Bat Cave & Lake Lure

On the way up to Bat Cave, just before getting into Lake Lure, we discovered the new nature park had been opened, although some of the trails are still being cleared, we enjoyed the park very much, it is beautiful. The name of the park is The Donald Ross Nature Park and there are currently 4 active geocaches within the park with room for many more.

The reason we decided to ride up to the Bat Cave area, was to try to find a geocache that has been on the to do list for quite sometime. The geocache is Troglodytic Visitation.

To access this cache, you must drive to the top of a mountain that has the most spectacular views. It amazes me that the homeowners on top this this mountain actually allow folks to access the cache by parking and hiking their property. The cache is a multi-stage cache, and the first stage is a rock outcrop overlooking the valley below, and it is breathtaking. The final stage where the cache is located, is in a cave below the overlook. We never found the correct cave. We found two caves, and spent way too much time in one of them, and going back to it three times to confirm what we really already knew, the cache was not there. We never found the cache container, and later by looking at other pics geocachers had posted on line, we realized we were at the wrong cave. The opening did look very similar though. We enjoyed our time on the mountain, and took a little time to enjoy the overlook and the valley below.

We never did get a good GPS lock on the coords, reception was very spotty. We were not aggressive enough in widening our search area. We shall return in the fall.