Geocaching In Headingley Manitoba

Saturday In Headlingley

We decided to get out and about early this morning because we were going to cache on the Headingley Grand Trunk Trail and that would be a lot of walking.  We got to our destination about 9:30, the sun was shining very nicely but the wind was rather cold!  We started off walking at a brisk pace to warm up! Here is some of the scenery along the way.  Some of the crop land has been seeded and some has not been worked yet. This series of caches are called the HGGT series as they are along The Headingley Grand Trunk Trail, which  is the abandoned CNR rail line that traverses the municipalities of Headingley and Cartier. The railroad bed, originally built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad, was used from 1894 to 1972. The trail covers approximately 15 kilometers from the Perimeter Highway to Beaudry Park.

We arrived at the first cache and had it in hand very quickly!  By eagle eyes "moi"

This was a shot looking across a field towards a farm, there were a row of grainerys in the distance.

This road certainly looks bad! But it was dry, not something that I would want to drive on!This was a little bit of fun on the way to our second cache.

These bales look bigger when you are up close to them. 

The next cache was a very small bison tube that was disguised very well on a tree branch.  It was hard to see but Gerry had it in hand rather quickly. This one will be extremely hard to find with leaves on the trees!

This is what the trail looks like, it is graveled and well kept.  I am not sure about this part of the trail but the Harte Trail which is within the Perimeter of Winnipeg seems to be very well maintained summer and winter.  This trail is a bikers or a walker or runners dream!

This is the last cache that we got for the morning, we decided to head back to the car and go into Beaudry Park to eat the yummy picnic lunch that we brought along.  We had worked up a heffy appetite.  The park has several picnic sites with tables and fire pits.  I would  imagine on a warm summer day we would not be so fortunate to get the nice spot that we did. 

This is the scenery from the picnic table.  It is a really nice park to have a picnic or a person can hike the many trails in summer or ski in winter.

Our first cache after lunch was Called Deere John this is a fun idea for a cache! Here is the info.

Cache is called Deere John for 3 reasons:

1. The surrounding farmland and the busy farm equipment (John Deere) that is persistently present throughout the year.
2. The families of deer that gather in this area to have bush parties throughout the year. Quite beautiful watching deer prance and play on the fields.
3. The classic Dear John letters, the TV show from the 80's starring Judd Hirsch and, most importantly, the suggestion for logging this cache below ....

---

This is your chance. When you log your find, write up a Deere John letter to release some stress and let it out in a healthy way. Have fun with it if you want ... or be totally serious and use it as cathartic relief. Either Way, so long as it is family friendly ;-)

---

 Here was our log

My Dear John Song!
Dear John, oh how I love to write,
Dear John, I must let you know tonite
We have fou.. nnnd the cache
We move on to another stash
Oooohhh.......we thank you, Dear John

This was an ammo box a little ways into the forest! We dropped off  Dalecarlia horse Eat-Sleep-Cache to rest in this new home awhile, and we picked up Mr. Changey Face, we will bring him along with us on our next adventures.

This one was by the Pheonix Community Center, easy find but not so easy to get out of its home!  This is a very nice Center and well kept.  It has several play structures as well as an outdoor ice rink.

This was just behind the Community Center which was our next find!  There was garbage and old cars and crap in the forest!  I wonder what people think when they dump their garbage like this!  We ran into a lot of wood and stuff along the HGTT as well! 

I am so happy, I found it!!  The GPS was here and there with this one!  But patience and persistance pays off big time.

Another very easy find, we are just moving right along here!  For the caches that we found after lunch we were driving and finding!  This was all in a residential area.  This area was very nice, the homes were all large new homes on big lots and very well looked after.  We liked the area a lot.   It was quiet but not isolated. It is so nice when the loudest noise you hear is the birds singing, or the train whistle blowing!

This find was our last find! We did look for 1 more, but it eluded us, we looked and looked!  Every tree up and down and around and again but we still came up empty!  So we decided to call it a day, but it was time!  We hopefully are starting to learn to say enough before we are "done for".   Next week will be another week and we shall see if we get into the adventurous spirit!

