After work today I went for a hike near the end of Airport Road to find a geocache. I hadn’t really planned on doing this hike anytime soon, but for some reason this afternoon I felt like I needed to get out. I parked the truck right on the side of Airport Road and started hiking a little before 4:00. It was only 0.2 miles to the cache, but with 700 feet of elevation gain. It was steep, rocky, loose, and heavily wooded. The first three-fourths of the hike was easy as far as navigation goes, but it was still plenty strenuous. As I neared the top, there were some cliff bands that were really tough to get over/around. I almost gave up at one of the ledges because I worked so hard to get most of the way up, but near the top of the ledge it was just too difficult to get up, and would have been impossible to get down safely. I eventually found a much easier way up that cliff band, then had some trouble at the next one, but finally I reached the top of the ridge about an hour and a half after I’d started.
I was only 300 feet from the cache, and it was an easy walk downhill from there. The view was great, though it was windy as hell. I didn’t spend much time on top–I signed the cache log, snapped a few photos, then headed back down. I relied very heavily on my GPS tracklog to get back down the ledges in the same places as I’d gone up them, and even so I still had to look for my footprints in a few places to make sure I took the right way down. It took me less than half the time to hike to the bottom as it had taken me to hike to the top, and my round-trip hiking distance was 1.11 miles. It was great to get out for a short hike so close to home after work.