FERNALD HILL 1870

Rich surprised me on this drizzly day by suggesting that we do a simple hike to Fernald Hill. The FERNALD HILL tri-station was near the bottom of our list because it has already been found by so many geocachers; still, the promise of doing a complete and careful recovery always tempts us. In addition, most geocachers were simply finding one or both of the reference marks and not the station itself, which is an admittedly difficult-to-spot copper bolt.

First we found the two reference mark disks; they stand out well against the bare rock ledge. Using the adjusted coordinates and our keen eyes, we worked our way back to the station bolt without too much trouble. It’s in good shape considering its age and the number of feet that have no doubt tramped over it throughout the past century. We noted that the box score does not include distances and directions between the station mark and reference disks, so we decided to provide them ourselves. The problem? We had no measuring tape with us today! We took painstaking, though probably still crude, measurements with Rich’s pole and translated them to feet/meters when we returned to our room in the evening.