With the geokids back in school after a couple weeks off, Mr. and Mrs. GeoK set out first thing Monday morning. Our goal: to find at least one cache on an island in the Bow River. The result: not good!

We parked at the very west end of Bowmont Natural Environment Park, figuring we could walk the 1.7 km generally eastward and then cross good, solid ice to the island. Two things stopped us! First, there are new(?) fences up in Bowmont Park, as the City of Calgary is trying to reclaim some of the unofficial, networked trails to restablish more of a natural area. As a result, we couldn’t get any closer to the island than about 900 meters! Second, from where we stood, we saw about 25 meters of open, flowing water in the Bow. So, even if we got any closer, we probably wouldn’t have made it across.

The reality is that we weren’t that broken-hearted. It felt a lot colder than we expected it would, especially walking into the wind, so we were happy to return to the car. Also, we watched the sun come up through the trees – very pretty.

After our "not even close" attempt in Bowmont, we headed to Hidden Valley to try a more typical urban hide. But after Mr. GeoK slipped off the top of a low sandstone wall landing on his back in the snow, we decided to abandon our geocaching activities for the day. We don’t need a smiley that badly.

So here we sit, hoping for a Chinook to come through and melt away some of the snow, making some of the larger containers easier to find. Alternately, we’ll use GSAK to screen for caches that have been found recently and try for some of those. And in the meantime, we’ll turn our efforts to solving some of the challenging puzzle caches in the Calgary area. Our short term goal is to try to solve three puzzles in Cochrane, so that – weather dependent – we can search for them after attending DanOCan’s GC1JB42 – 2009 Geocacher Breakfast on January 24.