Once upon at time, like 10 years ago, Michael introduced me to geocaching. I never picked up doing it on my own until a few years ago when my brother got into it. So naturally, I told him about my failure to find the Carney Park Cache. He naturally wanted to try finding it. So we set off with Ta in tow, or her towing us as the case may be.
Last time I went in the park and tried to get to the cache from the top down. This time we thought we'd try getting to the cache from the bottom outside of the crater. We parked the car in a spot that was sort of out of the way and then started the steep hike up the roadway that got us "near" were the cache should be. We saw some pretty views. Michael took several of these photos, but I don't remember which ones. Any of the wide panoramas are his for sure.
At some point we may have passed private property, in which was lurking this fellow:
There was quite a bit of tension as we waited to see how German Shepherd would react to us and Ta.
Thankfully he was super friendly and just followed us on our adventure. We dubbed him "Alfredo."
We got as close as we could to geocache while still on a service road. This still put us within 100 meters of the cache. At this point Michael went to explore down the hillside; Alfredo followed. The above photo doesn't do justice to how steep this hillside is. At one point I was concerned that Michael and Alfredo had fallen down the hill. They ended up scrambling back up with little damage (a few scrapes is all and only on Michael). At this point we both deemed that the cache owner either 1 - input their coordinates incorrectly or 2 - was a jackass. I hope the former.
We decided to see if we could get over to the power station, but to no avail. We ultimately gave up and decided to go hike the rim at Carney Park.
We had a little trouble getting Alfredo to stay at his house once we returned. He tried to follow us down the hill. Michael ran down and got the car so we could escape more quickly, hopefully giving Alfredo a hint. We tried VERY hard not to take him home with us.
Hiking the Rim:
Views down into Carney park and out to the South-East.
We made to the top!
Oh look....a cross?
We stumbled upon some half/mostly buried ruins that Michael explored.
We also found morel mushrooms.
Yes, that is Michael at the top of the old electrical tower.
Views from the tower:
Looking down into Carney Park. We started walking up where that little dip is on the left-hand side of the crater and would eventually head down over by the golf course on the right-hand side.
A peek through the gap in the crater.
Much of the trail beyond the tower Michael climbed was not quite what I would call a trail but I might call it a goat path. We were unsure a lot of the time if we were still where we were supposed to be.
We made it to the right-hand side of the crater in time to watch the sun set and to take some evening light photos of Ta:
Ta is so pretty!
At this point I figured we should find our way back down. My phone was dying and it was our primary and only map of the "trails" around the crater. Neither of us had light of any sort. We followed the most direct trail down, which lead us to a service gate for the golf course. As luck would have it, the gate was open because a groundskeeper was messing around with something. I think we confused him. We just sort of showed up and strolled through.
I was also unsure when Carney Park closed and didn't know if my car would be stuck in the parking lot. It turns out Carney Park doesn't close, so this was a moot issue. We piled into the car and headed home.
This concludes our adventure for today.
