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| Lost love Letters |
My friend Tom invited me on a geocaching hike near Louisville, and I was keen to go as it is an area I haven't explored yet. I also enjoy caching with Tom and Kim, two of the geocachers that I met through MOGA competitions. A few days before our planned hike, the weather forecast was for temperatures in the teens, and a biting wind to make it feel even colder. We could have decided not to spend all day out in the cold, but as my cousin Ali likes to say, "There is no bad weather, only bad clothing." So off we went.
The Jefferson Memorial Forest (JMF) touts itself as being the largest city park in the US, a claim that requires a bunch of caveats. I remember the Franklin Mountain park in El Paso also making this claim, and a quick google search reveals that there are several large city parks that could also make claims to this title. Not that it matters much, as long as we can go geocaching out there. JMF is cache-saturated, meaning that the hiders in that area have placed geocaches in nearly every available space in the forest. This means you can spend a day hiking and easily get 40+ geocaches, which is what we did. Tom and Kim have gecached down there often, but it seems that three are always some areas that have new caches, or spots they had missed previously. They had a list of caches the were targeting, but for me, I was just happy to be out and find whatever caches we happened to pass by.
We pulled up at the trailhead at about 8am, and met two other geocachers there, Bucknuts who is moving to Louisville, and BuffaloBob, from nearby Indiana. Being a party of 5 meant we wouldn't be hiking too fast, but we would also have a much easier time finding geocaches. The more eyes looking the faster things get found. The area we were hiking w a remote corner of the JMF, with no maintained trails. Winter is definitely a good time to geocache this area, as we were usually hiking cross-country and I bet the bushwhacking in the warmer months is pretty brutal. There was some nice ridge-top hiking, and something of a trail along the ridges, but we were only on the ridges part of the time. I was constantly cold though, the layers I chose for the hike were not quite warm enough. I think I was counting on more strenuous hiking to keep me warm.
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| Earthcache, Errosional Fissures |
Most of the hides were pretty average, simple pre-forms on a tree or in a nook. There were a few challenge caches I qualified for, and some I didn't, but those were not interesting hides. The best hides were a letterbox, and some hides requiring climbing up in trees. GCZM2N, GC83JAB, GC8476R and GC83HM9 all had fun little climbs associated with them, as well as nice page write-ups with a good sense of humor. Most were by the same cache owner, JeepStaff, who the others in our group know well, and who has quite a reputation for fun and creative hides. I'll have to keep an eye out for his hides in the future.
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| BuckNuts at Oh Deer! not Here! |
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| BuffaloBob at Sky King's Plane |
We ended up hiking around 10 miles over the course of 10 hours, and visited 43 geocaches, 40 of which I was able to claim as found. The only DNFs we had were ones where the CO had given permission to leave a replacement, so we left new containers at those spots. Three challenge caches I signed but do not qualify for, and may never qualify for as they require pretty big numbers.
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| Kim-Possible at a hide in JMF |
As for my overall impressions of JMF: There is a ton of geocaching to be done there, and some fun hides, but the hiking was pretty average in my opinion. No real great views, or neat geologic formations. If it weren't fun the geocaching fun, I wouldn't recommend it as a destination. But there is plenty of geocaching fun to be had there, so I might go on another trip or two.
