Grandma's Old Horseshoe - Splash Traditional Geocache
1Queenand4Jokers: May do a new hide.
Grandma's Old Horseshoe - Splash
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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Micro cache - pencil included...Thought you'd enjoy a couple of
flood water SPLASH caches. Feel free to take any pictures at both
oxbow/horseshoe caches and upload them with your logs. Find both at
the same time if possible - good education!
This cache, as well as its much larger, smarter and more beautiful
twin "Kissing the Horseshoe", is hidden at a very unique
geographical feature. The larger and smarter twin is hidden at a
perennial oxbow lake on private land with special permission by the
land-owners. This one, from our studies, seems to be what is called
a channel scar oxbow which fills during high river seasons. There
are only 8 of these oxbows between the U-S./Manitoba border and
Lake Winnipeg.
Google Earth provides a good look at several of them if you are
interested.
OX-BOWS
By Johanna Keller
The hooves of a thirsty beast might have stamped
these parentheses in mud. C's and U's
spell what the mazy flow has left behind,
the wendings discarded for direct ways.
This river scores the prairie's tender hand,
a curved lifeline plaited with oxbow lakes.
Light glisters the hooks of estranged water,
like horseshoes lost, a bronze boat overturned,
or the crescent moon unable to rise.
Grain by grain, land records seasons of flood
and drought, choke of slow wash, the loess and drift
of migrating shoals, tearing down, building up,
and tearing down. A soil embankment holds,
then splits to trickle and swash, a freshet
rushes through the notch and cascades to gurge,
mud flume surges until the deeper place
is filled and the current slows. Newly sliced,
the island waits to be rejoined to strand
by drain and silt, while the waves lick cutbanks
to precariousness, to plummet, pull
the shore to another tortuous path.
Water reverts to earth: blue pond to brown
to algae, squelchy bog thickens with reeds
to wallow, to chughole, fallow and field.
Beyond bandy banks and lakes, green shadows
of lakes overlap, fishscales in bottomland.
The plow respects this healed terrain and draws
its sinuous furrows in sickle shapes.
The pewter road obeys what has occurred,
and twists and turns as if it held stained glass.
These verdant scars—lush earthen oxbows—prove
more fertile than land never cut. Half-rings
remember decisions, abandonings,
the rich alluvia yoke the river—
so restless and forgetful—to the past.
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This cache was created to add to the number of
QUALITY caches hidden in Manitoba. It is an official cache in the
MBGA Cache Splash event. |
| Category 22: Winter friendly
hide. |
Additional Hints
(No hints available.)