I have a whole new laptop and the world is mine. In trying to clean and streamline my digital life, I’m seeing if I can get back to doing this! We’ll see if I fill in the interim (hahahhaha who knows); I also am playing with a whole new photo pipeline in the last few years.
Anyway, in the summer of the corona virus and with a child actually old enough to do stuff with…we’ve been going outside a lot. Here, we did 2.5 miles on the Red Trail, some fireroad, and the Midnight Trail at Webster County Park. Overall a delightful and pleasant day.
We drove out to Webster County Park; we had gone on a nice walk on the western part of the park earlier in the summer and quite enjoyed the beautiful woods, so we thought we’d head back and visit another part of the park, still on the west side, but heading down to the southern park. We entered on the western entrance and drove to where the road ended at a gate. We walked down the road, taking a brief detour into the woods to find our first geocache, and also said hello to some people who were out mushroom hunting. We also saw an orienteering marker, which was cool. I should get back into orienteering. Or, well, I only ever did a few events, but they were certainly fun!
From there, we continued south to the end of the road, where we found one of the camper’s cabins and actually got to a “real” trail. That train has one part that goes back to the main body of the park and another piece that makes a loop. We ducked quickly onto the “main” part and played around for a bit until we found the cache we were looking for; while there, Nathan found a lost wooden meat tenderizer, which definitely rises to the level of one of the weirder finds we’ve had. From there, we headed onto the bit of the loop trail, which was quite pleasant; at the southernmost end, it hit the end of the park property, and the person who owns the private lot at that side is very serious about it and has strung up an electric fence along the entire boundary. We didn’t actually check if it was live, but hey. We continued the loop, ducking off into the swampy off trail (…largely unnecessarily) to find cache #3.
We got back to the cabin site and took a snack and bathroom break (there was a porta-john on site, although there was a rather creepy outhouse nearby too. Tiny unpleasant building with a Ladies and Gents side. Because single occupancy outhouses really need that. Yeah.). From there, we walked back along the fire road, ducking onto a side connecting trail to look for and fail to find cache #4 before getting back to the car. It’s a lovely park, with mixed conifer and deciduous forest and is large enough that you can actually feel like you’re out for a real walk. It’s also apparently open to bikes and was nice enough that I would enjoy riding there I think; perhaps I’ll duck out one day.
