Geo-caching and more camping

So on Friday afternoon around 3 p.m. as I was agonizing over what I should do for the weekend (I had three different choices I could entertain), I got an e-mail from my friend Curtis and he offered me Door #4 which I immediately chose. An invitation to join him and Bonnie outside of Bragg Creek, camping at Paddy's Flat campsite. I zoomed home from work, packed the car full of camping gear and immediately headed south for Calgary.

I drove only as far as Calgary Friday night but on Saturday I had more gear, and Will, in tow and we headed west out of the city, into Kananaskis Country with our sights set firmly on Paddy's Flat. Now the countryside around Bragg Creek, in K-Country, has become a familiar filming spot for movies such as "Legends of the Fall" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford". I wonder why it's so popular???

By the time Will and I got to Paddy's Flat, Bonnie and Curtis were getting ready to go geo-caching. Anyone new to the term "geo-caching", welcome to my world. The best way I can explain it is the coolest scavenger/treasure hunt out in the forest using GPS coordinates to help you find where the cache is stashed. Seeing as Will and I were new to the idea we started off small, going to look for two caches along the Elbow River.

While Bonnie and I took over finding duties, Will and Curtis did typical guy things - floating sticks down the river to see how far they would go, skipping stones, or throwing rocks at their sticks. Curtis even tried to throw Bonnie in the river but his common sense prevailed and he quit before he got his butt kicked!

A quick break for lunch and then we were off again, our friend Mike now part of the geo-caching party, following the trail of three caches along the hike up a rather steep hill. Cache #1 on this hillside hike had us stumped. We looked:

and we looked,

and then Bonnie sat down to think about the clue that had been left to us and she found it! Sneaky cache site!

We found our last cache under some tree roots and oddly enough the item we took away seemed fitting for International Talk Like a Pirate Day and for Will seeing as he reckons he's a modern day pirate!

We hiked back to camp and there was some competitive Washer Toss going on between Mike and Curtis while the rest of us started to cook supper and have some cold drinks.

Saturday was a gorgeous day but around 5 a.m. Sunday morning Will and I discovered why we aren't fans of tenting in the fall, in the mountains. It started to rain, the temperature dropped to around 5 degrees and it continued to rain all morning. We were so cold and miserable that we packed up our gear and headed back to Calgary before noon.

Aside from the crummy Sunday weather, driving down to camp with Bonnie, Curtis, Will and Mike was the best spontaneous trip I've done in a really long time!