The plan upon arriving at W.C Johnson Park was to pick up National Treasure key #2 at Stinky's Litter Box by TNBOYS (GC12PVW), take the boardwalk to Walk the Planks! by TNBOYS (GC11P79) to pick up National Treasure key #1, and then hike the short distance to Leonarda One by LeonardaDaArtsi (GC1JGBV). We would then go across the Wolf River and drop off the keys in two other caches.
This was a rare opportunity to get both keys in the same park and since we had been tho the caches where the keys where supposed to be, it should have turned out great. However, the individual who took key #1, while mentioning in his log, failed to log the key as retrieved. This screwed us and several others looking for the key in recent weeks. Sigh. At least the rest of the plan worked out. I retrieved key #1 from Walk the Planks and then met up with jbgreer at Leonarda One. After finding the cache, we hiked the boardwalk back to where we parked.
We intended to enter the Wolf River Greenway Trail from the eastern end, but the area that I though contained the entrance and parking was flooded. We then decided to enter via the Bethany Road trailhead. Finding the traihead took some work. Autorouting took us in circles and our paper maps were missing a few roads. I finally used Garmin's POI to locate a church on Bethany Road. After finding the church, it was a short drive to the trailhead.
Interestingly, the trailhead has no signs marking it as such. There is one sign on a gate that basically says "No motorized vehicles allowed". It turned out, though, we were in the right spot.
Before making our way to the trailhead, we took our pictures holding the National Treasure key #1. This was one of the requirements for logging the find and since we were getting rid of the key on this hike, I wanted to make sure we got the pictures.
There are five caches on this trail to date, and we planned to hunt them in order. Since we were both focusing on the walk, we absent-mindedly walked past the first cache. We started to go back, but decided it would we wiser to get it on the hike out.
This made out first find on the trail Rooty Toot Toot by TNBOYS (GC1GKHX). It was an unusual hide technique these days, but jbgreer found it pretty quickly.
Our second find was High Water by Cache Station (GC1JEBC). Easy find and close to the trail.
Our third find was Bottomland Hardwoods by jackthebear (GC1GPH0). It was a neat cache with lots of goodies, but I was just glad to find a cacher container large enough to hold the National Treasure key.
On the way to the next cache, we crossed this neat recycled bridge.
A little more hiking and we came to bamboozled by oak grove 5 (GC1G3QN). This was our only ammo can find of the day. We tried to take a different route back to the main trail, but ran into some flooding. We ended up backtracking a little and simply headed back the way we came in. The trail was roughly three miles long and it would have been easy for us to forget about the cache we missed on the way in, but fortunately we kept our eyes on the prize and found Big Bend by jackthebear (GC1GVKB) before leaving the trail.
We decided to get lunch, rather than go the Herb Parson's Lake, but we did manage to find one more cache before arriving back in Collierville. Saunderville by TNBOYS (GC18E9D) was a nice little hide in a spot with many potential hide spots. On our way into town, we spotted the actual trail parking on the eastern end along with the name of the trail: "Wolf River Environmental Restoration Greenway Trail".
After a nice lunch at Chick-Fil-A, we headed back to Memphis. No DNF's on this day and our only disappointment was the missing Natinal Treasure key (#2).
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