Today Pat, Neya, and I went exploring in and around Leominster State Forest.  Our intention was to locate three geocaches in the area and just have a nice hike.  It was a lovely day…

Watershed Retreat

Our first cache, Watershed Retreat, was in the woods east of Haynes Reservoir in Leominster.  Haynes Reservoir is located in the Monoosnoc River Subbasin which is part of the Nashua River Watershed.  This cache had been found only 5 days before, so it was a good bet that it was still there.

The trails were wide and pleasant and there was a great variety of trees and groundcover.  We got a brief look at a towhee while hiking.  The area was full of fall color and scenic places, really a gorgeous place to hike.  We got to the water's edge for a peek at the lake, saw a wide grassy access road bordered by red-leafed saplings, rock walls, an active stream, an empty channel, and even came to a section of the pine woods where thin lawn-grass grew on the forest floor.

We wondered at what the lawn grass was doing there.  I suggested that at one time this was probably somebody's property (what with all the rock walls) and this may well have been a lawn.  After years of disuse the forest encroached and covered the area (what ecologists call “forest progression“).  Probably in enough time this grass would die off or be replaced by hardier wild grass.  A quick check of the 'net once we got back home revealed the following.

From OLD HOUSES AND SITES OF HOUSES (Excerpts from a paper read before the Leominster Historical Society):

James Boutell about 1740, built a house just above Haynes Reservoir. The house stood just north of the house we remember. Afterward the large two story house was built. This house was burned a few years ago. For many years after Stephen Johnson, in 1753, located at the comer of Pleasant and Pond Streets there was no houses between him and the center of the town…

[emphasis mine]

Pond Street was one of the streets we had taken to get to this area.

All of the caches today required “bushwhacking”, i.e. covering at least part of the distance offtrail, pushing through vegetation.  This cache was the easiest to bushwhack to of the three.  But under treecover, GPS units get flaky, and today was no exception.  When my GPS said we were 30 feet away, I dropped my backpack and said “Let's search in a wide circle around this area.”

20 minutes and one wide circle later, we still hadn't found the cache.  So we regrouped and Pat and Neya went to sit on a large boulder while I switched the GPS back on and tried to get some more bearings.  Chasing the arrow led me in a circle about 40 feet wide with my pack where I had left it, in the center.  Getting suspicious that my pack was in the center, I returned to it, leaned over the rock wall I had dropped it next to, and there was the cache.

The cache was in a PVC pipe that someone had painted dark green… this helped camouflage it. Neya extracted several treasures and put trade items in to replace them.  I spotted an “I [heart] NY” keychain and grabbed it… one of the caches we were planning to visit today only accepted keychains!

We read the log entry of the people who had visited it a few days prior, and then added our own entry to the logbook.

After puting the cache back in its hiding place we bushwhacked back to the trail and started down to the car.  Pat and Neya both complained that they were tired, but I cajoled them into at least trying to find the second cache.

Total hike distance, not counting time wandering about searching: 0.6 miles.

Wolf Cache

Not far from where we parked to find Watershed Retreat, was the parking area for Wolf Cache.  An old gated-off dirt road (called Parmenter Road) extended into Leominster State Forest here.  I wondered at the name Parmenter… did it mean something?  Was a parmenter some sort of occupation or trade?  Turns out it is a rather rare surname… presumably someone named Parmenter lived in this area a long time ago.

At the gate we spotted the parmenter road sign which warned us that October through February was hunting season in the area.  We could hear gunfire in the distance.  We didn't want to be mistaken for deer, so we idly considered quitting for the day, but ultimately we really wanted to go looking for the caches so we decided to sing while hiking.  I figured there was very little chance for a hunter to think that shape ambling about singing “Would You Like to Swing on a Star” was a deer.

Except for the occasional gunshots in the distance Parmenter Road was pretty peaceful.  This cache was about 0.9 miles as-the-crow-flies from the car so we were in for a longer hike.

