rougher road).
Then head left to XXXX Springs staging area. It's a fairly nice flat gravel
road, nothing my old Honda Accord couldn't handle. After about X miles, you
will see the second staging area on your left. If you intend to park your car
go and do so now, we'll wait for you.
Continuing past the second staging area for a couple hundred feet, you will see
a road off the right labeled 2J. The first time I went this way it was dry as a bone and I had no trouble, but when I went back to actually place the cache it
had been raining and there was this huge mud puddle right at the first
turn which even my Jeep had trouble getting through. After that it's about
0.8 miles of the roughest road you've seen, with huge ruts higher than
your hubs and just try to track a straight line with a wet muddy road and ruts
that force you to slide sideways all the time. Somewhere along the way, the road
changes to road 6. The last 0.7 miles are about the same except it
gets steep (about 45 degrees in some
places). Side note - going downhill is a lot scarier than going uphill.
A couple of places I thought for sure the car was going to flip forward.
But coming back heading up the same hill I had no problems. So if you can
make it out there you can easily make it back.
So you've now gone about 1.5 miles from the second staging area, and you've reached a small turn around area with a single track off the right and a very steep and rocky road off to the left labeled "DEAD END". While tire tracks going down that road proved that some people drove down, I chickened out at this point - parked the car and walked the last hundred feet or so to the stream. Right before the end of road, there is a small game trail off to left that heads back up the mountain. About 30 feet from the road it heads under a bush. Hopefully you should be standing right next to the bucket, if not on top of it right now.
You should know what to do now...