Birkhead Hiking Challenge Unplugged

This past weekend I had set off to complete the Birkhead Hiking Challenge. While this was originally set up to be a geocaching course set up by Ranger Fox a fellow Backwoods Orienteering Klub (BOK) member Matt Kirk had put in a lot of work to make it accessible to the BOK at a members only event back in December 2025.

I had wanted to try to complete this in January as training for the Winter Wildcat event, however, Matt had convinced me to join him and Phil Tosteson at Fairy Stone State Park for a virtual score-O he called Adrenaline Rehash . Then the last weekend of January was snowed out, so instead I attempted Matt's Carolina North Forest cache-O as practice for Birkhead.

Following my win at the Winter Wildcat (report coming soon). I was looking forward to carrying my great orienteering momentum forward into Birkhead. I arrived late Thursday night to the Tot Hill Farm Trailhead parking area and set my car up for sleeping. I set my alarm for 6am and went to sleep quickly. After a few presses of the snooze button I finally started getting ready. I loaded up with all my gear, food, and water. At 7:16am I started the hike towards the main interior trail junction with two jugs of water and my bear canister full of snacks. The hike into the trail junction is between 1.6-1.8 miles depending on which route you take. Once I got there I hid my supplies behind a large forked tree, pulled out my compass and maps, and got my watch and Garmin Inreach ready to start.

Starting Photo

I started off over an hour after sunrise at 7:53 am. Fortunately, the first cache is not very far from the trail junction and is the easiest cache of the entire challenge to find. It took me a little over 11 minutes after starting to find it. I then recorded the GPS coordinates in my little waterprook notebook, marked the location on my map with a sharpie and set off to location 2.

In order to maintian the integrity of the challenge and the secrecy of the cache locations, I will depart from a traditional narrative style report and simply provide a list of challenges encountered, strategies used, and successes achieved.
Challenges, strategies, and successes
1) Got extremely lost early because I was not used to the scaling of the map
2) With 16 ft of elevation change between contour lines, many features exist in real life that are not mapped
3) I misplotted one point by 1/16th of an inch on the map
4) While re-attacking I identified a bearing tree to resume my line while going around a large briar patch, but lost track of distance and waaay overshot the cache. Turns out the bearing tree was only 4 ft to the right of the cache.
5) My backup light must have turned on in my pack at some point because it was dead when I pulled it out. I had to use my battery pack to charge my light. 15 minutes of charging was enough to get me back to the car on the lowest light setting, which was barely bright enough to see the trails, and definitely too dim to see caches. This cost me about 5.5 hrs and ~8mi of extra travel.
6) At least 4 times I searched the correct feature multiple times before finding the cache including three times I correctly identified the hiding spot immediately.
7) At one point I searched a spot (because I was quite a bit off course) and did not find a cache in that spot. Several hours later, I came back to the exact same spot and dug a little deeper and found the cache. So had I found the cache the first time I looked, I would have messed up the entire challenge by skipping several caches.
8) After struggling to find a cache in a feature rich area, I paced off the location from a new attack point and immediately saw the cache hiding spot ~8 ft to my right.
9) It took me over an hour to find the final cache even though I was within 100ft of it the entire time I was searching. It was less than 15 ft from the spot I was certain it should be.
10) Some marked trails on the maps are ancient and are barely discernable. There are also new trails and dirt roads that are not marked on the map. Especially on the western side of the maps.
11) I turned over a lot of rocks and while I did my best to return it how it was before I arrived the hiding spots might not be as obvious now due to all the displaced rocks, so sorry to anyone searching.
12) Most of caches are in obvious places if you are experienced in geocaching.
13) At night, I relied HEAVILY on moving between known points which is why there is more difference between the arrival distance and the straight line distance. Unlike during the day I can just wander into an area, look around and estimate where I should be based on how far off visible features are.
14) I got lucky on a cache where I waaaay overshot the location. As I was climbing back up the hill to reattack from the summit, I saw a rock that looked out of place. It was the cache.
15) One cache was located in an area with parallel features. Therefore I spent almost 2 hours looking in the wrong area, once I moved to the correct feature it didn't take long.

Overall this was a great challenge. I only made a few true blunders, which cost me about 9.25 hours of time and added almost 13 miles of additional mileage onto my total. Even if I had simply done a better job of checking my gear and making sure I had my spare headlamp battery in addition to the two lights I had, then I could have saved myself 8 mi and about 5.5 hours. The straight line distance of the challenge looks to be about 27 miles. However, that does not account for route selection. I had about 37.3 miles between caches and an additional 7.4 miles looking for the caches (assuming you exclude my blunders), which broke down to about 14:01:17 traveling between caches and 6:41:12 looking for the caches (again excluding blunders). The last cache as mentioned above was by far the best hidden cache.
I look forward to seeing someone else try to complete this challenge unplugged. It definitely adds another layer of challenge to an already challenging adventure. However, I did find it to be much more rewarding. There were a few times especially on cache 3 and 13 where I wanted to pull out my phone and figure out where I was, but I resisted and managed to get it done. That is what makes it that much more rewarding, because I didn't take the shortcut to make it easier on myself. I stuck with it and figured it out. I learned alot while I was out there and I'll definitely be able to carry the lessons learned forward into some of the other bigger challenges I'm striving for.

In the parking lot after completing the BHC unplugged

After I got home and showered Matt called me for a video interview.

Edit: Don't forget: If you pack it in, then pack it out.

That's 9 packs of fruit snacks, 3 packs of protein PB cups, 7 bags of Cheez-its, 9 Rice Krispy Treats, 3 peanut bars, 8 Gu gels, 1 Awake chocolate, and 1 stroopwaffle, when added ontop of my gel flask was about 5080 calories consumed.