Return to Hawn State Park

The weather prediction this weekend was pretty spectacular, so we decided to give up our cabin fever and go to Hawn State Park for a day of hiking and a night in our tent.  Since our first attempt at geocaching a few weeks ago was a failure, I downloaded a couple of new caches onto our GPS so we could give it another go.  Here you can see the track we made last time, wandering willy-nilly on a snow-covered hillside, trying to find the cache at Trail of Tears:

The campground was fairly busy, since it had just opened for the season, but still quieter than last year:  We had shown up in the middle of Memorial Day Weekend.  The walk-in sites were abandoned and only one other couple was using the area.

We drove back to the park entrance and started down one of the connector trails, and then did the north loop of the scenic Whispering Pines trail.  Our total distance was about 8 miles.  Along the way we encountered quite a few people, but for the most part we had the woods to ourselves.  We had just seen Alice in Wonderland the night before, so our hike was punctuated several times by Hans turning suddenly to exclaim "You're late for tea!" followed by a flying pine cone.

The first geocache was at the the top of the highest point in the park, left by a geocacher who goes by the name "Strider".  He's obviously a Tolkien fan, or a fan of one of my sister's cats.  Hans charged ahead and found it fairly easily.  Success!  We agreed that the views offered from where we stood made our first find much more rewarding than the one at dreary Trail of Tears would have been.  We opened the musty ammo box and looked at the various treasures inside.  Someone had left a 200-peso note, another had left a laminated card listing prime numbers.  We didn't bring anything to trade, so we just left a note in the log book.

Victory is mine!

The next cache took us a ways off the trail, but it made for fun hunting with the GPS.  Hans was a gentleman and let me find this one.  He even stopped when he spotted the cache first and let me discover it.  It was under an alcove of sandstone cliffs, and neither of us felt like crawling into the hole.  The find itself was enough for us.

Our hike was finished a few hours before sunset.  With stiff legs we set up to make dinner, discovering that I had remembered to bring the hot dogs, but not the buns, and had left the marshmallows at home.  Drat.  Nevertheless, we played a round of Settlers of Catan (if you've never heard of it, well done) and tried to eat brats with spoons.  At least I remembered to bring the beer.  The firewood bundle we bought was a little damp and moldy, so it took quite a while to build a fire that was worth anything.  Once it had died down to coals, we did a little star gazing at the clear sky and crawled into our sleeping bags for the night.

Here are a few more trail shots and the GPS track of our hike.  The little green boxes are the geocaches.

(It was funny at the end of the day when I looked at the trip log on our GPS, because it said that our average speed was 2.5 MPH and that our maximum speed was 27 MPH.  But then I realized I had forgotten to turn it off when we drove back to the campground).