Samuel Smith Park

With spring just around the corner, it's time for us to get back out hiking and of course, my new favourite hobby, geocaching! I'm still not 100%, so we took it light on Monday night and went for a walk in Colonel Samuel Smith Park in Toronto. It's a beautiful park right along a peninsula on Lake Ontario. There's a lot of wildlife, trees, plants and, as you'll see soon in some of my pictures, lots of birds! There is also a yacht club, for anyone who enjoys looking at gigantic, million dollar boats. Apparently, in the winter, they have an "ice trail" in which you can ice skate on! Pretty neat, we'll defiantly have to check it out next winter. There is also a beautiful view of the Toronto skyline, as you can see in this picture below (this is from an earlier visit to the park)

Overall, it's a very nice park right in the middle of the big city. Plus, there are quite a few geocaches in the park! We went a little bit later in the day, so we only had a chance to look for 2 of the caches in the park. Unfortunately, the first one we couldn't find because where the cache was hidden was still covered in snow and ice. However, we got an absolutely stunning view from the cache location:

The second one we found pretty quickly. I didn't grab a picture of it, but I did grab a picture of this Red Winged Blackbird near the cache, who didn't seem all that happy to have us lurking around: 

 It was getting late after we found the 2nd cache, so we decided to head back to the parking lot. As we were doing so, we saw something big and white fly overhead. We watched the bird fly over the water, back towards us, where it finally landed on a pile of rocks. Luckily we got close enough without scaring this beautiful female Snowy Owl away so could grab this stunning picture:

Probably the coolest bird I've ever seen while hiking and probably the nicest picture I've ever taken. Overall, even though we didn't really get very many caches, it was a great walk. Hopefully I'll have more posts as the weather starts to get nicer and trails get drier! 

--Nicole 

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