William O'Brien State Park

 William O'Brien State Park

—Marine on the St. Croix—

It did not take us long to make it to William O'Brien State Park because it was only about 15 miles farther.  This is a park that I am pretty familiar with, and I have actually camped here before.  Marcus and I drove in and found our way to the first location pretty quickly.  It was located right on the back side of this sign by the visitor center.

 It was a really interesting sign – full of facts about the bluebird – which is apparently a very popular bird in this park.  It made me wonder if that was the card we would find at the end.

Since we were so close to the visitor center, we spent a few minutes looking inside, and we also changed a diaper... I have to vent, but it is really annoying when they don't have diaper changing stations in the bathrooms.  Makes me realize that we are extremely fortunate today because those didn't even exist 20 years ago!

After leaving the visitor center we were on our way, and Marcus took the navigation extremely serious today.  Look at him checking out the map!

... hmmmm... which way should we go...

One thing that is challenging about the state park geocaches is that you always have to stay on the trail.  Sometimes it is not easy to figure out which trail to follow because the map and the compass (on the GPS) don't seem to be pointing in the same direction.  We made one of those mistakes today, and as a result, hiked a bit longer than we intended—but, heck, it was a 2-year-old navigating!

Even with our mistake we quickly found our way to the second location – but it took a bit longer to find... We looked up and down and in the woods, and finally I picked up the rock... It was a Key-Rock!!!

This is one tricky ranger.

We entered the data and moved on.  The directions kept us on the same path.  It was actually kind of weird because the path just followed the road and Marcus really loved the protective barrier.  He would stop every few feet to check it out.  You can't tell from the pictures, but this was all a downhill at this point (cameras never show slopes well at all).

So we kept hiking...

... and just a bit later we found the next location – Marcus found a small Nerf arrow in it, and he loved it and would not put it down.

Following the new coordinates we turned off the path by the road and onto one that headed deep into the woods.  It quiet and pretty and buggy!

View of Lake Alice.  (Not the one in the BWCAW, of course!)

About a 1/4 down the trail we found the turn off for our final location and Marcus quickly found the cache.

I was so certain it was going to be a blue bird, but I was wrong.  Instead it was a red-shouldered hawk.  What a pretty bird.

Now it was time to go back.  At this point we had hiked about a mile – pretty much downhill, so our return hike took a lot longer.  Marcus didn't want to walk back up the hill, and he didn't want to ride on my shoulders – he just wanted to be carried... I really missed Luke during this part of the hike – two parents does make it a lot easier!

After this weekend we are now well over halfway with 48 of the 82 park challenges completed (82 challenges = all 67 state parks (SPs) + all 9 state recreation areas (SRAs) + 1 of the state trails (Root River State Trail) + 4 biome challenges + 1 final Avian Adventure challenge at Itasca SP).  We are going to have some big weekends coming up, and I am super-excited to see what the rest of the state parks are like.  One exciting thing is that we know that these three parks are knocked out of the way and we are really close to finishing another biome (the Big Woods Biome) and we only need one more trip to the SE corner of the state to do it!!

Smiley faces are taking over now!!  The scales have tipped in their favor indeed...