Haw River Bison

Serious cachers are serious. Deadly serious.

I always enjoy hiking along the Haw River, a hundred-mile-long tributary of the Cape Fear River, which runs through several nearby counties to the east of Greensboro. Numerous trails run along the Haw's banks, and there's not a one of them that I haven't found among the most scenic I've hiked. Much to my liking, there are geocaches aplenty on many of the trails, and yesterday, fellow cachers Rob "Robgso" Isenhour and Debbie "Cupdaisy" Shoffner set out for a trail along the Haw just east of Pittsboro, in Chatham County. On this particular stretch, there's a series of ten caches, all bison tubes (small cylinders about 2 inches long, often used for carrying pills on a keychain), which make perfect micro-sized caches. They can also be exceptionally difficult to locate when in a densely wooded area. Such was the case yesterday, as we claimed finds on only six of the ten. Typically, that's not a stellar showing for three highly experienced cachers, but almost every group who has gone after this series has come back without finding the lot of them, so we were in good company.

Funny how rocks grow on certain trees...

In the 90-degree heat and very high humidity, our hike was rigorous to say the least... "brutal," even, according to Mr. Rob. Regardless, to my mind, it was a great day in the out of doors, with lots of challenging terrain and some incredible views of the river. There was one length of trail in particular — and it's a trail only the technical sense — that involved scaling many massive boulders, and there were several places that a bad step would have been bad indeed. It was worth every second of it, mainly for the scenery, but also because I did eat rather well this past week, and I needed to burn a few calories. That I did and then some.

Naturally, afterward, some of them were replenished by way of a Ham's bison burger, but that's all beside the point....

I hope you had a mighty fine labor day. I spent a portion of mine groaning about sore muscles.

It's not so evident in the photo, but a bad step here would be bad. A long way to bounce downward.