At about 0.4 miles we took a side road but it didn't seem to get us closer to the cache and eventually we turned back toward parmenter.  We were not of a mind to bushwhack for half a mile!  We continued down Parmenter to another side road which bore a sign proclaiming it to be “BROOK WAY”.  We followed this road unil the GPS said we were 0.11 miles from the cache.  At that point we had no choice but to bushwhack.

It was much harder going than the last cache, the area was thick with pine saplings and small hemlocks and beech.  The vegetation was too thick for the GPS to get an accurate read, but I had taken a bearing from Brook Way and was determined to push on until I got close.  As we forced our way in, we heard gunfire again, closer (maybe a half mile away) in the direction we were heading.  I started getting nervy.  Should we just turn back and forget it?

“Did you decode the clue for this one Pat?” I asked.

“Yeah.” she replied, it said “Don't whine through the pines.  Life's a birch.”

“Okay so when we get there, start looking for a birch tree.”

“Well, there's a birch.” she said, glancing toward a tree that was only 10 feet from us.

I glanced at the GPS: 280 feet to go, about a twentieth of a mile.

“Nah that can't be it, we've still got nearly 300 feet to…” that's when I noticed the cache, sitting right out in the open at the base of the tree.  Talk about GPS drift!  This was the first time I had ever experienced 270 feet of drift!  I took a waypoint of the area and considered how lucky we were to have spotted it here.  If we hadn't noticed it and had pushed on, we never would have found it.  We'd have been off by almost 300 feet.

This cache was also in a piece of PVC pipe.  This time white with a red cap on one end and the name WOLF CACHE embossed on the side.  We cracked it open and found that the person who had signed the logbook for Watershed Retreat on Oct-4 had also signed this logbook on the same day!

Once we were done trading the cache was packed pretty tight.  We placed it back where we had found it, and then I glanced at my GPS unit's LCD screen.  To the east was Brook Way, and to the north was Parmenter Road, and north of that was the last cache I had wanted to hit today, and the one I was most excited about seeing.  When I checked the distance I found it was only 0.25 miles north.

“Look how close we are Pat.  Why don't we try to find this last cache?”

Pat was into the idea, and since we hadn't heard any gunshots in awhile, we decided to go for it.

Total hike distance: approx. 1 mile.

Keys to the Forest

The last cache was one I had noticed on geocaching.com a couple of weeks earlier and had printed out.  Out of all the caches in and around Fitchburg, this one hadn't been visited in the longest time–it's last visitor found it on July 11… almost 3 months ago.  It was also an interesting cache in that it was full of keychains, and the cache description indicated that visitors were only to trade keychains in the cache for other keychains:

The container is a 3 inch pvc tube that has many keychains in it. These plastic key chains were made by students that I teach. Please take and leave keychains only.

After putting Wolf Cache back where we found it, I began heading back toward Brook Way when Pat pointed north.

“Cache is that way, Chuck.”

“Don't you want to go back to the road and take the road up there?” I asked.

“Ah what's the difference, we have to bushwhack to the last cache too.”

In fact the cache description indicated that one must bushwhack about 475 feet north of Parmenter road, about a tenth of a mile.  But bushwhack a quarter mile to get there? Ermmmm.  Oh hell, why not?

The dense pines got denser and the ground became very uneven.  There were fallen logs everwhere that had been completely buried in pine needles making the footing treacherous. After about 15 minutes of this I had had enough.

“Okay, I'm heading to Brook Way, objections?”

There were none and we proceded to converge toward Brook Way.  After awhile we came to a particularly dense area that we had to skirt around and when we emerged and glanced to the right we saw that we were standing on Parmenter Road just past where Brook Way forked off of it.  We had essentially bushwhacked about 0.13 miles parallel to Brook Way.

We turned west and continued down Parmenter Road looking for the direction indicator on the GPS to indicate where a right turn was necessary.  It did so at about 435 feet to the target.  At a spot where a very pretty brook south of the road passed northward through some pipes and emerged on the other side under some tall, thick hemlock trees.  The GPS indicated that we needed to head north, pretty much the same way the brook was going.

When I told Pat how far we were she said that the description had indicated you should start bushwhacking at 475 feet.  The sun was very low and the forest under the hemlocks was getting pretty dark.

