Pine Woods Trail, Mendon Ponds County Park, 1.5 miles – this is a small loop trail in the NE corner of Mendon Ponds park.
We had gone to the beach for a bit in the morning, and Levi also still wanted to “go for a hike and also find some geocaches,” so I spent a few long minutes looking up someplace we 1) hadn’t been to that 2) had some reasonable number of non-micro geocaches and 3) wasn’t too far away. Anyway, while we’ve been to Mendon many a time, we have never been to this corner, and it had a bunch of listed caches.
The trail itself is only 1.1 miles of very pleasant loop, but we had a couple divergences looking for a few of the caches. On the way to one, we also found an unmarked (but very clearly built) trail that walked along a ridge, and had a couple trips back and forth from that bit. The trail is mostly undifferentiated pine woodland, so it had that nice pine scent, but otherwise was nothing to write home about, but it was pleasant, and also had the minor feature hitting the very north edge of the park, so you could see and old stone wall (…in front of some barbed wire), and look over from the woods into an excavated field.
We were 3 for 5 on geocaches; one I was just…not finding it, but the other I think would have been much easier at literally any time other than the maximum overgrowth time of the year (or, I suppose, deep snow, but there are fewer pricker plants in the winter JUST SAYING). The final one of the geocaches was not really “on” the trail route, so we ducked well over to it, at which point we found ourselves much closer to the roadway than we were to the trail we had come from, so we just ducked over to the road and walked back to the car from there. Levi’s most prized find here was a Pokemon card (Baltoy), and I was delighted that someone had been leaving tiny pottery pieces, and I brought one home to house my rings. Overall, a lovely hot summer Sunday.
Here’s hoping all this laying the groundwork will lead to some awesome hiking in years to come.
