Dahlonega & Amicalola

I headed back up north today to hit the Dahlonega gold museum and then over to the Amicalola Falls state park.  For those of you who don't know it, the first gold strike in the U.S. of A. was right here in Dahlonega, Georgia.  I'd been in the area a few times but never to the museum and besides, it is an official 'stop' on the History Trail geochallenge.  Finding the clues and opening the cache got me another location card and I noticed that the partner card was the Picketts Mill Battlefield site.  So, I turned in my cards to the nice ranger lady and she gave me my very first prize:  a history challenge path tag.  Yippee! 

Here it is... my prize!  It's a small medallion thing which is actually quite pretty.  The pick and rifle on the front signify the two locations visited for this challenge.  On the back is a registration number that you can use to register the tag and then place it out in a cache to see where it moves to.  I ain't giving up my tag!

Then it was off to the Amicalola Falls State Park to search for another state cache.  I'd been to the park before with friends Bill and Jane.  This was the park that had so many steps to go down to the bottom of the falls that I walked.  The cache walk and find were pretty lame.  Nowhere near the falls and the path was paved.... sheesh.  It took me longer to put my boots on, get my stuff on, walk to the trailhead through the parking lot than it did to walk to and find the cache.  Oh well, at least it's another challenge cache found.  Just for the record, a couple of pictures near the falls... not near the cache.

Taken right at the very top of the falls.  I'm standing on a little wooden bridge spanning the little creek that falls down the side of the mountain.  Very pretty view, for sure.

This was taken from the very same spot with the camera now pointed pretty much straight down.  This is the highest falls east of the Mississippi at 729 feet but it's a pretty lame waterfall as waterfalls go.  It's really more of a near-vertical rapids.  Regardless, it's pretty and this area of the park was, and I guess always is, quite crowed even on a weekday.

Looking back up at a part of the falls... maybe 200 feet of the fall.  I got this picture off Wikipedia.  They must have taken it in the winter months.  No leaves on the trees.  I have similar pictures at a previous posting on this blog:  http://bobcernock.blogspot.com/2011/08/long-overdue-visit.html