Third in a series of caches placed in the southern section of this signature county park. Ironically, I only discovered this area in the past few weeks in spite of hiking the other trails in this park for 20 years. Most locals leave the parking lot and head west up Sourland Mountain and the well-marked trails that bring you to the top. For some reason I missed the trails that bring you to Roaring Brook in about a mile. What a shame! This area has peace and quiet, less traffic than the mountain trails, and a spectacular array of stone and wooden foot bridges to carry you through the lowlands with their little tributaries. Eventually you'll come to the remnants of an ancient dam and a stone foundation. Near the park perimeter you'll find one nice cache provided by Jan and the Man, but nothing before that--until now. I placed three today evenly separated and expect to hide at least three more to coax folks into this underappreciated nature zone. The caches ascend in difficulty level as you continue.
Number 3 will test your attention to detail. While the cache is almost as big as the first two, I hid it in the mode of my very first geocache, Up a Creek, which challenged cachers more than I expected. The key here is to rehide it EXACTLY as you found it, with suitable camo. Otherwise the difficulty level drops to about one!
What's great here is the stone steps the parks people put in to mark the trail. I've never seen anything like it! They have plenty of glacial moraine in the area to draw from. You can see as you leave the trail that it's been rerouted, as there's an old trail marker on a tree.
Las Vegas key chain to the FTF. Pencil provided. Enjoy and God bless!