Beaver Valley Hike - May 21, 2010

I took a half day of vacation on this beautiful Friday afternoon to golf, but plans fell through and I ended up doing a solo hike/geocache instead. When I look at the geocache map around my house, there were still a bunch of unfound items in the Woodlawn Trustees wildlife refuge tract that I began exploring a couple weeks ago. With some time to burn today, I set out to clear as much of this as I could while having a nice hike.

I started on the far eastern edge of this map plot, and worked my way west, collecting caches as I went. The black squares are the geocache locations (the orange squares are my parking spots). There are also a couple of non-contiguous sections of walking on the western side of the map - these are the two times where I moved the car to get closer to a stray cache that needed finding.

This whole area seems much more remote than it actually is, and in the whole time I was out here in the woods, I think I saw three people and three dogs.

Along one of the paths in the woods, there were lots of signs of habitation in years gone by: old walls, springhouses, and this shell of a house. As an archaeology major in college I obviously have an interest in old things. So I can't help wondering about who lived in this house and when...

Look at the artisanship. They don't build 'em like that anymore. I love the arched fireplace opening, which would have also most likely served as the kitchen stove/oven.

3 hours and 9 caches later, having hiked 5.7 miles, I headed home. I am still loving the GPS's ability to plot all this for me...