Today, in the hopes of finding some large granite boulders that I had heard were somewhere in the area, I woke early and drove to Five Forks Battlefield. I'm hoping to create one more earthcache for the area by finding these boulders and marking them as a place of geologic interest. I'd been assured that the granite outcroppings exist, but on my first attempt I had failed to find them. I did locate a large marshy lake on my first venture however, which I considered to be worthwhile.
When I arrived at Five Forks around 7am the air was still what passes for cool here in Virginia (75 degrees), but it was quickly warming up. The temperature dropped however when I entered the pine woods. The pines are huge loblollys and maintain the shade all day. I wandered about for nearly an hour - finding nothing - before I made a detailed study of the map. The map clearly labels one trail as the 'Pine Rocks' trail. Despite having read the map before I never thought to guess that this might be where I could find some very large rocks. Pine Rocks trail was , of course, the longest in that section of the park. It covers the better part of the left side of the map above. By the time I found the rocks, which are suitable impressive, and made my way back to the road I had hiked something close to 4miles and walked into something like 4,000 spider webs. For some reason that probably has a lot to do with annoying me a certain species of spider has a habit of trying to block the trail with web after web. At an interval of sometimes no more than 10 yards the webs significantly slowed my progress. It took me close to two hours to hike the distance.
Now I am engaged in writing the proposal for the earthcache. Hopefully I'll be able to get it published before I leave.
No comments:
Post a Comment