An autumn day out

Geocaching in the forests and moose hunts don’t go that well together, so my planned day out was shorter than expected and only covered a few places. I was tempted to drive over to Broddbo where a new series of seventy caches was released as a power trail on a 12-13 km stretch of road. Memories of the Dalälven power trail, parts of which I did early this year, came back to me and I couldn’t quite summon up the enthusiasm that a lot of cachers have, to actually want to do the series. I weighed up the fact that I hadn’t found a cache since my trip to USA in September and that I wanted, no needed, to find some, with the stress I feel with the drive, stop, seatbelt off, get out of car, find & log cache, get in car, seatbelt on, drive less than 200m and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Of course, I could have walked the stretch quite comfortably finding the caches as I walked along. Now that could have been OK. However, having to walk the 12 km back just to pick up my car wouldn’t have been so much fun.
I decided to do a clockwise loop south of Gävle and started off with Daniel’s 1st. Mapsource showed a 5km track from Hyttön alongside the channel/canal to the cache. Would there be a barrier across the road? Was I prepared to walk 10km back and forth to find the cache if the barrier was closed? I was lucky and was able to drive the whole way on a muddy and slippery track through Båtfors and Spjutholm nature reserve.

Entering Båtfors nature reserve

I got to the river at the end and found a car with boat trailer there. Perhaps they had unlocked the barrier? Anyway, it didn’t take long to find the cache and admire the view across the river.

Cache and view into forest

Timber channel disappearing off into the distance.

I was tempted to follow the wooden channel across the river to find it’s source. How could the water level in the channel be three or four meters above the river level when the water was fed by the river? I didn’t know, so I decided to move on. Checking Google Earth today, revealed that the start of the channel was a further 3km up-river and above a dam. Now I know!

My planned route took me to the forests south of Söderfors. Not a good move. A moose hunt was on and the place was crawling with hunters and dogs. There were 4WD trucks all over the place, some with trailers for the expected game to be transported back to base. Everyone I saw was armed to the teeth and carrying com radios strapped to their chests. The dayglo orange vests and hats were in sharp contrast to the camouflage coloured clothes all were wearing. I wonder what the moose make of it all. Do they not see colours as we do? Anyway, I decided that it was safer elsewhere so I moved on. The only creatures that seemed to be unperturbed by the hunt were the swans.

Swans getting ready for their migration south

Some weeks ago Kyrkstigen 8 was published and I got an FTF on it. I wondered at the time why Kyrkstigen 1 to 7 didn’t exist. Anyway, some time after, they and Kyrkstigen 9 and 10 appeared but I didn’t have the opportunity to go for any more FTF’s. I decided that on my way home that I would see what I could do. When looking for Kyrkstigen 8 we found the church path but noted that it was narrow and not that well marked. As we had bushwhacked in and out we weren’t really bothered about not finding the path. I parked close to Kyrkstigen 1 and had the cache in my hand in a matter of seconds. When I started looking for the blue markers for the path I had to guess which direction to head off in. The first marker was a stone painted blue and the second a short branch sticking up in the same blue colour. Not the easiest of markers to spot. Once I had got past them the path became clearer and it was easy to get to Kyrkstigen 2. It was impossible that I could have missed “that” stone!