27 June 2009 Beaver Creek








I expected to be useless today after a week of traveling. Instead I was ready to go and spend a day at one of my favorite places, Beaver Creek. Over the years, we've come really close to either buying property here or moving here. It was the first place we went hiking so every visit is special. Today we were chasing caches for two Ohio State Park Challenges. After all these years and all these visits, Todd Metz, was able to take us to yet a new place we hadn't explored here. It was a quiet stream area filled with the leaves of many wildflowers that had bloomed earlier in the year.

On the way out of our first cache, Ali spotted a mother with her baby raccoons. They were trying to scramble back into the tree and out of site. Their cute when they are little (and in the middle of the woods, not picking trash... )

14 June 2008 Columbiana County with GeaugaGarmin









This was our first day of chasing the ODNR 2008 series. The weather didn't cooperate as it rained a lot later than was promised, but we found the caches at Beaver Creek and Guilford plus a few in between. By the time we were headed to Guilford we had blue skies and a nice late-spring day.

25 August 2007 Beaver Creek Sprucevale Road









Our early evening stop was to find a quartet of caches we missed when we were here with Lep last month. We had been back in this area many years ago to fish the stream. On that visit we hugged the shore. This evening we were heading up and away. The hiking was really treacherous for most of the way out. We were hugging a rock face for a good portion of the way. The third cache went beyond the rock face to a section fo woods where there was a primitive horse trail. It was a really serene area and a big surprise. The cache was very near a clearing in a nice stretch of woods. Our last cache was back down the horse trail to a stream called Long's Run. By the time we reached Long's Run, it was pouring. We found the cache, but the intense rain robbed us of the chance to visit a very scenic place we had never visited before.


I was really concerned about the rain and the rock face between us and safety, but we negotiated it easily and quickly. As we finished the hike, the rain was gone and the last remnants of the day were giving the show in these pictures. The post sunset shot was taken about five minutes from Beaver Creek at an RC plane field. We hunted this last cache as darkness fell.

25 August 2007 Beaver Creek State Park Nature







It's still butterfly time. Somedays you are in the right place. The butterfly was photographed as we hiked the lower Vondergreen trail by Beaver Creek. The spider on the web was hanging out along the Dogwood Trail. She was rather unhappy that I ticked the web when I was trying to get this photo. The second spider was really large and unexpected. It jumped out when I removed a rock from a cache on the trail near Sprucevale Road.

25 August 2007 Beaver Creek State Park







We needed to return to Beaver Creek State Park so Ali could finish the ODNR State Park Challenge. She needed to get a photo taken at the "20th cache" site. We stopped at Berlin on the way down and found all the caches but one. After that we made for Beaver Creek and some serious hiking. The final "location" was on one of our favorite trails so we had a fun, little walk to it. Beaver Creek has a lot more water than it did when we visited with Lep.

After the photo was taken we headed for the Dogwood Trail. We've been hiking here for 20 years and had only been on the Dogwood once previously so the return this afternoon was fun. The mosquitoes were intense, but we prevailed to find a well done Carl from Ohio cache.