Adventures with Marcus: Prairie Grassland Biome (at Camden State Park)

Prairie Grassland Biome

—Camden Sate Park—

—Lynd, MN—

After we finished the Camden State Park Avian Geocache, we were ready to knockout the Prairie Grassland Biome. Earlier, while Luke was searching for the second stage of the regular state park multicache (see the previous blog), I was getting a head start working on the biome geocache clues in the car.

Here is the clue sheet at Camden.

My scratch work.

I spread all of the cards out on the dash of the car and got all the required details – the only thing missing at that point was that I did not have the Camden State Park card, so I had to double check my work when we got it to see if it changed anything (it actually did... two answers were affected).

Once we had the answers and had the digits figured out, we headed off to the new coordinates – and what we thought was going to be the final location for the biome. It was a one-mile drive across the park.

Once we found the parking lot, I grabbed the GPS and started searching. I was looking for the final cache—since this was a puzzle cache, we thought it would only have one stop (similar to the Tallgrass Aspen Parkland Biome up at Lake Bronson). But the coordinates didn't bring us to a place where a box could easily be hidden. Instead, they brought us to a sign in the middle of some grass.

Hmmm...

I spent some time looking at the sign and finally looked up... sneaky ranger. They had another stage.

The new coordinates brought us across the river (again) into the group camp. It was kind of awkward because it was in use and people looked at our car slightly strangely... we clearly were not part of the family camping here.

Luke parked the car, and we decided it was his turn to get out an explore. Similar to the last hike, there were two pararllel paths: one next to the river and one a bit farther in. And just like my start on the last hike, Luke picked the wrong one to go with. He didn't go very far because it was obviously not headed in the right direction after a little ways. Luke turned around and headed for the other river trail... hmmm... guess we should have read the clue on the last coordinate card (it said "river").

Once Luke was on the right path, it did not take him long to find the final location. It was tucked in next to a fallen log.

The Bobolink was our second biome card! So excited!

We left the park and were headed to our other event of this weekend, Giant Days in LeSueur, for some corn on the cob (yum, yum, yum).

The drive was pretty, and it was pretty much like traveling through Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. We drove through all of the towns from the book: Walnut Grove and Sleepy Eye (funny enough, we even hit Burr Oak a few weeks ago in Iowa). The sky was great and the drive was nice, except for a small rain storm. Here are some views from the drive.