24 September 2013 Ascutney and Vermont's Oldest

Our two plans for the day were to revisit Ascutney State Park for the other older cache in the park and to hike and find GC86, Vermont's oldest cache. I don't know how long the Lebanon Diner has been open off the town square. We didn't eat here at our last visit, but stopped by each day were in town this visit. It was a quiet place with standard breakfast items done well.

After breakfast, we walked the town square park and the outer ring of the town square to find the answers to a solve on site puzzle cache. The town square park is as clean and inviting as it was the last time we visited. We had to make a stop at the fire department for one of the answers. The fire department has an old fire alarm posted outside. These are getting rarer, and this one is in nice condition. Ali solved the coordinates for the final, but we held finding the cache back for another day.

It seemed as though we saw fewer covered bridges on this visit than our last visit. We stopped by this one for a cache find.

The Ascutney hide was a 4 1/2 terrain. The terrain may be that when there has been heavy rain, but this afternoon we quickly made it up the trail and across the falls to the hide. There was very little flow in the falls so we had an easy crossing near the cache. It was a fun journey and another old cache (2001) found.

The interesting gate below marked the entrance into a very old historic cemetery. There was a cache nearby outside the stone walls of the cemetery, but the cemetery was a place to visit.

I missed the turn for the parking area to take us to Vermont's oldest cache, and we drove to Manchester, Vermont. I usually don't form big, negative opinions of towns, but I left Manchester with no positive thoughts. The town appears to have been swallowed and turned into one big outlet strip. There are cookie-cutter outlet stores everywhere. The city streets are narrow and have the new terribly designed tiny roundabouts. If you add to that a multitude of cars looking for parking and wandering shoppers, you have a good impression of Manchester through my experience. We made two quick stops and met with crabby, unfriendly employees.

We were both cranky from our Manchester visit by the time we finally got back to the parking area for Vermont's oldest cache. It was a nice hike up to the cache with good views in the area. The cache is multiple-stage, offset multi. The stages of the multi are all in wooded areas and the cache was placed in 2000 with old gps technology so the offsets are not very accurate. We tried to find the cache using the offsets for each stage, but looked a long time with no luck. We were fairly certain of where the last offset ended so I finally went to that area and walked along the last heading. I checked four or five spots before spotting the ammo can.