Hiking & Geocaching: River Tillard to Sporting Mountain Rd

This is my first blog post ever!! Perhaps my last. This is an attempt to try and keep a journal of our hiking adventures. Probably a bit of geocaching thrown in as well. We use a Garmin Oregon 300 for geocaching and since have become interested in hiking and mapping these hikes and trails with track logs and uploading them to Garmin Connect.

Yesterday January 1, 2010 was a beautiful day sunny and between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. My wife Martha, myself and our lab Caoimhe did not to waste such a beautiful New Years Day. We had noticed a couple of new caches were posted in the River Tillard area a few weeks ago. We had driven close to one of them last week and discovered the construction of a new multi purpose trail by the NTC. So we decided to park in River Tillard and have a look for the caches while checking out the progress of this trail. The trail is mainly being constructed on an old railway bed. A good size stream meanders along side the trail and about 4 km in from the River Tillard side there is a waterfall and old salmon ladder.

The work is ongoing. They are cutting brush/trees and leveling the trail with heavy machinery. Easy going and nice and level. Not much of a challenging hike, but a good way to get out in nature and not worry about busting an ankle :-)

We made it to the location of the first cache but did not get it because of the high water levels, it is on the other side of the stream at the waterfall. By this point it was heading for 3:00pm so we decided to return. The trail is going to eventually go to Louisdale from River Tillard.

If you click on the link below it will take you to the Garmin Connect site. 18/01/2010 edit I have updated the track log, it shows one way and the player goes in reverse of the way we went but the track itself is more accurate, still messing up the time lapse though.