First Try at Off-Roading and Geocaching: Mt. Waldo

This is a strange thing for me to be doing, but here I am writing a blog post.  I figure it will be a good way to document the events of the coming adventures, and more personalized than sharing on Facebook.

Following my trip to Portland to pick up Eliot from the airport, we decided that an outdoor adventure was on the agenda, but not wanting to do anything too large to start off the winter season, we chose to explore Mt. Waldo in Frankfort, ME.  It's a nice mountain just over 1000 feet tall, it has two towers on the summit, and a granite quarry on the northeast flank.  The granite from this quarry was used to construct the Rockland breakwater and Fort Knox along the Penobscot River.  Being a mere 20 minute drive from my house, we thought it was a great meeting point for an adventure.

The access road to the north of the mountain starts off as a relatively well maintained dirt road, but as prior trips down there indicated, the conditions deteriorated quite rapidly into a Jeep trail of sorts.  But this did not stop us.  Recently acquiring a Subaru with AWD, I thought it would be a fine idea to break it in on such a drive out on this trail to see how far I could get.

A shot of the trail going in - a bit rutted and squishy on a warm 55°F day.

For tricky bits and deeper puddles, Eliot got out to spot me.  It was a whole new kind of fun for me, since prior to owning a Subaru, neither a low clearance RWD Miata or a Prius would make it through these conditions.  My only experience with this style of driving is messing around with tractors I suppose...  And I broke the first rule of off-roading already: they say never to wheel alone, and here I was wheeling alone. Clearly, my faith is quite high.

Before all the mud, it looked like a pleasant Sunday drive through the woods.
Spirits were high!

We did encounter some deep ruts which were quite challenging due to the abnormally warm temperatures.  This was the first real holdup, and required a few attempts.  In the end, it was a correct approach and raw POWERRRR (in the words of Jeremy Clarkson) that got me up the muddy slope!

Wombat has conquered the muddy climb.

Our overly optimistic goal would have been to follow this track all the way out to the other side where it joins onto North Searsport Rd. However, after descending a long hill, we found some rather deep puddles that I wasn't quite up for crossing.  The hard part at this point was reversing out of my situation.  Thankfully I had Eliot to guide me back to the most recent turnaround area.  He did a pro job as no car parts were left smeared on rocks.  I believe we made it nearly 3 miles from the meeting spot at the start of the dirt road.  We returned to a "trailhead" of Mt. Waldo without any problems, which was a great relief for us as a party of one vehicle.

Armed with satellite imagery, knowledge from previous hikes, and a GPS with coordinates, we set off up a trail of sorts through blueberry fields.  This was completely exploratory as there are no good maps of trails on Mt. Waldo.  We stayed in the open areas as long as possible to keep bushwhacking to a minimum.  We then relied on the GPS to guide us through the woods to our chosen geocache site near the quarry.

The quarry from above.  (Quite near the cache site.)

Along the way, we encountered a man with a rake!  He asked if we were lost, and we meekly told him we were on the search for a geocache.  Now I have been to this quarry in summer before, so I recognized the area as the trees thinned out a bit.  There are steep "roads" that criss-cross the area that must have been used to transport the granite off site to the job, and we did pass a few of these.  Our clue for the geocache was a rock with a chain around it.  Which we did find. A huge rock with a cable (we figured it was close enough) fastened around it.  We scoured the area around the rock, and sadly were unsuccessful.  So much for a 2-star difficulty.

After not finding the cache, we assumed it was taken be someone unfriendly...  That did not stop us from having a glorious time at the quarry itself though.  We discovered that the quarry had a few inches of ice, and because of the warm day, the top had melted enough to cover the ice with water. Now, I had seen this video of a guy skipping rocks, and I just about jumped with joy when I saw this quarry, surrounded with rocks to throw in!

Frozen over, with a film of water on top - perfect conditions.

After trying it and getting almost the same chirp from each rock bounce, I was instantly addicted.  Rock after rock went onto the ice.  Ploing, ploing, ploing over and over again.  Meanwhile, the smarter one of us was starting up his stove to prepare a meal.

Eliot prepares the pasta meal of a lifetime.

Eventually I ate my thermos-full of lunch, and went right back to rock throwing.  It was such an enthralling sound, and I couldn't get sick of it!  I tried dropping them from the cliffs on the right shore, with increased results of course.  Then the rocks got bigger.  Then we broke the ice. The air from impact was stuck under the ice and started migrating under the surface to the highest point. After filming some slow motion rock impacts, Eliot took to harvesting ice with his ice ax, which from across the quarry, sounded just like the rock ploinging.  Can't say I've had much of a better time.  In honor of the ice, we hacked off a piece and posed with it:

Realizing that 4pm had come and gone, we decided that the easy way down (i.e. not buskwhacking) would be down the granite transport road I mentioned earlier.  I knew we could road walk this bit back to the car because I had been up that way in the summer before.  It was an excuse for us to test out our new headlamps, which performed with utmost excellence!  More geocaching is in our future...and some rock throwing of course.