It was Wednesday night and I took advantage of my weekly kitchen pass to go to Turkey Mountain to run a few miles. It has been a few weeks since I had been there and I was missing it. Check out this anchor, if you need tourism related information.
I took off on the well known trails. There were less people than usual on the mountain even though the weather was very mild.
Turkey Mountain has several marked trails, some with nice neat official looking markers. This marker is on the blue trail. People that go to Turkey Mountain a lot know that the official marked trails are just a framework. There are a multitude of unmarked trails. The unmarked trails are what makes the mountain fun. I think I have been on almost all of them. Or so I thought.
The pink trail is a semiofficial trail on the west side of the mountain. It is probably the least traveled and known of the trails but also the longest and most complex.
I like to go “off the reservation” to the seldom used trail on the other side of Elwood. I hardly ever see people there. I have seen a lot of deer there in the last year or so. I used to see lots of deer on main part of the mountain but as the park has gotten busier the deer have got scarcer.
The trail is a single loop and it is very difficult to get lost.
But on Wednesday night, I noticed a new trail with a new marker. Zoi? What is that. What does it mean. Anyway I took off down that trail. It was brand new. I had heard reference on facebook to somebody running several miles of brand new trail on Turkey Mountain and I wondered where it was. Well, I think I found it. The only thing was that it went on and on.
And it was marked with pink ribbons. It was quite long and I got to wondering what the deal was. Does it loop back on itself or does it fizzle out or just what. I ran into some bikers that were dismounted and were clearing what they called a “cutoff” to bypass a real bad section just ahead. I bid them adieu and headed off to find the “bad section.” I kind of like bad sections.
I got passed by a bunch of bikers going pretty fast.
Later on I found the bad section and discovered that the fricking frackers had been there ahead of me. I’m actually a fan of fricking frackers, they put food on the table in my house. Seriously though this well looked like it still had tubing in it and a sucker rod string. What’s up with that? The tubing looks open to atmosphere and so there is probably no harm done, probably.
I finally found my way back to the connection to the existing trails. I was pretty happy. Not too many days when you can find new trails in an area where I thought I knew it all.
It is no fun being a know it all is what I say. What about you? What do you say
