Category Archives: Geocaching

The (Hot) People of Geocaching

I have a geocache hid near downtown called “Boys Night Out – Downtown” last September I put a recyclable camera in it and asked finders to take a picture of themselves and put it back in the cache and let me know when it is full. So I got the word finally that it was full, so I  retrieved it and got the camera developed. So here are the highlights. 

PICT0083

As you can see geoachers are very attractive, look at this group above. So who says geocachers are nerds?

PICT0081

Geocachers are fun also. These guys look they are headed out on a beer run.

PICT0077

The girls smile better than the guys is what I say.

PICT0069

Well some guys smile pretty well.

PICT0068

As you can see finding geocaches is fun.

PICT0067

Are you still doubting me, geocachers are hot is what I say.

PICT0066

My advice to the lovelorn is to forget hanging around Sunday School Singles groups and museums and such. Go get yourself a GPS receiver and go walking around the woods. Who knows who might run into?

PICT0065

This couple met at the cache, maybe. They seem to be getting along great. This could be you.

Turkey Mountain in the Rain – Our World

DSCN1588

Saturday I went to Tulsa’s popular Turkey Mountain park and did a little hiking. It is never very crowded once you get a quarter mile from the parking lot but what few people there were seemed to vanish when it started raining. The temperature was in the sixties and I didn’t care about getting wet. I did care about lightning so I took the above shot and got away from those powerlines.

DSCN1590

The park has a surprising number of ponds (for some reason ponds are lakes on the mountain). Last summer they dried up. It is nice to see water in them.

DSCN1597

I spent about two hours and found three of the seven new geocaches in the park and then left. Two hours well spent in my book.

Our World Tuesday

Our World – Cold, Wet, Rainy and Skunked – More Geocaching at Tulsa’s Mohawk Park

Untitled
(Selfie at the end of my geocaching jaunt)

Saturday it was about 36F and rainy. I had some time after dropping the kid off at his Improv class so I went back to Mohawk Park to do some more geocaching. The forecast was cold and rainy but I thought they were just kidding about the wet part. They weren’t kidding. The joke was on me but I didn’t mind. I got to for a long walk in the woods and that was the whole point. I was warm enough even though I was wearing too much cotton. I have all sorts of high tech clothing to keep me dry and warm in the rain. I don’t wear any of it when going into the woods. The thorns tear that expensive stuff right up. Let them tear up old cheap cotton is what I say.

IMG_8703

I met Pepe LePew. He didn’t stop to chat and that was okay with me. He looked injured to me. You don’t generally see these critters moving out in open country in the middle of the day.

IMG_8706

A creek was up. I love the sight of rain drops hitting water. Reminds me of when I was just a little kid in central Utah fishing for trout in the rivers and streams. It seemed like the trout were easier to catch under such conditions. Plus the rain seems to amplify the solitude and dampen out outside noise there was. I’m all about the solitude when I’m in the woods.

IMG_8704

I found  the cache I was looking for. The one at the farthest reach of the park. I’m wanting to find caches like these before the weather warms up too much bringing with it ticks, chiggers, poison ivy, and snakes. Late Fall and Winter is really the golden time for woods geocaching. The reduced leaf cover makes for better Global Positioning System Receiver (“GPSR”) readings necessary to find the caches.

If the weather had been better I had enough time to find a few more caches but I was getting cold and I’ll be back another day. There are over two million geocaches in the world. I don’t have to find them all. That reminds of a joke but since I’m really trying to keep this humble blog G rated I’ll pass on telling it for now. Just take it from me, it is a good joke.

Geocaching 101

Our World Tuesday

Our World – Geocaching at Tulsa’s Mohawk Park

DSCN1501
(Only geocachers were out in the park on Saturday. And other people who have no sense.)

With all that we have had going on this winter plus the cold miserable weather I haven’t been geocaching in months. Today after dropping Logan off at his improv comedy class I had a couple hours to myself so I went to Mohawk Park to find a few caches.

DSCN1505
(Old lighted parking lot fallen into disuse. I don’t know why people would park there, especially at night.)

You see I like to find the bigger caches out in the woods. I like the sense of aloneness and it gives me a chance to get my head back on straight. My hair may be all messed up but I like my head on straight.

DSCN1517
(Believe it or not I followed a faint trail through the woods.)

Mohawk Park is immense. At 2800 acres it is one of the biggest city parks in the country. Some of it is pretty developed. The Tulsa Zoo is there along with picnic grounds and playgrounds along with a police shooting range. There is plenty of woods left to hide geocaches.

DSCN1516
(For some reason coming upon these little buildings creeps me out.)

In my travels I found a long forgotten barn out in the middle of nowhere.

DSCN1512

It wasn’t too forgotten. Somebody was storing hay there. For what, I don’t know. There were no livestock nearby.)

DSCN1514
(Are you kidding me? It is not even that good. Maybe they were practicing, or they were ashamed of themselves.)
And some taggers had found it.

