This “Running of the Bulls” is a geocaching series near Edson, Alberta hidden by chipchic, a geocacher from the area. That “Running of the Bulls” is what some foolhardy people do in Spain and in areas of France during summer festivals. If these people aren’t candidates for individual Darwin Awards, I don’t know who is.
Running of the Bulls in the Hornbeck Rec. Area#
My geocaching buddy Hugh and I planned a two-day, one-sleep trip to Edson to tackle as many of the Running of the Bulls series as we could. We knew that there were too many caches hidden over such a wide area that we’d never be able to find them all during one trip.
After the drive to Edson from Edmonton (and for Hugh, a bit further from Leduc), we made our way to the northeast corner of the Hornbeck Recreation Area where the series is hidden. We thought these more remote caches would be the most challending of the bunch and so chose to tackle these first.
After parking at a gas well site, we set of on the trek. We were met with overgrown, but completely walkable trails. And we frequently bellowed out the forest, which we hoped was empty of bears. What was it like? I think this movie produced by Relive tells the story better with video and images than I can with words. It give you a bird’s-eye view of our trek. Many of the pictures are the same as those in the image gallery below, but this puts the images in context on the map.
Our Route and Pictures Taken - From a “Relive” video#
These are examples of the containers we were looking for. Some we quick finds, while others took us a while.
And we stopped along the way to take some “hero” shots:
We were right to think this section of the series would be on the more difficult side. The black diamond markers on the cross-country ski trails told us there plenty of hills ahead. Add to those a few water hazards we had to bushwhack around where the trail was completely flooded with water or consumed with swampy muskeg. All this made for a tiring trek.
But we made it, just as the sun was setting. We’d made the loop, found most, not all, of the caches we’d looked for and were ready for a good shower in our hotel rooms and a good night’s sleep.
Image Gallery#
Here are a few pictures from the outing today.
And just for fun, at the beginning of the hike I tried a bit of photo trickery. On the left, taken as we started out: “OMG, the gas is leaking!”. When we got back as the sun was setting, “OMG, the gas is exploding!” 😉
