DuPont State Forest

Yesterday we had no cleaning to do and had heard the weather was supposed to be nice, so we decided to do some geocaching in the DuPont State Forest. It's located near Brevard, NC which is about an hour's drive from here.

The weather was absolutely perfect and we had a wonderful day hiking and geocaching. Before we started hiking in Dupont, we made a quick side-trip about 10 more miles south and picked up a geocache in Caesar's Head State Park located in South Carolina. We wanted to log a find in SC to increase the number of states in which we've geocached. That makes 5 so far. We hope to add TN before we leave the area, and maybe even a jaunt to VA.

After making a quick find in SC, we headed back to DuPont. We brought both the dogs with us since we hadn't taken them anywhere for awhile and we thought we'd be gone most of the day. We ended up hiking a good 5 miles!! The trails are really nice and are open to hikers, bycyclists and horseback riders. We saw mostly bikers and hikers, altho there was a group of horses taking off when we arrived. It looked like a fun way to see the scenery.

We found 5 caches in the DuPont forest, which when added to the SC cache we found, brings our total to over 100! I doubt we'll ever accumulate anywhere close to the number of caches found by the 2 ladies who introduced us to this sport when we were working at the KOA in Richmond. They're 2 retired schoolteachers from Cincinnati who Steve struck up a conversation with. Geocaching is their main interest since they retired and they travel all over the country to do it. They have logged well over 2000 finds in about 3 years!! We might be able to catch up to them a little in the next few months since one of them just had double knee surgery!!

We had heard about the DuPont forest from someone we met when we were mountain biking here in Asheville at the Experimental Forest. He gave us a trail map and told us about some of the interesting things to see there. He recommended we visit Bridal Veil Falls, so we made that our target to hike to, finding as many caches along the way as we could. The Falls were pretty spectacular and well worth the hike! I've read that a portion of The Last of the Mohicans was filmed at this location.

This picture was taken standing at the base of the falls. We could hear the water rushing from almost a half a mile away and the temperature was several degrees cooler as we approached.

This picture was taken standing to the left of the rocks pictures above. We talked to some other hikers in the area who said they had visited the falls a few years ago and they were only a trickle at that time. They said they could walk on the rock face. It must have been in the dry season or during a draught!!

I sat the camera on a rock and set the timer to take this picture. I don't think Twiggy or Shelby were very happy about being out there!! It was late afternoon and the sun had gone behind the mountains, so it's a little dark.

We had a wonderful time but were pretty tired and hungry at the end of our hike!! Thank goodness we took some cheese and crackers to munch on! I think even the dogs were worn out, they slept the whole way home. We stopped in Brevard and had dinner at an Irish Pub. It was pretty good food.

When we got back to the campgrounds, they were having a little bonfire with some people who have camped here for several years. We had an enjoyable visit with everyone. And we slept like logs last night!!