DSCN1509
(Something else that creeps me out, getting followed at long distance.)

A guy was walking his dog along an abandoned road.

DSCN1503
(Thank you to my fellow taxpayers for spending billions of dollars putting the GPS satellites in space so I can find trinkets in the woods! I salute you.)

I found four caches while I was out there. My fancy schmancy fitbit tells me that I walked about 6000 steps doing that or about three miles. That includes the walking around in circles muttering to myself while looking for these things.

DSCN1506
(I bet you were completely fooled)

This is what geocachers call “parallel stick camo.”

DSCN1508

Somebody else found this structure. What it is doing out here besides being a cache hiding spot? I have no idea.

DSCN1520

I saw this cache from across a creek. It has been out here eleven years. It takes a lot of work to keep a cache going that long. People accidentally find them and take them or vandalize them. Water gets inside them and spoils the paper log.

Time was up and I headed back into town to pick up the kid.

Have you ever been geocaching? Or do you have a life?

Geocaching 101

What is Geocaching

Our World Tuesday

Enhanced by Zemanta

New Years Eve Geocaching – Finding Tom’s Turkey Mountain Homestead – Finally!!

#turkeymountain #moonshinershack #geocaching didn't find it #tulsa #oklahoma #igersok

There is a geocache named Tom’s Turkey Mountain Homestead located at an old Moonshiner’s Camp on Turkey Mountain. I have been looking for this cache a long time. The owner of the cache, kimbotjr, finally took mercy on me, or got tired my whining, and gave me a clue. I didn’t know when I was going to be able to get back up there because our weekends are pretty full and it is dark after work. Luckily though we got let our early at work on New Year’s Eve. So off I went in my work clothes.

Untitled

I did change my shoes though. But otherwise I was the sharpest guy on the mountain on New Year’s Eve. Especially the hat.

DSCN1231

The shadows were getting long so I didn’t have time to waste to use my precious clue.

DSCN1229

Every time I’m up there I see things that I can’t explain. Don’t ask me what is going on here cuz I don’t know.

DSCN1227

I had the clue but providence provided me with another aid to find the cache. Meet my new friend Soshie. Believe me or not but Soshie is no regular basset hound, he is a gold sniffing dog. That’s right, he can sniff out gold. Plus he likes me. So what the heck I took him along. I don’t know if that is cheating or not. My friend Trail Zombie used a metal detector to find this very same cache. If that is legal then using a gold sniffing dog is legal also. And probably not any help if there is no gold in the cache. Plus the cache is supposed to be a microcache, so it is pretty small.

Well guess what, we got there at the cache site and Soshie found the cache. Yes, he did and it was not a micro. Look at what we found.

Walking in #downtowntulsa #tunnels today I found where all the money is kept #bank #vault

The cache was as big as a bank vault! And loaded with gold. The site was not a moonshiner’s cabin. It was a gold mine. I found the lost treasure of Turkey Mountain! I don’t know how I missed it! Now, the cache is a mystery cache and posting pics of the cache is a nono but I hope that kimbotjr is understanding. If he is not he can delete my find. A find is worth a lot more than gold to a geocacher.

Our World – Geocaching on Turkey Mountain

I have geocache named Rock City  hidden deep on Turkey Mountain. The last person who looked for it reported that they couldn’t find it although they looked twice.  I knew that somebody had probably “muggled” it. Geocacher lingo for stealing or vandalizing a cache.

DSCN1204

So I made me another cache out of a Bismati rice jar and some camo duct tape.

DSCN1208

Son and I packed it up and headed up to Turkey Mountain. You can see the finished cache container sitting on the sign to the left.

DSCN1209

A mountain unicycler came on by. Ultra cool. I have seen unicyclers on the mountain before but they had poles. This guy just had pure balance.

DSCN1211

We passed this thing. I told Logan that it is the skeleton of a the TurkeyMountasaurous dinosaur. He quit believing in his Dad’s stories a long time ago. Shows you how smart he is. Compared to me at least.

DSCN1215

This is Rock City. It is quite the meeting place. Stay here long enough you will see runners, hikers, bicyclists, geoachers, and micro car enthusiasts all converge here. One of whom stole my cache. I hope they quit. Anyway I replaced it. Here is the story of when we planted the cache two years ago. I put recyclable cameras in the caches I plant nowadays and ask finders to take pictures of themselves. Here are some pictures of people who have found the cache.

#turkeymountain #moonshinershack #geocaching didn't find it #tulsa #oklahoma #igersok

Then for grins and giggles we went over to another cache to Tom’s Turkey Mountain Homestead to look for it, again. I have been here at least a half dozen times the last year looking for it. I spent about a half hour rooting around looking for it. It is a micro so it is very small. I didn’t find it this time either.