The CPR Rail Line Bridge in Headlingley MB 

     

Taken on our way back into Winnipeg.

Have fun caching

GeoPartnerS
Caching since 2011

Leap Day Caching

St. Vital Park

Diane and I set out to gather our Leap Day caches about 10:30ish, it was -13C with a windchill of -21, we weren't sure if it would be a bit chilly!  But we were going into wooded areas with protection from the wind.  We headed out!  There was one point on our map that we were not going to visit, as it was a distance away and it was rated at difficult.  What do I do? Mistakenly put that point into the GPS!  So we head out, the walk didn't seem so bad but when we got there we were doing the drunken bumble bee dance!  The GPS would not give me an accurate reading, going this way and that way...so we did an honest to goodness search and then decided to give it up.  But we did discover this tobbogan ramp that kids have a ball on I am sure.

The walls along the trail were made of ice to keep the tobbogans on the straight and narrow coming off the ramp.  I am very sure that this area is very well used.  It was deserted today.  Off down more trails to get to our next destination.  The park has a loop of road ways with a large network of groomed trails for hiking or skiing.  It's a very nice place to go for whatever activity that a person chooses to do. 

 

We are now heading to our second search! We are hoping that we will have better luck then we did with our first one.  The hides here seem more difficult to us!  We get to the spot and again we walk around and expand our search and come back to the area where the GPS tells us that GZ is, it is starting to look like we are going to be beat again, when Diane comes up with the find, it was on the ground which we were not expecting by reading the information, but there is was in a hole in a tree!  This is our 60th cache, yeah PartnerS!

We have been waiting for a little while to log our 60th.  Now upward and onward!  On to our next destination which was a mico, by the description it should not have been hard to find, as it was near a tree with 2 limbs coming out of one stump! But which one?  There were tracks near such a tree, the GPS was telling me that was the general area!  There was a nice hole in the tree, but sure no cache in that hole!  So we did a very wide search of this area and gave it up as a DNF. Diane was ready to call it a day as well and so that is what we did!  Better luck in St. Vial Park next time!

A forest guard



Just going about his business



There was also a real nice duck pond, which was perfect for skating!  By the time we left the temperatures were nearing 0c.  I was able to walk around without mitts at that point, there was a fair amount of melting going on, the sun is starting to have some good warmth already.  I finished the day by coming into my area and grabbing 2 caches within .5 km of my house.  I had been wanting to look for these for awhile now.  So we logged 3 for our Leap Day caches, we discovered Regina travel bug as well.

Some History of the Park

Have fun caching

GeoPartnerS

Caching since 2011

Hello Forest Our Old Friend

Another Day In The Forest

Saturday turned into a beautiful sunny day, when we started out there was a very light breeze blowing and the temperature was -9.  Facing into the wind was a little chilly, but we knew that we would soon be in the protective cover of the forest and the breeze would no longer bother us.  But first we had to grab our first cache! 



Click on the pictures to
see a larger view.

 This geocache found by "moi" was at this little building which is a water station.  Most of the homes south of Wilkes are not hooked up to the city water and so they need to get their cisterns filled. This is one of the filling stations where the pumper trucks fill up with water to deliver to those homes.

On the edge of the forest, behind the Tuxedo Golf Course, Gerry dug this one up very quickly.  We signed the log and left our ladybug magnet and sig card and continued on, deeper into the forest!



Fallen dead trees in the forest




Some Oak trees along the bike trail
leading into the forest

  

We thought that we would never reach
some of these caches!

Gerry spotted this cache as well! He did have his super geocaching eyes wide open today.  This cache was in two parts, the log was in the cache with the gnome so we signed it! Then we figured out where the treasure was!  This was a neat cache made us think and read! I like to just skim the text, in some cases that is not a good idea!

Gnorman's Diamond Mine found
by Gerry, we liked this one.





The diamond mine workers!



We like what we found!

