Current at 11/6/2011 (Online waypoint URL) You have already found this cache! Master Index    Nearest Caches The Forks - The Wall Through Time by Tromelin and junglehair (1/1) N49° 53.168  W97° 07.814 (WGS84) UTM  14U   E 634313  N 5527647 Use waypoint: GC24ZFA Size: Not chosen    Hidden on 3/13/2010 In Manitoba, Canada Difficulty:     Terrain:                           The coordinates given bring you to the bottom of a path containing marble plaques and informative signs concerning the Forks named the Wall Through Time. The Forks is named as such since it is the branching of the Red River and the Assiniboine River. The site as recorded occupancy for over 3000 years. Many native tribes have travelled to the site for commerce ranging for Swan River Manitoba and North Dakota. The aim of this earthcache is to show how sedimentary deposits from the rivers can help understand the history, climate and hydrology of this historical site. As you move up the river bank, you will pass by many layers of soil and debris which have been deposited from the two rivers, the Wall Through Time shows some of the secrets these deposits hold. For the first question, history that you cannot see. During the last ice age Lake Agassiz covered this area, while Mammoths and Mastodons roamed the area on ice up to 4 kilometers thick. 1- How far is the glacial lake bed below your feet? Freebie, this one is currently in the water Climate change can also be studied with the sediments. The plaques mention a severe drought period roughly 800 years ago. This helped the prairies expand north. 2- How do the sediments reveal this drought? The floods, sometimes catastrophic, and the river courses can also be studied with the sediments. The panels show that the Assiniboine river change it's course through time as well. 3-How long has the Assiniboine River maintained its current course? Extensive archaeological investigations of the sediments reveal some of the history of this area. Various pottery fragments, bone and tools can be found in the sediments which help identify the different Aboriginal tribes that hunted, fished or traded at the Forks. Later in history, trade post were established and settlers arrived. Beginning in 1886, The Forks emerged as one of the key sites of early railroad development on the Prairies. 4- Examining the plaque layer insert showing actual sediments of the railway period, how are the sediments different for this period? What causes them to have this difference? Today, The Forks is a vibrant downtown Winnipeg setting where people gather for celebrations, recreation and, much like the early Aboriginals, to meet one another. To log this cache as a find email the answers to the profile email. Optional: also post a picture of yourself and/or your GPSr with one or two of the rivers in the background. Some of the information for this earthcache was obtained at http://www.theforks.com/. All information required to answer the earthcache is on the outdoor plaques.

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9/12/2010 by Kabuthunk
I've walked down this path a fair number of times in the past. Unfortunately, all of those times have been prior to this earthcache being established here . And naturally, once I noticed that this earthcache was here and was out at the Forks, the spring waters had come in, and the bottom half of the plaques were completely inaccessible. Or at least completely inaccessible without getting the bottom half of you covered with ice-cold water and mud. Actually, back in spring I was tempted to find this geocache by way of attempting to zoom in on and take pictures of all of the plaques from dry land. I think only a few of the plaques were still underwater at that time, and I had no way of knowing if they were needed or not. I eventually came to the conclusion that my camera simply wasn't high enough quality to be able to zoom in that much and get readable pictures, and so abandoned the pseudo-attempt. I then came back later towards the start of summer, and due to this year's ridiculously high water for so long, it was STILL inaccessible.

THIS weekend however... I was able to make my way through the trail. This weekend as well was a good time to come out to the Forks, since the Manitoba Dragon Boat Festival was happening! My wife was one of the rowers for team "Northwest Pirates"... if you were at the event, you'd have likely recognized it as the team that was all wearing pirate hats . To state the obvious, I decided that this would be a convenient opportunity to tackle this earthcache after all the races had completed (her team came in 3rd, 1st, and then 3rd again for the three races... not sure what their average time was as of posting this). So after said races, we wandered over to this trail and looked at all of the plaques. I kinda wished they had used a lighter-coloured stone for the stone plaques though. It was kinda hard to read the text with the dark red colour with black lettering. Especially so if the sun was at the wrong angle. I actually ended up taking pictures of every single plaque so that I could reference them at home as well, but a number of them are quite difficult to make out. Especially true for the ones with the plastic cover, since it looks like those sheets of plastic could stand to be replaced pretty badly.

I DID however learn quite a bit of information from reading all of them. I don't think I've ever actually stopped and read everything there is here before. A lot of it was quite surprising, and it was very interesting to see the progression (or perhaps regression) with the glaciers pulling away, and Lake Agassiz disappearing to leave Manitoba how it is now. I was ALSO completely unaware that the Assiniboine River had changed its path. By quite a fair amount, it looks like. Then again, given how much these rivers meander all over the place, I'm not too surprised. If anything, I'm more surprised by the amount of meandering, and how or why the river doesn't just... y'know... form a straight line from point A to point B.

But all that aside, it was quite the informative walk, and my wife and I quite enjoyed taking a slow, leisurely stroll on a surprisingly beautiful, sunny day. When we happened to go there was also very little wind, unlike later in the day. So not only did we learn a lot, we got to watch (and my wife participate) in some dragonboat racing (of which I had never actually watched or even seen prior to this weekend), do some shopping, get some tasty food at the Forks, and all in all have an awesome final day to the weekend. Probably won't be too many more of this quality of weekend before the snow starts flying, so we got to soak it in for all it was worth today .

Took: Lots of pictures on a slow leisurely walk
Left: With the memories of much learned knowledge

Note: If I made a mistake in the question, or the pic isn't up to snuff, let me know and I can change this to a 'note' until I rectify any problems .