May 17 2009
Gap Mountain Treasure
This past week was a busy week, however, as usual, I try to squeeze in a geocaching adventure or two. I work so much of the time, that it is good to take a break from the work routine and escape to do something ‘fun’! I am fortunate that I work for an employer that has a very flexible work schedule and they don’t mind when a group of us take time off on a work day to go trecking through the woods in search of geocache - they even encourage such activity!
Well, my cache adventure was a week ago today, so, I did not take time away from work to do this one. The cache - Gap Mountain Treasure is located on? If you answered Gap Mountain, you were correct! This is a pretty mountain in the southwestern section of New Hampshire, part of the Monadnocks. It is one of my favorite places to go as it offers different levels of climbing and hiking with a wide variety of well maintained trails. I live not far from one of the trail heads. As I started out on this 3.75 mile round trip adventure, I head down an old logging road, past a nice little water fall with a raging brook.
Continueing on down the road for almost a mile, I come to field that right now, is full of wild flowers and four apple trees in blossom - very pretty. The trail crosses the field and then enters the woods, it wanders through pines and hardwood trees, then crosses a brook and then the up-hill climb begins. Up you go through the forest, at first, you are just climbing up a trail, then you encounter rock ledges where they laid out the paths of the trail to follow the ledges like you were going up steps. At one point, you level off and walk along a ridge line for 1/4 mile.
Up you go, continuing on up — you reach a point where you look up the trail and you see the point of a ‘V’ where the trail splits to the right and the left and you arrive at the base of the ‘V’. If you take the right - you climb up a short incline and then through some blueberry bushes and out to a large rock where you can over look the valley. Turning around and heading back, down the ‘V’ and up the other side, which takes you on to the trail that continues up through Christmas trees and then leads to the top.
As you leave the Christmas trees, the grade of the climb tapers off and becomes relatively flat with slight inclines and an occasional down slope - on you go through this field / semi-forested area (with lots of blueberry bushes - ummm - good place to come in August) for about a 10 minute walk before you come to a large opening where you think you are on the top as you can see all around, turn to your back and you have a grand view of Mount Monadnock.
The cache is located about 100 feet from this wide open area, it was a quick find (GPS works real well up here) - the logs had folks visiting in 2009, although the web site recorded the last visit in the Fall of 2008. I ended up taking away a package of cookies that somebody left in the cache - we do not hide food in the caches, the wild beasts that roam these forests and mountains might tear apart the cache to eat the food.
The day was coming to an end and the sun was heading down and so must I head down so I am down the mountain before dark. I will return and continue my trip to the top of the mountain as there is another cache up here to get!
