Nature Does Some Clever Magic Tricks

August 17 2024·287 words·2 mins

Geocaching Hiking Chickakoo

One obligatory trail picture to offer an idea of what most trails looked like today.

Three of us decided to do a grand loop hike at Chickakoo Lake Recreation area today. There was an “International Geocaching Day” event scheduled for 4 pm in the main parking lot and our plan was to do our hike and land up in the parking lot when the event started. It would be the “dessert” for our “eat-your-peas-first” outing.

As it turns out, we found a few caches, didn’t find a few and even took a nice long rest break at one point, complete with fun tales of geocaching exploits. These exploits involved the climbing of dodgy trees in London and even enlisting the help of an innocent passer-by, a young mother pushing a pram no less, to assist in the find. But those details will stay on the trail.

In the past I’d found almost all the geocaches on the route we were taking today, so even though I helped search for the hides my buddies needed, I often had some free time to focus on the details of the natural world we were traversing.

The result of that focus? I was able to capture a few of those “magic” details you see in the images here.

A very cool, thankfully abandoned, wasp nest. They built their nest completely surrounding the spruce twigs

The focus on this one is a little off, but it looks like the dead leaf in the middle was hovering in mid air! It was a spider's web doing the heavy lifting of course.