Letterboxing at Stone Mountain

Today, Mom and I set off to Stone Mountain Park for some letterboxing and other fun stuff. We started with the ambitious goal of finding seven letterboxes in one outing. We started in an area of the park that we were pretty familiar with and we were pretty confident in our ability to find the two boxes there. Both clues mentioned the same very specific landmark. Well, we found about 6 such places, but none of them were the landmark. We had been searching for over half an hour when Mom mentions that the picture in one of the clues appears to have been taken from waaaaaaay up. So, we broadened our search zone and ,finally, I spotted the landmark! There were only a few obstacles between me and success! One of those obstacles just happened to be a huge (over five foot high) "step" up. After climbing up and over the ledge, I hiked the remaining seventy-five steep yards (after the first hundred and fifty yards) up the mountain to the first letterbox. Yay! Success! But there was one more letterbox and I had come way too far and taken too much time to leave without retrieving both boxes! Well, the mountain got steeper as I breathlessly climbed the last thirty or so yards and snagged that last box! Victory was mine! Now all I had to do was try not to break my neck as I made my way back to the landmark where Mom was waiting. By this time, my knees were shaking because I was both tired and afraid. We stamped the stamps and hid the first box. Then I had to drag myself back up there and hide the second box. The hardest and scariest part was the descent because there are tons of little rocks and a few ice patches on an already steep mountainside, but thankfully Mom and I both made it down safely. At the end of our adventure I reiterated the fact that letterboxing takes you to places you would never have been otherwise-- like halfway up the backside of Stone Mountain! Haha! Don't get me wrong- the view was great (I could see the lake over the treetops and a ton of the surrounding landscape) and the boxes were cool and the adventure was fun! Plus it only took us a little over an hour and a half!