9-17-2011 North Mountain Geocaching Event

Length: 6.6 miles

Duration: 5 Hours 10 minutes

Vertical Up: 1982 feet

My track log at EveryTrail







This week's geocaching hike was on North Mountain.  The group was meeting up at 8:00 AM to hike to the top.  I made a plan to arrive at the North Mountain Visitors Center (link), do some geocaching for an hour, then meet the group at 8 AM for the hike.  That was the plan ...

View of North Mountain (looking south)

I arrived at the visitors center around 6:45 and spent the next 45 minutes hiking the preserve and finding some geocaches.  As it got closer to 8, I wound my way around the mountain to where I thought the group was meeting up.  Here is where I was reminded of a lesson in directions.  Maps are in 2D and hills are 3D.  It turns out that the group was not meeting in the parking lot I thought, they were about 1/2 mile south.

The Geocachers meeting at the Ramada

This was no problem as I had plenty of time to hike down to them.  I looked on the map and thought I could get there by following the road up a bit and around the mountain.  Well, I was wrong.  By 8 AM I found myself on top of the mountain looking down at the group meeting up at the location I was supposed to be at!







Scratch that plan.  Since I was already on top, I decided to wait around up top until they made it up.  Killing time was a mixture of relaxing, exploring, geocaching and watching the group work their way to the top.


The group eventually made it to the top.  It was fun to greet them as they passed.  It was even better to have more eyes to hunt the cache I could not find.  (Up on top Cache).  We did not stay at the top long as some in the group wanted to go find a puzzle cache that they had figured out.  We made our way down the backside of the mountain to a different peak.  As we were doing this we passed a sad sight.  There was a dead golden retriever lying under some bushes.  As best we can figure, it must have ran off and made it to this spot.  Very sad site.

We found the mystery cache in short order.  After that, a few guys said that they wanted to head down into the preserve and do some of the caches on the main trail through the preserve.  Since this was my plan, I decided to join them.  We started hiking down the mountain ... right past the "Area Closed" sign.  This was a steep descent.  It was also a quick decent as the guy leading us down is a strong hiker.

We made it down to the valley floor and began our trek on the trail.

Geocaching in the preserve with MikeJF57

I spent the next hour hiking and geocaching with two seasoned cachers.  By the end of the day, I ended up with 15 caches found, 2 DNFs and 1 sore body.

What a Great day!