As my brothers will tell you, I have been in a MAJOR geocaching slump. I have not been out for a find since mid October of 2007. When Duane and Dave where visiting last weekend, we did a couple of hours of caching each of the days they were here. So, I kinda got my groove back a little bit. Now that my caching pump has been primed, I started to think about one the goals I've been working on since 2003, finding at least 1 cache in each of the 50 states. My cache map has looked like a big red doughnut, with the hole being South Dakota. So with a day off today, I woke up early and got my gear together and headed off to the west.
Since I was heading to the southeastern corner of South Dakota, I decided to make a detour and visit Pipestone National monument, a small little national park just across the border in Minnesota. It was a very cool place, with a well maintained hiking trail that leads you through prairie grasses, across a fast flowing stream and ultimately to a good sized waterfall. The pipestone which is the namesake of the park is a smooth, soft sedimentary rock that the Native Americans have used to make ceremonial pipes for hundreds of years. Check out the Wikipedia page to learn more about the park. There was also a type of geocache at the park called on Earthcache, so I was able to do this one before I headed west to South Dakota.
After a picnic lunch I drove into South Dakota, to the town of Brookings. There was a cache I had picked out ahead of time. Well, I got there and searched and searched but to no avail, I could not find it. I wasn't about to be shut out on my attempt to check SD off my list. I broke out my trusty smart phone, got on the geocaching web site, entered my local longitude and latitude and found that there was another cache located just a mile to the north. This one was called Wagon Walk and it was in a beautiful city garden. It was a quarter mile in from the car, and I found it with no problem. My brother Dave would have loved it, it was a large plastic container that you could place lots of trade items in.On my way back to the Twin Cities, I stopped by one last cache in the tiny town of Buffalo Lake. The cache was called Tornado in memory of a large Tornado that hit the town in June of 2003. I found it and finished off my day of exploring. I arrived home 11 hours and 400 miles later tired but happy to have spent a fun day on the road.
