Did a road trip to Elk Island National Park, about a half hour drive east of Edmonton. Originally I had debated on making this a day trip (a long day), but with the Edmonton Expo happening this same weekend it just seemed wrong not to check that out as well!! Elk Island is a bit of change from other Canadian National Parks I’m used to seeing such as Banff and Jasper. There were no pines or evergreens here!! I only visited a tiny portion of the park though, the welcome sign at the south entrance, the visitor centre, and the Bison Loop road. The north end might look totally different, I couldn’t say!
I came here with one main goal: To achieve the goal of one of my geocaching travel bugs. It has a goal to visit specific national parks across Canada, one of which is Elk Island. The only other park it had been to so far was Pacific Rim in BC, so I wanted to help it along! And why not, it gave me a great reason to go somewhere I’d never been, not that I remember anyway. Road trip!
It took around four hours from Calgary, although I did stop at the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame & Museum just outside Red Deer on the way north. There was a cache there I wanted to drop some other trackables in that I had been holding onto for longer than I had wanted. The cache turned out to be this AMAZING looking ark, someone got real creative! I wasn’t planning to pick up any additional travel bugs, but then I saw two ‘turtle bugs’ and knew that since I was traveling, I wanted to help them on their way as well. TURTLE POWER!!
So I made it to the south end of the park, and thankfully there was some massive signage that was easy to park near so that I could get some pictures of my travel bug with a mission… Gotta have PROOF OF VISIT!! I planned to take other pictures in the park too, but was really hoping for a sign and I definitely got one. Ended up with five pictures of the travel bug, a cute little traveling beaver, in various locations I visited within the park:
Got a nice picture of autumn colours in the trees:
I found two geocaches around the areas I visited, which again was a very small section of the whole park. I found it very interesting that when I was at Jasper National Park this past summer, all the geocaches there seemed to be pretty adamant that no SWAG or trackables were allowed in caches in national parks, the main reason being so they won’t run the risk of attracting wildlife. Yet here at Elk Island, while SWAG was definitely not allowed, trackables are and seemed to even be encouraged. I left one of the turtle bugs at one of the caches and picked up yet another… Well hey, I gotta head back to Calgary at some point so I may as well bring it with me and get it some mileage!
No bison were to be seen this day, or any other wildlife for that matter. These two red chairs were sort of in the middle of nowhere though, complete with their own platform:
Here’s Michelangelo the ‘turtle bug’ just hanging out, or Mikey as he seems to be called now… Everything is getting abbreviated or shortened these days it seems!
An interesting looking tree in the middle of the field:
There’s a geocache in this picture below, can you see it?? Guessing it’s not going to be very winter friendly:
Made a quick pit stop in Sherwood Park, AB on the way back to Edmonton for one last cache. I wanted to find one big enough to leave the lil’ traveling beaver… I hadn’t planned on leaving him in Elk Island National Park because I didn’t think it was allowed but even once I learned I could have left him there, I didn’t want to. Hopefully the next geocacher to pick it up will help him on his journey to another park!
…Aaaaaand that’s a wrap! Onward to the Edmonton Expo before heading home!
