All 150 coins have been claimed. The caches are still in place but the challenge has ended. Thank you for coming out and enjoying LBL Heritage.
This Geocache is part of an annual Geocache Challenge put on by the Heritage Program at Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area as part of our outreach to the public, to get people to explore their forest and their history, and to share the unique heritage of the families from Between the Rivers.
This Geocache is part of the “2024 Land Between the Lakes Heritage Geocache Challenge: Moonshine Heritage”. There are 6 geocaches placed across Land Between the Lakes related to the history of the moonshine industry between the rivers. If you locate each geocache, and collect a numbered aluminum tree tag from each cache, you can turn them in at the Golden Pond Visitor Center for one of 150 Challenge Coins created for this event.
The Geocache is a 6” x 6” orange watertight plastic box marked “Heritage Geocache” on the top. The geocache is placed inside a tree trunk. The geocacache is located 1 mile from the recomended parking spot.
Men Only?
Many think of moonshin’ as a man's job. On the contrary at one point prohibition agents believed that women outsold men 5 to 1.(Minnick 2013:75).
During the 1920s, in many areas, it was illegal or taboo to search a woman's body which allowed females to transport moonshine with little if any police interference.
Women were used to working in the kitchen, making their own homebrews, as well as selling their surplus goods to neighbors. Instead of having to pay for childcare, making moonshine allowed women to make more money than any day job and they could raise and care for their children themselves. Moonshining gave women a way to be independent, make their own money, and support their families.
All the geocaches in this challenge have been placed in locations that were frequented by moonshiners. Some are placed close to old moonshine distilling sites. Others are placed on ridgelines or hills that overlook areas moonshiners once hid their stills in.
As you walk through the woods on your way to find these geocaches, there are many subtle signs of the past and if you pay attention to them, you can get a glimpse of times gone by.
There are old road beds in varying states of erosion. Some are vibrantly apparent while others have faded into the landscape. You can follow these roads to the geocaches and imagine the moonshiners that once traveled it, keeping their heads on a swivel looking for interlopers and revenuers.
Other signs of the past are daffodils and wolf trees. Many times, you can see daffodils lined up next to a road or bordering the footprint of a homesite. Wolf trees can be any species but are marked by being larger and older than surrounding trees. Their identifying feature is that its branches stretch out parallel to the ground rather than at steep angles, or they have numerous nubbins that indicate their branches have fallen off. These nubbins and the horizontal branches indicate that the tree was once in a cleared area, it did not have to fight for sunlight and could stretch its arms wide.