This is the outer container, very neat and a lot of work to make. It was quite far from where the GPS was telling us that GZ was, but I noticed it and was going to investigate, I thought that the stump looked out of place.  Gerry mentioned later that there is no birch in the forest!  But it was just the bottom part of the stump that didn't look right to me!  Just as I got there Diane noticed a giant spider hanging from a tree above my head, so we knew that the cache was very near by!  This cache is another in the "Remember Series"  This one is Remember #30.  The information on the service man is at the end of this post.



Another cache! Neat tradeables in this one, a little porcelain doll!
amoung other nice items.




Our first room in the game cache.
We will have to get the others another day!



This was the last one of the day for us.  This cache is part of a game, called "Clue Jr" The mystery is "The Case of the missing Chocolate Cake"  There are 5 rooms, each room has a set of clues and suspects.  When you find a cache you need to cross off the clues, when you have visted all five caches, the remaining clues will help you find the grand final.  A very neat concept for a different type of cache.

  The excerpt below is taken off the website advertising the university.  The University borders on the Golf Course and Assiniboine Forest.

Canadian Mennonite University



Canadian Mennonite University is a Christian University in the Anabaptist tradition, offering challenging programs and recognized degrees in undergraduate and graduate studies. CMU is a member of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada.

CMU values strong academics, excellent teaching, and rigorous thinking. We do this within a framework shaped by Christian faith and with the conviction that faith makes a difference in how people understand the world, how they live, and how they relate to others.


Three tired cachers back at the car

This is the information in the cache, the date of death is different then the documented date on the net.

Richard plunkett Baker

Pilot SPAD

AF706 Lt. 19 Squadron

11 Canadian Mounted Rifles

Born October 18, 1888

Cheated death march 24, 1919

Died April 1954.

This information is off the internet

Lt. Richard Plunkett Baker

30 3-24-1917 He cheated death on this day.

11:55am
At Givenchy in France

Died in April of 1956. He was 66 years old.
 Spad S7

№ A6706
 Halberstadt DII
 19th Squadron

Royal Flying Corps.

The common factor in the 2 caches in this series that we have found is a German pilot Manfred von Richthofen or better known as the Red Baron.  We will have to find more in this series to find our answers.

Have fun caching

GeoPartnerS

Caching since 2011

Assiniboine forest caching #2

And Then There Were Two

Two of us braved the colder temperatures and slight wind today to go out on our adventure!  The temp was -16c with a wind chill of -26c, with light snow falling.   We started walking with a brisk pace and kept warm, the wind in the forest was at a minimum.  We were fine as long as we were moving, but as soon as I had to bare my hands, the first time to sign a log book my hands were ice cubes.  When my hands got cold I used Hot Hands2  this was the first time I used them!  They are amazing!  When the packet is exposed to the air it heats up, I put them into my mitts and wrapped my fingers around it,  the hot hands stayed hot for about 6 hours.  I will stock up on them from here on in.  We had a great caching day, getting 8 !  I don't have many pics today as my camera pooped out, bummer.  Gerry's "eagle caching eyes" were peeled today, he was spotting them right away.

We found 2 hides by the Boy Scout Troop placed while out hiking in the forest.  The one cache shelter was very unique and cool, a wood teepee, not sure if they used it as a shelter and then decided to shelter a cache inside. 

Another hide by a local cacher was placed in a quality piece of real estate, a well ventilated house for sure!  We looked this house up and down, round and round very carefully and thought that we would have to pass up on this offer today, but in the end we had success and put in our offer!  This was a cool hide, our first ammo box container.  Lots of room in it for tradeables.
We hiked and bushwacked until we were tired hikers and decided to call it a day and hike out about 2 pm. Backsides et al dragging we headed to our starting point and the car.

14:00	Light Snow	-14	80	-17	SE 26	101.1	3	-24
11:00	Light Snow	-16	73	-20	ESE 22	101.5	19	-26



Boy Scout Teepee

 The above were the weather conditions when we left and when
we came back.










Have Fun Caching
GeoPartnerS
Caching since 2011