Bemidji Caching Trip Day 1

A small park in Ada, MN

Over Labor Day weekend Erin and I planned a trip to Bemidji to do some geocaching. There were a large number of caches in the area, as well as lots of bike trails to fill up our time.  Friday night we got everything ready and Saturday morning we were able to get on the road shortly after waking up.  The first part of the trip took us North on highway 9 in Minnesota to Ada. We found 2 caches on the highway and 3 more in Ada.  On of the caches we found was a locked box attached to a pole, Erin was amazed when I walked over and got the combination right on the first try, all it took was a little bit of looking around the area.

Pine trees near Gary, but no cache

Mahnomen benchmark

From Ada we headed East with a quick stop in Gary before heading onto Mahnomen. Our stop in Gary was not productive. We think we found where the cache used to be, but it was no longer there. We did find the cache we were looking for in Mahnomen right near a benchmark.

Lunch time sneaking, you can just barely see the truck

After our stop in Mahnomen we stopped by a public water access, there were people there, so we parked a little ways away behind some trees and ate lunch while we waited for them to leave. Once they left we quickly found the cache.

Near Zerkel

From there we followed a logging road through the forest to some caches that don't get found very often.  It was a neat area that we probably would not have been in if we hadn't been out geocaching. After the logging road we found the remains of a house that had been moved, the foundation and chimney were all that remained.




From that point on we ran into some trouble maintaining a data connection with our phones which made things a bit more difficult. We had the waypoints stored on our watches, but needed the integration with the maps to drive to where we needed to go.  I think we missed a few caches I had planned, but muddled through as best we could.  We found a cache near a bridge of historical significance, if you'd like to know more about it, I've attached a picture of the sign.

3rd cache down the narrow dirt road

After the bridge we found a narrow dirt road that had a few caches down it. When we pulled up a few people on ATVs let us know that the road was closed up ahead, we decided to try it anyway and found the caches, the last of which is the little mailbox shown here.  That was the easy part, the hard part was getting back out, with no where to turn around I had to back down the narrow dirt road about a quarter of a mile. When we were done here we tried for a few more caches without any luck so we decided to head to the hotel.







Once we'd finished checking in and dropping off the bikes we decided to grab an early supper.  I had read about an Italian restaurant that had just opened that sounded good.  We drove over and I guess 4:30 was a bit too early for supper because we were told that the kitchen wouldn't be ready to server until 5:00. We decided not to wait and walked over to a near by bar.  We had some cheese curds and burgers at Bar 209 before heading out to a place called Hobson Forest to do some more caching. We had no luck at Hobson forest, we made it to where 2 caches were supposed to be and found nothing, fallen trees blocked the trails to the other caches back in the woods. After that disappointment we stopped at Bemidji State park to pick up the Avian Adventure multicache.  We had to walk a couple of miles to make the find, but really enjoyed how well this was put together and where it took us in the park. After that we wanted to break out single day caching record so we picked up a few miscellaneous caches on the way back to the hotel and finished the day with 34 finds.