GC33N4J
Tall Grass Prairie
Type: Traditional
| Size: Small
| Difficulty: 
| Terrain:
By: MBeans
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| Hide Date: 04/09/2011
| Status: Archived
Country: Canada
| State: Manitoba
Coordinates: N49° 30.465 W97° 59.461 | Last updated: 10/06/2026 | Fav points: 0
This Cache located just off the River Walk portion of the Carman Community Pathway for Active Living.
Away from traffic and totally surrounded by nature, the River Walk part of the pathway features a scenic river path that follows the meandering Boyne River. In the centre of the river path is the tall grass prairie.
Carman's Tall Grass Prairie was initially planted in 1996 by the University of Manitoba's Botany Department. Several studies on grasses and insects are on-going at Carman's Tall Grass Prairie.
In 2002, the Province's Department of Agriculture and Food - Soils & Crops Branch "adopted" the prairie with plans to rejuvenate the grasses and control the weed infestation.
Maintenance plans include controlled burning or mowing (simulates grazing) and biological control of weeds (using insects).
Before settlers arrived, grass fires used to sweep across the prairies, burning from horizon to horizon. Fire breaks down dead vegetation returning nutrients to the soil and allowing the sun to warm the ground earlier in the spring.
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1 Logs:  1
04/03/2012 By Kabutroid
This cache actually wasn't quite planned for today. Originally we were thinking of leaving it for warmer months. Myself and my nieces (team Blagden) had just finished finding a different cache in the vague vicinity of Carman, but despite somewhat cold feet between all three of us, my nieces were still raring to go for more geocaching. So hey... I'm always up for more, so let's do this thing.
At first we were rather stumped as to how exactly to access the River Walk (my nieces were apparently unfamiliar with where the start or end of it was). I just pointed the GPS to the coordinates, and it had me go to the end of a street closest to the cache. Well, it turns out that no walk near a river exists at the end of that street. Walking back to the car, a woman happened to be outside so we asked for her assistance. She told us it ran behind the school, so no sooner said than done, we had parked the car in the school's parking lot and were walking off looking for this mystery path. We followed her instructions of finding a path that runs behind the school, but it seemed rather... peculiar since it didn't seem at all like the last cache I've found involving this River Walk. But we continued down the strangely almost dead straight path.
Passing a few snowmobilers on the school's field (seriously, how is that allowed on there? And what's the fun of repeatedly circling around on a small, perfectly flat rectangle of land?), we soon found that our straight path heading East was about to get a lot less boring looking. No sooner had the path turned North that the sound of traffic and civilization quickly disappeared. Enter the quiet sounds of only our steps in snow, and the occasional bird. The large amounts of snow that somehow managed to accumulate on the branches probably helped kill the sound the second we got some branches between us and the snowmobilers. I kept checking with my nieces to make sure they weren't getting too tired or cold, but they were still enthusiastic, so onwards we went!
The path looks like it's pretty well used, since the new snowfall has mainly been stomped away by the foot traffic. However, once we reached a bridge and information board, things got a lot less dry for our feet  . We followed what appeared to be a person using a ski-pole as a hiking stick and his dog, but the significantly deeper snow definitely tired us out a lot faster. I had made the assumption that this person was also likely going to the cache. This became even more believed when their path turned East again to head directly towards the coordinates. Inexplicably however, about 30 meters from ground zero, their path suddenly turned North again, so I took the lead and broke trail for the others. I may have only been in my work shoes, but I've got a lot more energy, stamina and temperature tolerance, so it just made sense. With team Blagden following in my footsteps, we soon found ourselves near the cache area.
We found our way to ground zero and began pawing around. After about 20 seconds of us three digging away here and there, I eventually turned up the cache container! WOOH! I was a bit worried this one would elude us after all that walking. A quick poke around inside, and it was decided not to trade anything out. In went my signature chainmail ball (micro size... I was out of regular size at the moment), and I signed the logbook for both of us.
Thanks for the excellent walk and a goal of a cache at the end. It was definitely a nice hike on a beautiful day, and my nieces managed to make it through the day like champs. Bet they slept like rocks though that night . Admittedly, so did I. But all in all, a really fun cache to go after while visiting family out in Carman. This hike was a great reason to get out of the house and get some fresh air  .
Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and micromail ball
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