A few years ago when the Ohio State Parks were presenting a new geocaching challenge series every year, I volunteered to hide the OSP cache in Punderson. I chose a spot that required a long hike on the Cayuga Trail, where you were rewarded with a nice view of the southern end of Pine Lake. When it came time to hide the Joker cache for my Poker Run event, I thought I might be able to use the same hiding spot. Unfortunately when I hiked down to Pine Lake to check it out, I discovered that the far end of the Cayuga Trail loop has now become the 6th and 7th pins for the disc golf course.
Even though the disc golfers are supposed to share the trails with hikers, I’ve found that it’s probably best to keep geocaches away from the disc golf course, as the Punderson course has become an extremely popular attraction, and the golfers can be quite intense. So I looked for a spot a little farther away from the lake, and I ended up finding an interesting piece of history nearby, although not a very significant one.
This multi-cache will take you on a nice long hike on one of the longest trails in the park. The Cayuga Trail is a loop trail, so you will find the two ends of the trail loop situated very close to each other, about 200 feet apart. Both trailheads are along a short grassy trail not far from the gazebo. The northern trailhead is marked with a large wooden sign, but the southern trailhead is not. Although the first stage is on the southern end of the loop, you can begin your hike on either side of the trail, as the north and south ends run very close to each other at this point, allowing you to cross over. As you move farther west, the northern side of the loop switches back on itself a couple of times, making it easy to lose your bearings.
If you take the southern end of the trail and hike to the cache and back, the entire round trip from the parking area at the gazebo will be just a little over a mile and a half. If you decide to hike the entire Cayuga Trail loop after finding the cache, you can add another mile to that distance. Be sure to take a trail map along with you as the trail system here can get a bit confusing when several different trails and loops run so close to each other. After finding the cache, you can continue heading west until you reach Pine Lake, but watch out for the disc golfers!
This is a three-stage multi-cache. The first two stages are small metal tags and the final is a camo’ed lock & lock container. There is a lot of signal bounce in this area, particularly at the final location, but the caches should be fairly easy to find, especially if you use the hints.
The final cache is very close to the southern border of the park, so don’t stray too far into the woods. Once you find the cache, you can look for a tree about 25 feet south of the final location that has an interesting old park boundary marker sign nailed to it. There’s really not much to it, but I think it’s probably been there for a long, long time.
Punderson State Park is open to the public from 6 am to 11 pm. While caching after dark is allowed, please be sure to exit Punderson by 11 pm when the park closes.