Brandywine Creek State Park - August 29, 2010

On Sunday August 29 I had the chance to get out and explore another section of the area that comprises the Woodlawn Tract and Brandywine Creek State Park. I have spent a decent amount of time roaming around various parts of the Woodlawn tract, but had not yet set foot in the Park itself. The tracks on the map are actually two different expeditions that day. In the morning, I took the girls with me for a little walk in the woods to get a geocache or two. That is the red track. We parked at the blue mark (west) and walked to the cache at the black mark (to the east). We followed the Northern Delaware Greenway along the creek, but then turned due east away from the creek and climbed into the woods along a nice trail up the hill. It was pretty hot with no air moving, and it was stuffy back in the woods, so a 1.4 mile hike, with some decent up and down the hill for little legs, was all I could talk them into.

After some time back at the house, I went back out by myself to try to find a cache or two in the southern part of the Park on the SW side of the creek. The first order of business was to try to pick up a puzzle cache, assuming that I had figured out the coordinates properly. I had, and the little diversion on the green track to the black mark accounts for fetching the puzzle.

The rest of the track is a more substantial hike (in a clockwise loop with some out-and-backs along the way), and shows me tracking down the three stages of a "multi" hidden here. Stage 1 is the northern of the three red marks, stage 2 is the easternmost, and the final stage is the southernmost. This little expedition made a nice 2 mile hike, and showed me some nice woodland scenery along the way. At one point on the most direct route between the second and third stages I was following a very overgrown side trail and not the main trail. I was considering going back and looping around on the main trail because it was getting so difficult to fight my way through waist high and chest high brambles, but in the best geocaching tradition, I had to keep "following the arrow" (on the gps unit..."target destination is that way"). While fighting through the worst of the undergrowth, I stumbled on the daytime nesting spot of a small group of deer, and almost jumped out of my skin when three or four deer exploded out of the brush not more than 10 or 15 feet from me and went bounding away through the woods. A cool experience, and the kind of thing that adds texture to what would otherwise be a fairly routine hour or so in the woods.