Welcome to the White Horse Path of the East Coast Trail at Cape St.Francis!
We have placed a new series of caches, from Cape St.Francis south to Cripple Cove.
Cape St. Francis is the northeast point of the Avalon Peninsula, just beyond the town of Pouch Cove. While there was a thriving fishing community here once upon a time, now the Cape and nearby Biscan Cove are home to only a handful of cabin dwellers and a helicopter launch pad. For this series you can park either at Cape St.Francis or back the road a bit, at what appears to be a small parking spot for an earlier version of the East Coast Trail. If you park at Cape St.Francis and do the series of caches starting here, you get a nice geocaching loop of hides, and then your way back to your car is a 10 minute downhill stroll after you come back out of the trail. (Going in the other direction would have you walking steeply uphill at the end of your hike to get back to your car ;)
This cache is a true Terrain 5 / Difficulty 4 hide.
For a legit terrain 5, special equipment is needed according to geocaching guidelines. From the trailhead at Cape St.Francis on your way to get to the cache there is a small rockface which you must climb; accordingly the East Coast Trail has provided a thick climbing rope to help you traverse this area. This, along with the up and down trail itself, gives it a terrain 5.
When you get to GZ, the views of the area are amazing. Don't be afraid to do a little more climbing to get the best view of the area.
So: consider packing a lunch, and making a day of it on the trails out here on the Cape. Wear good hiking boots (waterproof if possible), and bring along a windshell if needed... just the typical hiking gear needed on such a rugged, beautiful trail.
Note: There is an older cache, "Cape St. Francis Micro" (GC1Z6FR) here right at the entrance to White Horse Path; our cache is the first of several beyond that first cache. (The older cache was placed by VO2WW, a geocaching pioneer in this province who has since passed away. If you come to this new series of caches, I would recommend finding this hide (it is no longer a micro but instead a 750mL sized lock-n-lock) in tribute to VO2WW.)