Buzzards Rock Geocaching
February 4, 2007
Hard to believe it's been three years since
we've been Geocaching. When we first started, we were hooked on
it. The sport was in its infancy, and a lot of the participants
had the same opinion as us regarding what it was all about:
adventures in the great outdoors.
But then the well ran dry. Not only had
we'd managed to search and find every single geocache hidden
within 40 miles of home, but all the extra-scenic ones within a
three-hour drive. The sport continued to gain in popularity but
it suddenly went in a different direction. People started
making caches very small - Micro caches they called them - and
hiding them right in town. Before too long it seemed that was
the only kind of cache available.
At first I tried to play along. I searched
for hours in a county courthouse flower bed for a hidden cache.
Turns out the cache was a fake water sprinkler hiding in plain
sight. No way would I ever risk being throw in jail for
vandalizing government property. Funny? Yes. Clever hide? One
of the best. My kind of thing? No. The day that I logged on to
the Geocaching web site and saw that somebody had hidden a
cache at a nearby Dunkin' Donuts was the day I called it quits.
I continued to subscribe to a weekly
newsletter listing new cache hides. Every great once in a while
a player would hide a new cache in a scenic location outdoors.
They wanted to share the location with us. I started keeping an
online list of the good ones, because I wanted to visit those
spots one day.
Well recently Cliff caught a story about
Geocaching on TV, and told me he wanted to go on a hunt. I
thought immediately of Buzzards Rock, a bluff overlook in the
river valley southeast of Paris that would have remained a
secret well-kept by the locals if not for the online Geocaching
community.
The first available Sunday afternoon we put
on some warm clothes, hopped in the truck and headed toward
Mount Magazine on our standard route along I-40 to Ozark, then
Highway 309 South. Cliff passed the time with a new backlit
GameBoy he'd gotten from Santa.
When we reached the northern foot of the
mountain around Cove Lake it was apparent they'd gotten quite a
bit of snow recently. Everything in the shade was covered with
the white stuff. Soon we turned East onto Spring Lake Road and
took a route that included a couple of other dirt roads. We
drove across numerous areas where the road was solid snow.
Several of these were on inclines, and I always picked up a
bunch of speed before we started up them, else we might not
make it. I warned Cliff that we might be spending the night in
the truck, because we were going down some pretty long and
steep snow-covered hills that we would have to make it up on
the return trip. The drive along the dirt roads seemed to take
forever (it was 13 miles) but we finally reached the parking
spot at a clearing beside a pond.
As usual we were short on time. We had a
1.5-mile round-trip hike ahead of us, and the sun was sinking
fast. We hurried down a sloppy logging road covered with snow
and red mud left by recent four-wheelers. There were quite a
few turkey tracks in the snow. It was when Cliff started
stomping on some frozen puddles that I realized I was in big
trouble when we got home. He was wearing his brand-new tennis
shoes, and Mom had specifically told me to make sure he wore
something else! (I relayed the order but didn't check to make
sure it was followed.) To make matters worse, he wasn't wearing
any socks. I felt like such a bad Dad at that moment.
It only took us 20 minutes to reach the
bluff area. Cliff started looking for the Geocache while I
headed downhill about 60 yards to the bluff edge to snap some
pictures. The view from the bluff was worth the effort.
Directly west in front of me rose a mountain (another one named
Rich Mountain) slightly taller than Buzzards Rock, where we
were.
Turning a bit to the south, I could see the
western side of Mount Magazine in the distance. Past the north
edge of Rich Mountain I spotted the familiar shape of Short
Mountain rising above the river valley. The bluff line curved
around to face Shoal Bay and Lake Dardanelle to the northeast
(pictured at the top of this page), but I didn't have time to
venture in that direction.
After a brief round of snapping photos I
packed away the camera and hollered for Cliff. Somehow he wound
up directly below me. I could see some interesting rock
formations down where he was, but we running out of daylight so
I told him to come up to my level.
I helped him find the Geocache, then while
he was filling out the log book and sorting through the trade
items in the container, I went back down to the bluff edge to
grab my camera bag. I got out the camera and took one last
photo showing the north edge of Rich Mountain with Short
Mountain in the distance.
We double-timed it back to the truck and
got there with just enough light to see. We made it back up
those snowy hills and home without incident. I didn't even get
in trouble!
