Owl Rock Revisited and I Say, Are You Blind?!

I’m sure it’s plain to those of you who pop by to visit now and again that many of my blogs are primarily for me to record events that I want to look back fondly upon, and this is one of those.

Actually, I wasn’t all that fond of the earlier hours of this morning, as a migraine set in soon after I dragged myself out of bed. On the upside, after the visual aura wore off, the headache was very mild, almost non-existent — which was good because I had geocaching on the schedule and lots of creative work to dive into afterward. I still have a bunch of that on the docket, so this won’t be a lengthy entry.

I was planning to hit the trail at Shallow Ford Natural Area to check on the presence/condition of one of my very old geocaches, which a geocacher had reported as possibly missing. However, a new cache was published this morning in Altamahaw, not far from Shallow Ford, so I detoured to it and claimed the almost-but-not-quite-coveted first-to-find honors. Then I made my way to Shallow Ford to check on “Owl Rock” (GC2HM9H), so named due to the stack of rocks someone put up along the trail many years ago; some say it doesn’t really look like an owl, but no comment. Happily, the cache wasn’t missing. It was right where it was supposed to be, but it did need a little cleaning up. Once I’d handled that chore, it occurred to me that there is an old hunting blind along the trail, and a cache had resided within it once upon a time. That one has been long archived, so I decided to put a new one in its place. It’s called “I Say, Are You Blind?!”, and I’m hoping the geocaching reviewer will be able to publish it sooner than later.

Afterward, since it was about lunchtime, I drove the short distance down to Simply Thai in Elon and tore into some delicious chicken lettuce wraps, which were screaming hot (I might have overdone the dumping of chili pepper oil on them). And then it was back to Casa di Rodan to continue taking care of business.

And now... see you later.

Old dude on the hunt in Altamahaw

I say, are you blind?!

The Oddities at Shallow Ford

Rock cairn photobombing ol' Rodan — or is it
the other way around?

A beautiful but cold morning. A handful of new geocaches awaited me over in a remote corner of Alamance County, a couple of which had not yet been logged, so I headed over fairly early, figuring I might have a shot at first-to-find. My first stop was the Shallow Ford Natural Area along the Haw River, which has several miles of beautiful hiking trails and a passel of caches, a couple of which are mine from a few years back — "Owl Rock" (GC2HM9H) and "Shallow Ford Towers" (GC2HMAJ). Along one section of trail, I encountered the ever-mysterious cairns that have been built from the stones that cover the wooded hillsides. I'm fairly certain they are the work of Martians, who have clearly taken over this section of countryside, for as I hiked this morning, I could hear them in the distance, constructing their giant fighting machines. The entire time I was out there — just over an hour — the hammering scarcely let up, and when it did, it was only for a few brief minutes. It had to be Martians; nothing else sounds like that. Many of the rocks were arranged in manners that defied physics, leading me to believe they might be designed for communications of some kind. Beware — the aliens could be on the move at any time. In the video below, you can hear the hammering. It's outright eerie, it is! (Click on images to enlarge.)

The enigmatic rock cairns along the trail. Note that one of them is wearing a rather macabre hat.

On the video, you can hear the distant sounds of the Martians at work upon the fighting machines
they're building.... sleepless, indefatigable.

I did get first-to-find on the new cache. And on a slightly more mundane note...

After quitting Shallow Ford, I headed over to nearby Lake Cammack, to the dam at its southern end, where I managed another first-to-find. The cache owner had suggested that hunters might help remove some of the trash along the trail there, for the local fishermen are apparently too brain dead to carry out what they take in with them. Indeed, the area is absolutely beautiful but for the prodigious piles of trash that choke the woods. In fifteen minutes' time, I filled up a large trash bag, leaving at least a section along the river trail almost pristine. If every geocacher that goes in there were to do the same, the trail would be as scenic as nature intended, at least until the local pinheads fill it back up with crap.

Perhaps, if we're lucky, the Martians will simply eliminate them. They're coming, you know.

A nice view of the dam at the southern end of Lake Cammack

The result of just a few minutes' effort along the trail