Effie Yeaw Nature Center
We are already at the end of June and sadly have not done any camping or much hiking yet. Despite the projected heat this last weekend, our family and the kids’ cousins went out for a morning walk at the Effie Yeaw Nature Center. There are several loops you can take, each being quite short. We planned for a 1 mile hike but I’m not certain now if that was indeed the route we actually took. Despite being within a busy city, I was amazed to see so many animals within close viewing distance. There were turkey and deer, some large frogs in a pond area, and lots of lizards.
My darling husband, the tech whiz, loaded up a few geocache sites onto his GPS before we left. Not familiar with geocaching? I hope to devote a whole post on this later, but for now I will say it is a way to make any trip into a treasure hunt. Typically you download from a website the GPS coordinates where a “cache” may be stashed. Jeff found two listed geocaches near our hike and downloaded them into his hand-held GPS. Then while we were hiking, we neared the coordinates 
for one, which brought us within a couple of feet of the stashed cache. Still, not as easy as one would think to find it. There is often a hint attached to the location, like “near the widest tree”. You often don’t know what you are looking for, but geocaches are frequently small, waterproof or hearty containers. Inside there is a small notebook which you get to sign and date, and a bunch of small random items. The idea is you get to take one item and leave something else. On our hike we think one of the geocaches was removed, but we found the other one and the kids were really excited to discover it.
Following our success as pirates with our high-tech treasure map, the path homeward took us right by the American River. We didn’t waste a second in the 100 degree heat to dip our toes (but who could stop there!) into the river. We arrived fairly quickly back at the car where I had packed lunch. Trekking tip to stash away: hunger can make the hike back a whole lot faster! There were picnic tables under shade and a very well-done visitor’s center worth checking
out afterwards. All in all we spent about two hours here, which was just perfect.
Here in Minneapolis, we have to take advantage of every single summer day since it doesn’t last long.
I love just going for walks with my kids; watching them enjoy the simplest things like rocks, twigs, and leaves. Nature centers are a wonderful venue for this, as well.
I’m curious about this geocaching, for sure.
Love the pictures!
That’s a great idea. I will have to look into that since we want to do more hiking and camping in the near future.