Hercules, Hercules!

The title probably only makes sense if you've seen Disney's "Hercules." If you have, picture someone clapping their hands together as they say that. About a week ago, I finished The 12 Labors of Hercules series. There are 12 "labors," caches put on peaks in the area. These peaks are all challenging to get to. Some have trails, some don't. Many have portions of trail that offer false hope that they'll actually continue to the top. In each of the 12 caches, there's a code. When you have all 12 codes, you can find the 13th bonus cache.

So far, only four people have actually completed the series. I was the fourth. I had, at some point, thought I might actually be the first or second to finish. In 2007, I found nine of the caches in the series. I got caught up on the three tough ones: 9 - Anthony's Nose, 11 - Organ Needle, and especially 6 - Florida Peak (technically, I think it's an unnamed peak, but it's much easier to refer to it with a name).

I wrote up a brief summary in my 13th cache log of the entire series. I had to be very limited in what I wrote. I think it'd be kind of fun to re-examine the series a bit more in detail over the next few weeks (slowly, I'll add it over a few entries). That's my plan. I'm not sure if I'll remember to do it or not.

It was a very fun and challenging series that really opened my eyes up to hiking in more difficult terrain. I honestly hadn't put much thought into hiking up some of the peaks I did, or even doing much off trail stuff. With the encouragement that there was a cache on top of the peaks, however, I forced myself to go through some brutal stuff (especially on Anthony's Nose- yikes!).