International border between the United States and Canada
It was about a 20 minute drive from the border to Waterton NP. It had been a 2 1/2 hour drive to the park, so the first thing we did was find a place to eat lunch. There is the small town of Waterton that is within the park. There was a Subway shop :)
Waterton Lake
Historic Prince of Wales Hotel on Waterton Lake.
One of the caches we were planning to do was based on the history of the area. We proceeded to the necessary coordinates and wrote down the required information. We then drove to the second coordinates where the staff of the history center let you sign the log book and you received your prize. It was a book, written by the cache's owner, about the trail an early explorer took through the area. We have not had a chance to read it, but it has some nice pictures! Y spotted a picture of some waterfalls in the history center and asked the clerk about them. She said they were just down the street. We drove down and took a few pictures.
The other caches we wanted to find were outside the park. After seeing what we wanted in the park, we drove over to the next cache. You had to drive toward the back of an RV campground to locate the cache. It took us a few minutes to find the cache. It required us to trapse through some underbrush, which seemed odd, since It had been placed by the local nature conservation center. Upon returning to the Jeep, I unlocked the glove box, to put some stuff in it...our passports were gone! What! How could they be? We put them in there at the border and locked it. I pulled out the glove box unit, easy to do in a Jeep. Whew!, they had fallen behind the glove box. We also found something else we thought we had lost. We will know better next time.
Onto the final cache of the day. We drove over to the coordinates...another campground, huh? We parked the Jeep, and walked around the rear of the campground. We walked down a trail and Y spotted it. With all the underbrush, I had walked right over it. We logged it and took a picture. On the way out, the campground owner was mowing the grass. He stopped the mower and asked us if we had found it. He explained he did not know who set it, but it was OK for now, since he wasn't using that area at this time. We chatted about the weather, then he wished us "safe travels". We climbed in the Jeep and headed for the border.
The border crossing took a little longer. The U.S. Customs & Border Patrol ask a few more questions and there were more cars in line. On the return trip, we stopped for a "pit stop" at a convenience store in St. Mary. As we were getting out of the Jeep, a guy said be careful, because a bear had been spotted around the buildings. There were a number of people wandering around looking for the bear. We did what we needed to do and left! It was a great day and we were able to log our first "international cache"!
