Entry for February 24, 2008 - Marshall WI

Been going stir- with cabin fever this winter. It has been snowing so much and often that the only outside activities were centering around clearing snow off of pavement.

In the last 2 weeks I finally bought a new and improved GPS receiver for myself, and discovered a geocache published last November that indicated that crossing some water to get to an island was required. The person who placed it walked there on ice, and I intended to find it the same way.

Had nearly a week of fair weather so this weekend was prime time to try my first ever winter geocache expedition. I recruited my sister to come along and we set out at 10am today. The geocache has a theme, and is named "Treasure Island".

The location is on an island around 300 or so feet off the shore of a town park in Marshall, Wisconsin. The park is not plowed during the winter apparently, so we had to park at a nearby strip mall. We were expecting to have to walk along the road to the park like all the other logs for the geocache indicated, but instead I discovered a snowmobile trail on the far side of the strip mall that lead directly to the lake. An ideal short-cut.

There is the park we were supposed to walk to then venture onto the ice. This way was much easier.

Walked around to the far side of the island, and the gps was pointing into this section.

Do you see it? I had benefit of previous finder's footprints to lead me here.

It's under there.

Cleared the natural cover. See it now?

Inside. The box was frozen in place.

My sister holding the "treasure". No, we did not take it all. As a matter of fact I left some real Euro coins (some "pieces of eight") and just took a traveling geocoin to move it along to someplace new this spring.

That felt easy, let's go exploring some of the lake now.

Walked out to a duck or goose blind across the way.

The snowmobiles apparently ride along the river channel

Some more of the lake.

Walking out the way we came in.

That was only 1.53 miles round trip according to my brand-new gps receiver.

Sister wanted to explore another park. She had been seeing cars parked out at Patrick Marsh (behind the school that she works at) in my hometown all winter long. I have hiked this place many times, and even shared many photos from there in the past. I however have never walked the trails with snow on the ground...

Here is what it looked like today.

The trails were well traveled and easy to find in the snow. Lot's of people walk their dogs here. We added another one and a half miles for a total of 3.01 miles walked today. The sun shined the entire time, and it warmed up to nearly 40��F as we finished our trip. Perhaps I may try another winter geocache if the weather is like this on a future weekend.

If you detected a difference in quality with these photos and my prior posts, it may be due to the fact I chose to carry my older Nikon Coolpix 995 for it's lighter weight and smaller size. I also was concerned about dropping my good camera into the snow or slipping and falling with it in my hands.