Springvale County Park

 Just outside of Cambridge, Minnesota, is Springvale County Park. The park has 211 acres of trails, hills, fields, forests, wetlands, and Johnny's Lake. Also, there's a disc-golf course and twelve geocaches in the park (and one just outside). 

We had fun walking. The older kids did disc-golf while I and the youngest hunted geocaches with Mom and Grandpa. Luckily, the caches and the golf course run parallel through the park, so we were together most of the time.

At the first hole/cache

ICP-Springvale was the first geocache we found. It was near the first hole (which I guess is actually a basket into which the frisbee goes). I was the first to spot the container but didn't point it out so others could find it as well.

Somewhere near ground zero

The golf course was mown to an easy walking height. They left plenty of "rough" on the sides for the discs to land in. 

Back to golfing

My son really enjoyed throwing the discs and he's been getting better. We may have to get our own set of discs.

Ready to throw

Caught in midflight

The path led by Johnny's Lake, which has both picnic areas and a boat launch. The weather was too cold for canoeing. Also, the lake is a bit far from the parking lot, so you have to be dedicated to use it.

Johnny's Lake

The multicache Two Parts Clearwater stumped us. Our GPS pointed into the lake as the location for the first stage, which clearly wasn't the right location. We pushed on.

It's around here somewhere

Sun over the lake

The next disc "hole" was right by the water. Any overthrow would be a lost disc, so we had someone stand by to try and keep things from getting wet.

An easy target to see

The next cache, No fires please, was an easy find for us. I was surprised by the container. It was an ammo can but made of plastic, not metal!

A fun spot to find

Another view of the location

The next cache is called Dead End cache. The path even went by a dead end sign! 

On the way to the cache with Grandpa

My son was excited to be the first to find (from our group). This one is a more traditional ammo can. 

Finding the cache

The path did turn out to be a dead end. We had to backtrack to get close to the golf course and the next cache.

End of the line

Our final cache find was Nyctohylophobia, which is the fear of dark, wooded areas, especially at night. We didn't have to go into the scary woods to find the cache.

Dark woods, dead ahead

By this point in the adventure, the disc golfers were done golfing and wanted to do one more geocache before heading back home. We found ground zero not far from the dark woods.

Not so dark in the daylight

On the way back, we had one last distant view of the lake.

There's Johnny!