Elliston Park, I’ve always known it existed but had never gone there until now. I wanted to explore a new place to walk that I’d never seen before, and also maybe discover a few caches to earn points for the Geocaching Cache Carnival going on right now. The park is in south east Calgary and the home of Globalfest which I’ve also never been to, but it seems like the perfect spot for a fireworks competition with how spacious and wide open it is.
It’s roughly 3.4 km to walk around the entire park, if you stay on the pathways closest to the water. There are a number of paths/trails that veer off to other areas around Elliston, and of course finding the geocaches required a bit more deviation as indicated in my Fitbit tracking map. So on this trek I actually walked 6 km.
Took lots of pictures around the pathways, the water is I believe a storm water retention pond, kind of like the one close to my home. It was an overcast day as you can see, but it was around 10 degrees Celsius and with wandering around it really wasn’t cold at all. There were a lot of dog walkers out and about, and I petted many and got covered in dog hair in the process! Part of the park is off leash, so there were a lot of friendly and excited puppies that approached me!
Below are some of the geocaches I found, these ones were super fun for me probably because they were not that difficult to find, haha! I was 5 for 6 on finds so I guess that’s not too bad!! I’m hoping ones like these are giving me the practice I feel I need in order to have a better eye for the more difficult to find caches:
This birdhouse geocache was a fun one, it’s actually a jack-in-the box with a freaky surprise!
There was one virtual cache at Elliston Park, kind of a fun one with a sundial, no shadows today though with the clouds:
This structure below is apparently a staging and announcement platform for boat races that occur during summer months. Never heard of boat races here before, might be worth checking out later this year. This is also the site of the one geocache I was unable to find. From reading through the activity log, I was able to see what it’s supposed to look like, but still had no success. Other geocachers also said the hint helped them save a lot of time, it seemed more like a riddle to me which I probably also need more practice at!
I always love seeing the geocaching happy faces on my map, this one is really fun because there’s a bunch all in one area:
So I’m currently sitting at 96 points in the Cache Carnival, only 4 points away from the 100 point souvenir!! I’m pretty happy to have the 10, 25, and 50 point souvenirs on my account, as these are just like earning achievements in World of Warcraft for treasure hunting, HA!
The geocache I didn’t find at Elliston Park was worth 50 points so that hurts a bit. The next souvenir after the 100 point one is the 500 point one (why is there nothing in between?) Not sure that I’ll reach 500 points but I’ll at least aim for 100 points before the carnival ends on April 15th!
