The original was our family’s first cache hide. It was a multi-cache placed on behalf of my grandson, in memory of A Forest Fire That Wasn’t:
On a parched and windy spring day in 2011, a careless park visitor placed a smoldering cigarette butt into a standing dead tree along one of the trails at Forest Park Nature Center. By the time our family encountered it that evening, the tree was smoldering along 5 feet of the trunk – giving off billowing smoke and airborne cinders with every gust of wind. As the park office was already closed for the day, we called the fire department to put out the fire.
The park contains over 7 miles of trails within 500 acres of dedicated nature preserve; thus, we assisted the fire department in locating the tree. Much to my 3 year-old grandson’s delight, the fire truck drove down the valley trail all the way to what we eventually christened The Burning Tree. They used an axe and a hand held tank to extinguish the tree, preventing what could have been a large scale inferno. As the hero of the day, the eager grandson was allowed to wear a real fireman’s hat and take pictures with the fire truck. He still asks when the fire fighters and fire truck are coming back to our beloved hiking park.
We hope you will enjoy the park as much as we do. Please stay on the trails – and take the time to enjoy the other caches in Forest Park Nature Center (Early Bird, Park 2 Park Revisited, Hung Up, Can you Reach This?, Multi-Fuzzy-Ness, Fuzzy B. hits 50G -- His second home, Forest Park Cache, and IL River Byway Forest Park). A trail map can be found here: (http://www.peoriaparks-planning.org/maps/ForestPark.pdf) though they are also available both inside and outside the Nature Center at the trail head. If you have an Open Street Map (OSM) setting on your handheld device, you will also see the trails on that map.
Special thanks to Forest Park Nature Center staff and Peoria Park District for permission to place this cache. 
