Wednesday, November 2, 2011 Lethbridge
6:20 am
The temperature is +1 C, with a high predicted of +9 C. From the Environment Canada website: Today Mainly sunny. Wind southwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming west 40 gusting to 60 near noon. High 9. Tonight Clear. Wind southwest 20 km/h gusting to 40 becoming light overnight. Low minus 1. Normals Max: 7°C Min: -5°C.
5:30 PM Geocaching
There is snow forecast for later this week so I decided to try for one more long day trip. I identified 4 Prairie Winds geocaches in the Medicine Hat area and decided to try for them all. Since one of them is very close to the Cypress Hills provincial park, I added one more cache inside the park (this is for a cache that requires one to visit most of the Alberta provincial parks). There were 2 other caches near the Prairie Winds cache on the road to Etzikom that I had not noticed and another 2 caches on the route to the PW cache near Cypress Hills. All told, I was hoping for 9 geocaches.
The morning began well and once I was near Etzikom I quickly found 3 caches (1 PW and 2 others).
Then the fun began. Once I began approaching the Cypress Hills area south of Medicine Hat I ran into some serious road construction. This put me on some detours which really messed up my GPS system which finally decided to reroute me through the Cypress Hills park and to try to get near the caches from a south route. The GPS unit indicated that there was a route through the park that did not, in fact, exist - except for wildlife. In fairness I think it might have got me within a couple of kilometers of the caches but I knew they were easily approachable by road. I determined a route that was longer but that would get me back on some reasonable roads. This seemed to work well for awhile but I then encountered a sign indicating there was a "road ban" on the gravel road for the next 30 km. The caches appeared to be about another 6 km down the road. The road looked okay at this point but given the extent of the construction when trying to approach the area from the north I decided to wait for another day. This meant that 3 of the caches I had hoped to find were not approachable. Overall I spent about 2 hours on the backroads without anything to show for it, except a greater familiarity of the area. There are some good looking hiking trails in the Cypress Hills.
Back to the Cypress Hills park to search for a relatively easy cache which turned out to be a delightfully camoed container. Then into Medicine Hat to look for two more Prairie Winds caches. The first of these went well, but there was a group of muggles that were staying right beside the other and did not look like they intended to move in the near future.
Final score for the day: 5 caches found, including 2 Prairie Winds caches and 1 provincial park cache. That brings the total for provincial parks that I have visited to 12. There are another 52 with caches in them that I have yet to visit. This looks like a long term goal.
The statistics that geocaching.com now provides makes for some interesting reading (well sort-of, anyway). For example over the 4 years that I have been doing this, it turns out that my three most productive months are October (239), September (224) and August (151). December and January are the two lowest months (2 each). I do not appear to be a cold weather geocacher. November currently sits at 118. There are about twenty caches in the local vicinity that I am hoping to find, one-a-day, on specific days that so far have no finds for them (e.g. Nov 8, 9, 11, 13-18, etc.).
There is 5-10 cm of snow forecast for Friday. That may put a damper on much travel.