As planned, I wanted to do a combination hike and geocache run, which is exactly what I did, especially since I was alone with no non-geocachers (aka Muggles). I ended up doing a two-part hike, one part in the northern section of the park, and one in the southern part, with a short car shuttle in between. This is unavoidable given the way that the actual park itself is split with a housing development in the middle...
Up at 6:30am and on the road shortly after 7:00 had me at the park by 8:15 or so, including the mandatory Wawa stop for coffee (at which I forgot to buy any Gatorade or water, a fact which I would not realize until later...), and grabbing one virtual cache along the way. The virtual cache was cool, requiring a stop at a sign explaining General William Howe's landing of the British army on Elk Neck, which was followed by the march to the Brandywine battlefield (September 11, 1777) where Washington's army lost (as it pretty much always did), and the subsequent loss of Philadelphia.
The northern part of my hike ended up being 2.3 miles of gently rolling terrain, and I was able to grab 4 caches along the way, including my 400th cache. In the map below, I parked at the blue square at the southern end of the "lollipop" and hiked in a counter-clockwise direction. The 4 black squares are the caches, with the one in the NW being #400. As always, little errant sidetracks show up in the hiking tracks. After caches 1 and 2 (the southern pair), I followed the White Bank trail further to the east, but it soon became apparent that the trail was not going in the direction that I needed to go, so I backtracked a bit and set off cross-country (follow the arrow!!). I have to say that the $3 park trail map that I bought at the park store on the way in wasn't any help in this regard - about half of the trails that were actually in existence were actually reflected on the map. Unfortunately, this is fairly typical of state park maps, where only the most major of trails are shown, and the rest is often either skipped or out of date. I spent much of the day hiking on trails that according to the park did not exist. I would consider the park map to be a nice souvenir, but pretty much useless beyond that.
This part of my hike was a very typical stroll through mid-Atlantic forest, with mostly deciduous trees with just a few evergreens mixed in. Leaf color was good (but probably two weeks short of peak), and many of the leaves were still on the trees, so it had a nice "closed in" feel to it as I walked. The walk was refreshing and energizing. And finding regular and small sized geocache containers in the woods is a nice change of pace from micros in the suburbs.
While I was spending way more time than one would expect finding a difficulty "1" (easiest on a 1 to 5 scale) cache (the one that turned out to be my 400th), I heard a tremendous racket, which turned out to be a wild turkey. I took it as a good omen that I got to see and hear a turkey while hiking on Turkey Point. Unfortunately, I wasn't quick enough on the trigger to get a photo. And good thing for the turkey that there is no hunting on Sundays in Maryland state parks. Come Monday, he should be more quiet.
The one thing that I didn't have the time to do this morning was take the trail down off the bluffs to the beach. Next time...
Next...Part 2, the southern park section.
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