Our early caching was interrupted by very heavy downpours. We were headed toward our Saturday destination Port Allegheny. Between the rain and a road detour, we decided to go to the town of Eldred to find an AGT-McKean cache. It was our first visit ever to Eldred. The AGT cache in Eldred uses the WWII museum as an information gathering point. The museum was a great place to wait for the rain to give up. We were both impressed by the quality of the collection at the museum and the size of the museum.
We eventually worked our way to Potter County and got to find a couple AGT caches. We started off our AGT Potter finds with a place called Saulter’s Preserve. This was an outstanding county preserve. We were surrounded by birds and found a new flower.
It was a day of meeting land owners. Ali spotted an old cache called Rose Lake Treasures. The write-up told people they were welcome to use the canoe to get across the lake and camp if they wanted. We didn’t know what to expect, but when we got to the area, we found a small lake covered with pink water lilies. And yes, there was a canoe. We wanted to walk around the beautiful little lake so we trekked off in one direction. Oops, we were stopped by a beaver dam that we couldn’t negotiate. On the way back, we found the best blueberries of the trip. We returned to where we started and began our journey the other way. There was some guy out on a tractor mowing. He came by and smiled and said hello. He then explained that the property was his family’s and he was a geocacher. We stopped and chatted with this friendly person for a long time before making our way around the lake. We found two different kinds of orchids before we found the cache. The cache owner suggested another old cache in the area he thought we would like (we found out the next day he was right – we did like it).
After leaving Rose Lake, we moved onto the Triple Divide earthcache. Some earth caches are lame. This one was fun, educational, and interesting. There is only one triple divide east of the Mississippi, and it is in Potter County. The triple divide is the headwaters of the Allegheny River, the Genesee River, and the Susquehanna River. It is an amazing starting point for water that flows from this point and heads to Lake Erie and the Saint Lawrence River, Chesapeake Bay, and the Mississippi River. The easiest little stream to find is the headwater of the Allegheny River that flows by our home. We liked the earthcache and the AGT located at the Triple Divide.
On the way back to the truck, we heard a vehicle stop by our vehicle while we were on the trail. I think we both thought Uh-oh. When we got to the road there was this gentleman who immediately asked, “Did you find it?” Yes, it was our second friendly landowner of the day. It turned out, he was also a former county commissioner and a really knowledgeable person about wind farms. We stopped and talked until sunset. It was a great visit and a lot of fun. We learned a lot more about the land around the triple divide than any sign could ever give. In the end, he made a nice suggestion for where we could stay for the evening. It was a perfect end to a rough, wet start on a fantastic vacation.
No comments:
Post a Comment