Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches Bird's Hills of Glacial Deposits by ertyu (2/1.5) N50° 00.751  W96° 55.746 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 648371  N 5542077 Use waypoint: GC1RZK6 Size: Not chosen    Hidden on 5/31/2009 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                   To find this earthcache, you will be exploring a small area of the park and stopping at two locations near the roadway to collect information. Named for Dr. James Curtis Bird who owned land in the area, the hills of glacial deposits in the area are a natural resource that continue to be extracted and contain a record of glacial history. More than 10,000 years ago as the glacier hovered over this area, it halted. Gravel, boulders and sand that were collected during the glaciers' southern movement, now were deposited here as the glacier melted. The most noticeable glacial hitch-hiker are the boulders or erratics that are scattered throughout the park. These are mainly granite originating from the Canadian Shield northeast of here. As the glacier continued to melt, rivers formed and carved through the glacier depositing large amounts of sand and gravel. As the area dried up, the sand and gravel remained as ridges called eskers. Birds Hill is believed to be a formation of several eskers. Along Garven Road south of the park, you can find two large gravel ridges which converge in the park. You will also see several of the still active gravel pits in the area. This cache is located within Birds Hill Provincial Park with permission from Manitoba Parks and Natural Areas. A provincial park pass is required to visit the park. However, Manitoba Conservation is providing free park entry until April 30, 2012. Birds Hill Provincial Park is a mosaic of landscapes not commonly found in such close association, such as esker ridges, dry prairie, wet meadows, bogs, and aspen-oak and mixed boreal forest communities. Classified as a Natural Park, its purpose is to preserve areas that are representative of the Aspen/Oak Parklands Natural Region, and accommodate a diversity of year round recreational opportunities such as hiking, horseback riding, cross-country skiing, mountain biking and wildlife viewing and camping. In order to log the cache you must submit the correct answers to the following questions. At the co-ordinates you are at an exposed area of an esker ridge. 1. Find a good spot that illustrates the geology and post a picture. No pictures of the erratic please. At the erratic waypoint (N50 00.274 W96 55.020) you'll find one of the many examples of the large boulders that were deposited by the glacier. 2. To get some sense of the force involved in moving these boulders, estimate the size and weight of the boulder. The density of granite is 2750kg per cubic meter. 3. How much of the erratic appears to be missing? Logging Etiquette: Geocache hiders sometimes go through a great deal of planning to place their caches. As a result, they'd like to hear your feedback on whether you liked or disliked any aspect of the hide, or if you feel that some cache maintenance is required. Blank, single word, acronym, or emoticon logs may be easier when you have a lot of caches to log, but it doesn't tell the hider or other finders anything about your adventure (or lack thereof) in finding the cache. Please keep this in mind when entering your log.

Additional Hints (There are no hints for this cache)

4/11/2010 by Kabuthunk
Sorry about the delay in logging this cache. It's been quite some time since I've had a chance to visit Bird's Hill Park. Ok well... last fall, but that's still a good chunk of time for me. The 2-year burst of free park access has definitely ramped up my going out here, anyway. Obviously, their ploy of "make people go to the parks again by making it free for a while, then get more people buying passes when that's done" is going to work... because I can't imagine NOT having a park pass after the past year and a bit .

But I digress. TO THE PARK! My wife and I decided it would be a nice day to try out her new rollerblades, and of course I'd be bringing my bike. She knew way ahead of time that I planned to do some geocaching, so she didn't have any qualms with us taking a few detours when we arrived. After a quick half-hourish drive from our apartment to the park, I stopped the car approximately close to where I thought the coordinates where, before looking at the GPS. However, I soon realized I was a good half-kilometer from the coordinates, and proceeded to get closer . Turns out there's a little mini-road to park on right close to the coordinates, although we had to be a bit careful. There was multiple other cars there, which we assumed belonged to the multiple bikers which at that particular moment happened to be whipping around the cars from one side of the forest to the other. After they had passed by, we parked, got out, and had a looksee. Gotta say... of all the times I've been to this park, I never knew of this massive sand area here. Made me think it was a beach, but missing the water. Surprisingly smooth sand too, given the location. So naturally I played with it for a bit, and took a picture of my wife standing on the "beach" with the trees in the background (see attached). Although I was also surprised that when I dug down about a foot or so, it was still sand! Not sure how deep it goes before it hits... well, regular dirt... but I'm definitely curious now! I suppose the sheer fact that there's no plants in it would imply that the sand goes quite deep indeed.

Random note: I'm TOTALLY going to be having a beach picnic there sometime this year .

So after mulling around for a bit, we hopped back into the car and went to the second coordinates. We were tempted to leave the car and bike/rollerblade along the way, but we were a bit worried about the car's placement with the biker's path, and also my wife is still very new to blading, so she didn't want to be on the side of a road quite yet.

Arriving at the erratic's waypoints, I suddenly realized something thanks to the cache description (that's for all the awesome info, by the way). I always thought these boulders were placed here by park staff to mark the entrance to a path or something (although I'm fairly certain at least SOME of them have been moved to specific places). I get the feeling now that many of the paths happened to go where they go BECAUSE the rock was there, not the other way around. So we snapped a few pictures for the purposes of answering the questions to the cache, and followed the path a bit more. Looks like there's some additional road there that I was unaware of, and a lot more of these boulders all in a row. Kinda curious now as to if that row was placed deliberately, or if it just happened to be that way because of a crack in the glacier gathered them or what have you. Methinks these are the types of questions I'll never have an answer to .

But nonetheless... quite the informative day today. Learned some things about the park, discovered some areas of the park that I didn't know existed, and got to do a bit of geocaching, biking, and helping my wife rollerblade. Before the wind picked up and it got too chilly, anyway ,

Took: Pictures!
Left: A mostly filled in hand-sized hole in the sand .