There's a story behind this paved road and the stone markers. When the dam was built, several town bulidings were moved or rebuilt at what is now the town center of Webster.
#1 was the location of the old webster meeting house, which was moved and is still up the hill on Route 127.
#2 was Stebbins' Store (now Coudry's Country Store.)
#3 was Burbank's Bridge, a covered bridge that washed away in the flood of 1936, prompting the building of the dam years later.
#4 was Burbank's Sawmill.
Back to our adventure, of course half the fun was getting there. A tree had fallen over the road at one point, so I had to get out move that away. A large puddle persisted from all the rain of a few days ago, so we had to power through that in our borrowed Honda Civic.
We went to check out the back side of the dam first, then worked our way back to see if we could find a trailhead. At this point I noticed there were parking coordinates, but those were over a mile away and we were only 500 feet from the cache, so I figured there mush be a quicker way. We drove down the road a bit until we found a small road leading up to the direction of the cache. We tried to drive it at first, but quickly we realized the Civic wasn't going to make it as the road got narrower and steeper.
All was going well until we went around a bend and found ourselves in someone's backyard. The trail seemed to stop, so I decided to bushwhack right towards the cache as some of the previous finders did. A few seconds later I attempted some bad footing on a log and fell right over, scraping my leg and wrist. Then we had to work our way through the thorn bushes, but finally we crossed a stone wall and the ground cover became much less dense.
I expected to come across a trail at any time and we saw some trees with blue markers, but no clear trail. Eventually we came to the top of the hill and the cache. Nice hide. The coordinates were right on. We TNLNSL. There's still plenty of good stuff in the cache.
Since we knew going back the way we came wouldn't be too fun, I decided to head down towards the road with the hope that we'd run across a trail on the way. Nope. We wandered down through the steep woods and eventually came to the road, .2 miles from our car.
On the way out, we looked for the suggested trail and the one that's on the map available at the dam, but didn't see anything. Our way was definitely shorter. Easier? I'm not sure, but definitely shorter.
Thanks for the adventure!
Posted by jeff at September 13, 2004 10:53 AM