Falls Lake Rail Trailin’

The Vaccinated But Still Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars

No fire-breathing Tyrannosauruses on today’s geocaching adventure, but we did encounter a fire. The Vaccinated But Still Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), Old Rob (a.k.a. Old Rob), and ye olde fart (moi) — met up at Falls Lake in Durham County to hike one of the area’s rail trails. This one is the long-abandoned Durham & Northern rail line, which dates back to 1887. There are ten caches along this particular stretch, and we set out to find them.

The hike took us about a mile and a half out to a point in the lake accessed by the narrowest of land bridges. The cache out there — “Guardian of the Point” (GC1DN30) — was an easy favorite for us, as the scenery out on that long, narrow strip of land turned out to be pretty spectacular. And we found fish. Dead fish. Many dead fish. They had clearly been swimming around there during a period of high water, and when it receded, they were trapped. Well, that really wasn’t what I would consider a favorite moment, but it was different.

Smoke pouring from hollow tree

One of the caches along our trek — “Loco Fuel” (GC5K7D4) — may have been the victim of the fire-breathing tyrannosaurus I sought yesterday (“The Lair of a Fire-Breathing T-Rex”), for at ground zero, we found not a cache but a sizable area of scorched earth. It was recent enough that we found smoke belching from the trunk of a hollow tree right at ground zero. Much to our chagrin, we couldn’t come up with even a melted lump of plastic here, though since we do know the cache owner, we took it upon ourselves to replace the container to (hopefully) keep it in play.

Once finished with the rail trail, our crew sallied forth to Hillsborough where we took a tour of several of the town’s myriad historical buildings by way of a recently published Adventure Lab cache. This one proved fun and edumacational. Then we made our way to Hillsborough BBQ Company for the first group lunch we have had in quite some time. Happily, we were able to sit outdoors, which we all still prefer.

And after all that, exhaustion set in. My birthday is coming up, so I may be even more exhausted at this time next week.

That is all.

All that remains of an old trestle

Something fishy

Heading out to the distant point

The view from GZ back the way we had come

Hunger Games at Falls Lake

Cyclopean horror along the trail near one of the caches.
The thing damn near swallowed Robgso.

"The Hunger Games" is a series of 22 geocaches on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail along Falls Lake, near Durham, NC. The caches are all food. Steaks, hamburgers, sub sandwiches, grapes, peppers, ice cream cones, you name it. Well, yeah, they're dog chew toys with bison tubes hiding inside them, but it is kinda fun going through the woods and finding an ice cream cone hanging in a little cedar tree. Out on the trail today with Rob (a.k.a. "Robgso") and Robbin (a.k.a. "Rtmlee"), I was thinking, if a smart phone were really smart, when I entered the cache description into my notes, the phone would reply, "You just said you found an ice cream cone hanging in a little cedar tree. That's messed up." To date, my phone has never indicated that level of smartness to me.

All total we hiked about six miles, and we managed to find the lot of the caches. Terrain here isn't too rugged, though neither is exactly flat and level. Since we had to go all the way to one end of the series and then hike back, we skipped every other cache so we'd have some to find going both directions. Good weather — mostly cloudy and gray, but about 45–50 degrees. We ran into one other geocacher of our acquaintance, and a couple of others we didn't know. As we neared the end of the trail, we kept hearing the howling of a dog (or, by the sound of it, possibly a werewolf) drawing distinctly nearer, and right about the time we were signing the log sheet, a couple of deer came bounding past, followed moments later by a rather less-than-ferocious-looking but highly spirited beasty dog. Once he saw us, Dog put the brakes on his pursuit, apparently bamboozled by our sudden appearance. By his prolonged hesitation and thoughtful expression, it was clear he was trying to reconcile in his mind how two bounding deer had transformed themselves into three old farts. Dog contemplated this anomaly for a couple of minutes, then shrugged and continued on his chase, presumably having come to the firm conclusion that nature is just plain strange. We weren't sure what he was going to do if he caught the deer, but my guess would be sit down and have a deep discussion about the things one sometimes encounters in the woods.

Sometimes you find old farts.

Mr. Lee, looking almost not unpleasant

Old Trail Dawg playing with his meat

If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding.