Pine

12/12/2010 By Kabutroid
Whup... bit late in logging this one. Kinda unusual for me to delay logging for almost a week, but computer issues coupled with playing some awesome video games do not make for a good logging environment :P.

Speaking of environment... with the temperature hovering at it's coldest for the year so far... below -20 at its warmest... while others may cower away from the earlier-than-usual cold, I'm in the meantime at the park snowshoeing BigSmile . Not only do I generally love snowshoeing, but I was also anxious to test out my new muskrat hat (see attached pic). So early in the afternoon, I drove on over to Bird's Hill park and proceeded to find the place... almost eerily deserted. My usual parking area for when I come out to bike in summer (the strip of parking on the South side of the main road closest to this cache), normally containing a decent number of cars, was at this time completely empty. I parked in an arbitrary spot, got out of the car, and prepared myself.

I had actually planned today to be a bit of a challenge for myself, wanting to snowshoe at least 10km in total. It was a lofty goal, I must admit... but I was quite anxious to see if I would be able to pull it off. Quite often, it's all in the mind. With this in mind, I originally started vaguely walking towards the swimming areas about 1km away as the crow flies. However, I checked my GPS and discovered that a cache (this one) was conveniently nearby. Seeing as I've been lazy as of late and haven't found many caches recently, I decided that I should end this streak of not finding a cache that's gone several weeks now. Carefully snowshoeing across the snowless highway (not carefully due to traffic... there was none... but carefully to dull the crampons on the bottom of my snowshoes as little as possible), I quickly hiked my way through the trees. I COULD have taken a trail of sorts, but snowshoeing is always more fun in the deeper, less packed snow BigSmile .

However, I soon discovered why my parking lot was empty... it appears that a healthy number of cars (and by 'healthy number', I mean about 4) had parked at a parking lot closer to the picnic table area. And from what I could see, ever single one of them was a cross-country skier. Pfft... trails. Trails are for the weak ToungeOut . So I continued onwards, and headed in the general direction of this cache. Once I'd arrived, it took me a good several minutes to hunt around in the snow and trees before I finally stumbled across the cache. One chainmail ball and a logbook signing later, and I continued onwards!

My direction-choosing after that was very simple. 1. Pick a direction initially. 2. Walk forwards. 3. Is something large immediately in my way? If not, continue walking forwards. If yes, pick a direction where something large was no longer in my way, then go to step 2. After finding the cache, I put a good 3km's behind me going in arbitrary directions through the trees. However... I discovered a problem. I had apparently SEVERELY underestimated how much water I would need for this. With about a half-cup of water left, I decided to head back to the car, and all in all ended at about 4km's hiked. So next time... triple the amount of water I'm carrying. The sun was getting close to setting too, but I was planning to hike in the dark if need be. That water though... can't do much without that. My legs were also getting a bit sore... if I had the time (and water), I could have rested for an hour or so I think. All in all, today taught me lessons about what I should do differently next time more than anything else.

Aside from that, it was an awesome day for hiking over to a geocache, and hiking in general. Although it looks like I'll have to start getting my GPS to change the icon for winter-friendly ones in the park pretty soon.

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball