Sunday, after returning home from a thoroughly enjoyable bike ride in Fish Creek Park, we decided to make a return visit on Monday, primarily to go after a few geocaches in the western part of the Park that we didn’t have time to ride to on Sunday. Since there are several puzzle caches hidden in FCP, we spent a few hours Monday evening doing our best to solve several of these mindbenders, happy to get the "success" message from the coordinates checker for 8 or 10 of them.
With the GeoKids back in school for the week, we waited until they were off to catch their school bus before heading south. We did 5 park-n-grab caches enroute, and then parked in the Bebo Grove lot to unload our bikes. We headed west first, making a quick find at our first stop. However, we ended up at a dead end while approaching our second target, stuck about 100 meters from the posted coordinates. Mr. GeoK volunteered to go after the cache, leaving Mrs. GeoK in charge of the bikes; he groaned out loud once Mrs. GeoK read the cache description – it was a multi! Nevertheless, he headed across the muddy sheet of ice and up the slippery slope and spent 10 minutes search for a micro in the woods before calling it quits. Meanwhile, Mrs. GeoK took several photos of the large blocks of ice slowly melting in this shaded corner of the park. Fish Creek was flowing quite strongly, and the water was very muddy…
We then headed east, passing our parking spot as we rode towards the next geocache target. Mr. GeoK searched for the cache while Mrs. GeoK tried to locate the Mazama Ash band on an embankment beside the creek. She finally figured out where it was, but couldn’t actually see the thin white line from the top of the embankment. Vowing to find a viewing spot on our return ride, we continued on to pick up one more smiley before reaching the Votier Flats parking area where we found another small cache without any trouble. We encountered a construction site (a storm water pond / wetland project) which meant a short detour before crossing under Macleod Trail and riding another 4 km (or so) to GCZCMD Brute Force, once of the puzzle caches we solved the previous evening. This was the first find on this cache in 2009, and the container over-wintered very nicely.
After an unsuccessful 30 minute search for stage 1 of a 6-part multi, our stomachs were telling us it was lunch time, so we remounted our bikes and headed back towards Bebo Grove. Mrs. GeoK was delighted to find not one, but 2 locations from which to observe the Mazama Ash band, so she’s working on a new earthcache for the Calgary area.
We thoroughly enjoyed our ride and look forward to finding a few more puzzle caches on the eastern edge of the park next time we go biking with G&G GeoK. Too bad we can’t say the same about the drive-up caching we attempted after lunch. Our string of DNFs simply reconfirmed that we far prefer biking / hiking for geocaches.
