DuPont Factory

I was doing some of the caches at Carey Lake this summer. This is now a recreational area with a variety of ski and walking trails, a  nice lake to swim in and some nice picnic areas. Through out the property of this park are old DuPont buildings falling into ruin with the largest of them being at the end of a road. All the ruins are able to be accessed and walked around during day light hours.

My first time out here we met Dr. Reynolds on the trail who talked about how the powder factory had exploded. After an hour long conversation with the doctor we opted to not go forth and try to find the largest cache that day as we had a whole host of other caches to get to and it appeared to be a hilly and swampy mess to get to the cache.

It was a while before I got out there again with another friend and we finally made the trek to the cache which turned out to be more hilly than swampy. It was one of those days where it seemed to get hotter and more humid the longer you were out in it and we had the added joy of neck high weeds to get to the cache. We finally get there and into some much needed shade of a small stand of trees only to fish the cache out and open it to find what appeared to be millions of red ants rushing around trying to hide their eggs. Apparently in the summer heat the ants decided to make the same hidey hole the cache was in their hidey hole as well. And apparently ammo cans are not impervious to ants as they had made quite the impressive nest in the can.

With some fancy maneuvers and both of us levitating off the seating area we had found we managed to sign the log and replace the cache. If there was a travel item or good swag in there we would never know as we didn't linger around to find out. This was the summer of giant ant hills we determined as we walked back to the large building. There were so many huge ant hills along the edge of the trail.

We then spent some time in the building unsuccessfully searching for a micro cache. GPS bounce and all those hiding spots did not help at all.

The disappointment to me on these caches are that the history of this area was not reported in any of them. Dr. Reynolds had mentioned that factory had an explosion and after a little research we found that it appears there were two explosions there. The DuPont factory manufactured black powder for the mines to use for blasting the rock to get to the ore. It was not unusual for there to be little black powder factories in various places and for them to have explosions back then. This was before OSHA and Department of Labor standards.

In 1912 was the last explosion of this place killing two men. Before that there was another explosion that also killed 2 men. They were large explosions felt in neighboring towns. It appears that the black powder factory did not last much past the second explosion. The main building and the out buildings are now all falling into ruin and being reclaimed by the earth.

I like history in my geocaches and that little nugget of information would have probably made me a little more enthusiastic about doing the other caches in the area. It's a very cool area regardless and I look forward to returning to do the other caches there.