Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Medicinal by OHMIC (1.5/2) N50° 13.543  W97° 08.680 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 632339  N 5565375 Use waypoint: GC1BZ2Y Size: Regular    Hidden on 5/5/2008 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                 Large ammo can. In First Nations culture, medicinal plants were valued and respected for their healing abilities. Traditional medicines remain a gift of the creator and should not be bought or sold. Most ailments could be cured using the medicinal properties of plants and often these were wetland plants. In western civilizations, it was known since the time of Hippocrates that salicylic acid, a compound found in willows is an effective medication. During the 18th century, advances in chemistry allowed the active ingredient, salicylic acid, to be extracted and transformed into acetylsalicylic acid,also known as Aspirin.

Additional Hints (There are no hints for this cache)

7/8/2011 by Kabuthunk
And once again, I learn something from having read the cache description, while at the time of finding the cache had absolutely no clue what the name of the cache meant. I didn’t notice any informational plaques around the coordinates, although there’s a possibility I just didn’t see it. Oh well, the cache description filled me in on a fact I had not been aware of. Who knew that the humble willow was actually a healing agent, as opposed to just really bendy branches we would use as a kid to make crappy little bows and arrows out of .

So walking up from the other cache, I at first thought the coordinates might have been a lot further along at the actual information kiosk thing, but found myself surprised to be stopped right along the trees. On the plus side, there was ample shade in the area (although due to the time of day I had to get pretty close to the trees for said shade to hit me). On the downside, said aforementioned shade created ample quantities of mosquitoes and horseflies to make sure that I kept moving for this cache.

However, between the walk from ‘Burnt’ to this cache, I found myself struck with several reminiscing memories. This area very much reminds me of growing up. On the left we have farmers fields, which we were surrounded with in the house I grew up in the country South of the city. And when I say ‘country’, I’m not talking town or village (technically, I went to school in Landmark, which is still known as a ‘Hamlet’, which ranks under the ‘Village’ status), I’m talking ‘lived on a gravel road with extraordinarily few neighbours and nothing but fields around’. So yeah, I got the feeling of that on the left, while on the right I had memories of my grandma’s place that we’d visit several times a year, about four hours North of the city. Way up past Teulon, past Narcisse, Fisher Branch and Dallas lies Red Rose (still surprisingly shown on Google maps, despite it almost being a ghost town (or Hamlet or whatever it technically is) at this point. Much of the area is swamp and bog, and we used to play in the forests and catch frogs in the bog and whatnot.

But I digress. While reminiscing over the past, I was able to easily walk up to the coordinates, and found the cache container almost instantly… the hiding spot was pretty self explanatory, and I just dove in and got the cache container. I had to keep an almost constant movement going while attempting to sign it because a fairly large horsefly kept chasing me. I traded out the travelbug inside the cache, since seeing it reminded me that I had a geocoin that I needed to drop off. It’s supposed to be looking for ‘haunted’ type caches… but well… this cache container was covered in cobwebs… that counts .

So trading those out and very quickly signing the log, I replaced the cache container and booked it out of there before more horseflies attacked me. Thankfully it was breezy enough once I started moving again that it managed to chase most of them away from me.

So all in all, a bit of shade, a lot of reminiscing, and another cache under my belt. Let today’s hike continue!

Took: ‘Traveler’ travelbug
Left: Logbook entry, ‘Tell Me a Haunted Story Geocoin’, and chainmail ball