Greene River Trail

Along the Monongahela River, on the Greene County side, a 5.2-mile trail has been developed, the Greene River Trail. It is a wonderful little gem, ideal for walking and biking, bit it is easily overlooked unless you know to look for it. Lucky for us, a geocacher took the effort to place a trail of caches on the trail that caught our attention while we were seeking out something fun to do on a Sunday morning.

Despite being about an hour from Pittsburgh, much of Greene County is very rural and elicits a very remote feel. The main community on the Greene Trail is Rices Landing, which is about half way down. The only other trailhead is at the yacht club along Ten Mile Creek near Millsboro, which marks the beginning of the trail.

The caches along the trail were distributed as densely as is permitted by the rules of the sport: physical caches must have a tenth of a mile between them. That said, for the most part, we were able to seek a cache every 528’ or so. Our strategy was to walk out about two miles directly and then work on finding caches on the way back.

Overall, this system worked out very well and a number of the caches were very easy to locate, which is perfect for a power trail such as this. The only real downside to this cache series is that some of the containers leaked (most will when they’re out for a long time) and in an attempt to keep the cache saturation so dense some less than ideal locations had to be chosen (which can also cause water to intrude into cache containers). With some less than ideal locations, some caches had also gone missing.

When placing a cache there are often tradeoffs, it was obvious what some of the tradeoffs were in hiding this series. However, without this series we would have never discovered this awesome trail. The other great thing about this series is that it does have an attentive caretaker, and the caches are checked on (and replaced, if necessary) once or twice each year by the cache owner. With all of that in mind, we will happily come back to avenge the caches we failed to find.

Though after a near four mile walk (and skipping breakfast) we were famished. After grabbing the cache in the parking lot, Greene Trail 1, we hopped back in the car and made our way to the Fox’s Pizza Den in Carmichaels. I could not have possibly piled my BLT wedgie into my mouth any faster than I did.

It was a great morning on a lovely, hidden trail in southwestern Pennsylvania. Just one more reason to keep on exploring.