Hiking in the New Year

The day of New Years Eve, I pondered where I wanted to go cachin' and selected the southern part of the Land Between the Lakes, a hiking trail near Piney Campground. I got up around 6 am and left just before 7 am heading for Kentucky Lake. First stop was at Wave at Hank, a geocache near the lake, where the cacher has to pass by the home of Hank Williams Jr. This was before 8 am, I had doubts that Mr. Williams would be up, I chose to go after the cache and not make a visit.

Arrived at the parking coordinates and headed for the hike. I had hiked this trail about 10 years ago and knew where to enter the woods. I turned my tracks on the GPS to record my travel where I would later upload the trip on EveryTrail.com. There was much rain the night before and I would later find that many intermittent streams were flowing at a large and fast pace. This made crossing the streams a delicate operation. My first find on the trail was Murray's Cache; took some time to find the cache since the coordinates were off by more than 30 feet. Since I was tracking myself, I elected to set down the GPS and not track all the circling, back and forth, ei cache dance that comes with the game. Found the cache and had just as much a difficult time to finding the trail. I would have another difficult time finding the trail and then began marking where I left the trail to find the right spot to resume the tracking.

Next find was Where's the Door, a cache at a small burial plot marked with stones. Very interesting location. Next cache was Sadee want to cache, too, that one took some hill climbing. Staying on the trail I sought 20th Anniversary then found Volunteer, followed by Micro in the Tennessee Woods. Micros in the woods are not my favorite caches but this one was spotted very quickly and coordinates were dead on.

After returning home, I uploaded the tracks and can be found here.

Returning home, I drove through Puryear, TN grabbing Audrey's Cache, Is anybody home? and ended the day with State Line Evil Micro. I will have to return to Puryear and avenge a DNF at Is anybody home yet?, I DNF'd the cache even through I could see the container. About two feet of water prevented me from retrieving the cache.