Berea Forest New Years Hike

While not technically on New Years day, this hike was close enough to the new year to call it such. My friend, Tom aka Sequoia hosts an annual hiking event in the Berea Forest, usually involving hot drinks at one of the scenic overlooks this park. This year's event, was to be held at Buzzard's roost, and would involve a nice 2.5 mile hike in and hot cider. I made sure to get the day free to head down and join in the fun.

The Berea forest boasts 12+ miles of trails and several rocky overlooks, and it has an active geocaching community that maintains (and flips) hides in the park. A dozen or so new caches were published on the day of the event, and if one was to hike all the trails, you could find over 50 caches. Which got me thinking, why not try to find every cache in the forest on my day hike? Tom said it would be tough, but doable. So I packed light, and left Cincinnati early so as to have a good start to finding as many of the caches as possible.

I started my hike at the West Pinacle trailhead, not the one most of the geocachers attending the event would park at, since it is further from Buzzard's roost. It was still dark as I started, but that played to my advantage as there was a night cache right at the parking area that I was able to find. The first few caches hidden up the trail took a little longer than normal in the dark, but I managed to make the finds and made decent time up to the West pinnacle. One of the better caches on the way up was GC80F9N which involved lowered the cache from a lofty perch.

GC80F9N

With all the caches I stopped at along the way, I missed having sun-rise on West Pinnacle, but still had the rock to myself for a glorious morning view. The day was unseasonably warm, with a forecast for the mid 60s, and it made for perfect hiking weather.

West Pinnacle

 With most of my elevation gain already underfoot, I made a retty quick ridge walk over to the Indian Fort lookout, which also had amazing views. As I approached a trail junction and started searching for a cache at a rock formation called Devil's Kitchen, I hear voices and ran into the first hikers of the day... my geocaching buds from Cincy! They were on their way up to the event along with some Kentucky cachers and we joined forces for a couple of the fun hides around Devil's Kitchen.  The letterbox, GC8G5CQ was my favorite cache of the day, with the directions leading you to a small cave where the cache was tucked way down in deep. It was especially fun to find this with the group.

GC8G5CQ from within

Devil's Kitchen

Hiking to Devil's Kitchen

From the Devil's Kitchen over to the event, even more geocacher's joined up with us, until we were a big mob of geocachers ambling down the trail, finding everything in our path. Tom left us behind as we found caches outBuzzard's roost, but when we showed up there, he had his stove out and was heatingg cider for us to enjoy. We hung out at buzzard's roost for quite a while, enjoying home made donuts, hot cider and swapping geocaching tales. I met dsms99 who had done my Frozen head Whereigo and we chatted a bit about some of the more challenging hides around southern Kentucky and the Cumberlands, like Caver's Plunge. I might need to revisit that   e one of these days. I'm sure I could get folks interested in taking the plunge. Another cacher had a quadcopter, and he flew it about taking videos and pictures. His video was posted and provides a pretty cool view of the area.

After the event, I stuck with a large group of cachers that were hiking north to Robe and Basin mountains, the furthest trails from the parking area. It was good fun to find geocaches in the company others, but after a while I  witching to head off at my own pace so that I could also hike to the other s of the forest. So after getting to the last geocache basin Mountain, a gem of a cache at the End of the Rainbow, I split off to hike on my own.

Finding caches with the group

One of the more interesting hides, found by Scouter James

Crevice you need to climb to access Basin Mtn

Pretty walls around Basin Mountain

View from The End of the Rainbow

Headwall of Basin Mountain

Great hiking day in Berea Forest

What happened next was a comedy straight out of my MOGA competition days. I would hike up to a geocche on Robe mountain, and then not be able to find it. After 5 minutes or so, the rest of the group would catch up, and give me a gentle ribbing for being slow to find the cache, which they would typically find right away. Then i would strike off at a fast hike again to the next cache and this would happen all over again. So much for finding caches at my own pace, I would have been better off just sticking with the group. But after the basin mountain caches were found, I really did have a chance to split off, since I was heading over to the Eagle's Nest and East Pinnacle, and everyone else was heading back to the parking area. As I made my way to Eagle's nest, the number of hikers I passed starting increasing. I guess a weekend at the end of the year, with absoultely stunning weather, would be a popular day to be out on the trails, and now that I was getting closer to the main parking arrea, there were a lot of people around. This made finding some of the geocaches along the trail a little trickier, only because I didn't want to call attention to myself. maybe I should not have been wearing blaze orange then... Oh well.

Eagle's Nest

The cache at Eagle's Nest was great, and there were only a few other hikers there when i showed up, but the East Pinnacle was thronged with people. Someone even had a guitar up there and was belting out country songs. It was a festive kind of atmosphere, by somehow I like finding solitude on my hikes rather than a party of strangers. So I didn't linger long even though the views were fantastic. I did make a mental note to come back here with my family. This whole area would make for a great family outing.

Near East Pinnacle

After tagging East Pinnacle, I couldn't believe my luck. About 40 geocaches found, and not a single DNF. Sure some containers were in rough shape, with soggy log sheets, but every one of them was there and findable. Pretty amazing. Kudos to the local COs for keeping all these hides active. On my way down the main trail, I ran into Tom and we found a few caches together while hiking down to the East Pinnacle parking lot. He offered me a ride back to my car at the West end, but I declined, since there were a handful of caches along the bike path that I wanted to find on my way back. I managed to find these and was back at my car around 5pm, for a 10 hour hiking day of a bit over 12 miles. Not bad at all.  And I just about managed o clear out all the caches in this park. I missed 4 caches near a dead-end trail called Davis Hollow, which I had skipped early in the day so as not to be lateto the event. Maybe I should have grabbed those while I was nearby. There were also a couple challenge caches that I didn't qualify for, although I signed one of them anyways.  final find count, including the event, came in at 53. Not bad at all. but even better, the hiking was just awesome. Beautiful terrain, rocky cliffs with towers, caves, crevices, overlooks. Not too much elevation change, but enough to keep things interesting. My kind of day hike.

Sunset over Kentucky Hills