16 December 2007 Far North Bicentennial Park

Finally, the temperatures are wintry and we've got a few inches of snow so it looks like winter. But there's still no skiing here in town, so we're hiking again. This weekend we explored the Blue Dot Trail in Far North Bicentennial Park (near our house) and searched out a couple of geocaches. We only heard of the Blue Dot this last year and sought it out for the first time earlier this fall. It's a singletrack trail that winds through the woods, mostly on the uplands. It's called Blue Dot because whoever maintains it (it's unofficial) has painted blue dots or nailed blue reflectors to trees along the way. When it reaches Campbell Creek, there's a questionable-looking bridge. The first time we reached this point, we decided to hike along the creek to another nearby trail with a sturdier bridge. But on this day, the bridge appears to be frozen into place and we tried it. I let Paul load test it before heading over myself.

A little farther along, we started tracking a geocache and decided to leave the Blue Dot and head directly to the cache. That got us into some wetlands along the creek and some overflow. We eventually found our way to this pond with this view of the Chugach Mountains.

We found the cache near the pond and joined the main trail nearby. Not being quick learners, we sought out another cache that required getting off a real trail. This search was even more of a thrash through alders along a small creek. But geocaching can become a bit of an obsession, and even though we don't do it often, it's hard to turn away when you know one is close. So by the end of the afternoon, we had found 3 caches and followed the Blue Dot almost its entire length back to the car. Between the Blue Dot and the caches, we'd explored several corners of the park that we hadn't been to before.