“Well, we'd better decode the clue for this one, just in case, I don't want to be wandering around in there in the dark.” I said.

Working together we deciphered the clue which said “Follow the brook until you come to a tree that looks like a fork tongue.”

“Well here we are at the brook, ” I said, “let's follow it.”

This proved more difficult than you would think.  Thick bushy hemlocks had to be skirted and required that we cross the brook a couple times and then… it disappeared.  The ground around us was full of mossy, muddy, furrows covered over with a thick bed of leaves.  The brook had split into literally dozens of tributaries that spread outward in a treelike pattern from northwest to northeast, but none of the tributaries seemed to hold any water.

“Well now what?” I said.

“Maybe it's gone underground, or is under the leaves where we can't see it.  Let's push further north, what does the GPS say?”

“About 200 feet that way.” I said, pointing north.

So we continued on, and before long the brook just reappeared, flowing out of a mossy furrow as if it had been there all along.  Weird.  We helped Neya hop across it a couple of times and continued pushing north until I saw a white PVC pipe crammed into the crook of a tree with a split trunk.  The pipe was stuck in the crook pointing straight up.

We had found the keys to the forest… and the GPS said it was still 100 feet away. *sigh*   I dutifully took a waypoint and then we retrieved the cache and cracked it open.

Unlike the last two caches this one was wet inside… not just damp or moist.  Clearly 10 months in the woods was not agreeing with the cache.  We dumped out the contents… dozens of keychains… many the obvious handiwork of young people but a number of others that had been placed in the cache by visitors.  Also in the cache were a couple items that didn't belong there… a golf ball, a subway token, weird stuff.

I had two keychains with me so we could take two home.  Lynnea selected a teddy-bear keychain and I took a 9/11 commemorative keychain.  Then we opened the damp logbook and found that the person who had visited the other 2 caches on Oct-4 had also found this one on the same day!  My printout of the cache description was a couple weeks old and therefore didn't reflect this.  Amusingly, the 9/11 keychain I took was the one they had left.  The teddy bear keychain had been in the cache since July 10.  We signed the logbook, packed the cache back up, and returned it to its “hiding place”.

All the while we enjoyed the soothing sound of the trickling brook about 10 feet to the east.  We wandered over there and checked it out.  Such a peaceful place.

“I love the sound of trickling water.” Lynnea said.

I smiled.  I had just been thinking how much the sound reminded me of those “nature sounds” tapes that people like to listen to.

“Me too.” I said, tousling her hair.  Then I spotted something skating across one of the small pools formed by the brook.  “Look Neya!  Water Striders!”

We watched them for a few moments before the distant gunfire that we hadn't heard in almost 45 minutes, started up again.

“Frere Jacques, Frere Jacques, Dormez vous? Dormez vous?…” we began to sing as we made our way back to Parmenter Road.  On the way back I discovered where the brook was hiding by stepping on some innocuous looking leaves and having my foot go through into the water.  Fortunately I pulled back quickly and didn't get very wet.  After that the hike down Parmenter Road was uneventful and filled with singing.

When we reached the parking area another car was just pulling up.  A woman in a red shirt and white shorts got out with a funny little dog on a leash, and set off at a brisk pace down Parmenter Road, apparently unperturbed by the gunfire.  Guess people in the area are probably used to it.

Total hike from Wolf Cache to Keys and back to the car: approx. 1.1 miles.

We were done for the day, it was about 5:20 PM at this point.  We had set out at about noon.  Our hikes added together totalled 2.7 miles.  A respectable distance considering the terrain.  We called in an order for pizza and headed home.

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Photos from the day's hikes:

• Watershed Retreat
   
• Wolf Cache
   
• Keys to the Forest

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My geocaching.com log entries for the day:
 

	10/9/2004	You found Watershed Retreat	Massachusetts	[visit log]
	10/9/2004	You found Wolf Cache	Massachusetts	[visit log]
	10/9/2004	You found Keys to the forest	Massachusetts	[visit log]

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