DSCN1216

As we left I noticed that a nearby tree was laughing at me. I don’t blame him. Next time I might bring my axe and see how he laughs then. (Just kidding folks!)

DSCN1219

On the way out we passed Pepsi lake. Oddly enough it has a bunch of old Pepsi truck bodies sitting on the dam. I have no idea why. It is also the site of another evil little microcache, What are These Doing Here. I found it finally last year kind of by accident.

We finished our little adventure tired and a little muddy but we had a great walk in the woods.

When was the last time you had a nice walk in the woods?

Our World Tuesday

Scavenger Hunt Sunday – Where I Stand Edition

Where I Stood

IMG_3882

Hey everybody meet Seven. He is the horse my son rides at his Thereapeutic Horseback Riding lesson every Saturday morning. Seven was donated to the center by a ranch here in Oklahoma. He is a trained cow horse but he has a trot that will “scramble your brains” which is not good for cowboys in the saddle all day. 

Silver

IMG_6670

 I captured this at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City during our Fall break trip in October. Notice I got myself along with Heather and Logan to the left.

 Tiny

Teeny-tiny #geocache like a needle in a haystack #tulsa #oklahoma #geocaching

I’m a geocacher, an internet based game (check out geocaching.com) where people hide containers or “caches” out and about in the world and then other people go find them using handheld GPS receivers (“GPSr”). The biggest cache I found was a footlocker in the eleavator penthouse of a New Orleans high rise office building (the owner of the building is a geocacher. He has a security guard take you up to the penthouse so you can go find it). This pictured is the smallest I’ve ever found. Talk about a needle in a haystack especially consider that the accuracy of a GPSr is only about 12 feet under ideal conditions. So if the hider’s GPSr is off by 12 feet and the finder’s is off by the same amount then you have a radius of 24 feet to check. Fun, fun, fun. I have found about 1300 of them over the years and hidden 27.

 In the Cupboard

Prepared Pantry

Well instead of Cupboard, how about Pantry. Above is my wife Heather at my cousin’s store in Rigby, Idaho. It is  The Prepared Pantry. They have all sorts of baking mixes that are great. They often have free cooking demonstrations on Saturday where they give out generous samples of the food.

 Shadow

IMG_6866

I found this shadow at Powell Gardens near Kansas City Missouri back in October. 

Scavenger Hunt Sunday

Enhanced by Zemanta

Water Tank Wednesday – Glasnost Edition

Bixby Water Tanks edited

A few weeks ago I dropped off the kid at a friend’s house so they could play video games while I went geocaching at Lake Bixhoma. Near the lake are these water tanks for the city of Bixby. 

Near the water tanks is the Oklahoma Geophysical Laboratory. Way back when in the early 1990’s, when George H. Bush was President he and Michael Gorbachev agreed to let the Russians build a nuclear monitoring station there so the Russians could keep tabs on the USA anytime we wanted to test a “device” bigger than 50 kilotons. Their monitoring station was deeded over to them and was considered Russian Territory just like an embassy (can you imagine that howling that would result if our current President agreed to anything of the sort.)

Several years later the technology needed advanced to the point where the Russians didn’t need the site any more and they deeded it back to the US.

Here is a brief newspaper article on the matter. This is an essay written by a woman whose father was involved in the project. And this is a brief history of the Oklahoma Geophysical Laboratory that talks about the Russian monitoring  site and also some interesting information about how the facility is still involved in monitoring the world for nuclear tests.

Unfortunately, the lab and the old Russian site are well off the public roads and gated from inquiring bloggers. I would really like to go check things out there and take a few pictures. Apparently the road by the Russian site was renamed “Glasnost Road” and the road sign is still up.

Water Tower Wednesday is a feature my blog friend Fashionista. Check out her blog Out and About in New York City. The water towers in New York City don’t have near as much rust as the ones above do.

Oh, and yes I looked for four caches and found all of them. 

Our World Tuesday – Travel Bugs

(Eastcountymagazine.org)

Those that follow me at all know that I’m a geocacher. (Geocaching 101 here). Geocaching is where some people hide caches out and about and post the coordinates on geocaching dot come and other people download those coordinates and go find the caches. There are over two million geocaches in the world now. An affiliated activity of geocaching is travel bugs. Travel bugs are tagged items, with individual tracking codes, that travel from geocache to geocache or person to person. Every time they are moved the person who does the moving logs the movement on geocaching dot com. Plus other people log a “Discover” a travelbug without actually taking it. On November 6, an American Astronaut, Rick Mastraccio, took a travel bug to the International Spache Station. (There has been a geocache on the International Space Station since 2008.) 

Some travelbugs are actually coins similar to the one above. The tags and coins are called “trackables” and lots of geocachers paricipate. I don’t too much. I’ve lost too many of other people’s trackables and some people keep the trackables without sending them on. I’ve had one geocoin do pretty well though. I launched a geocoin that I named “Memories of Other Places” in August 2005 here in Tulsa.

It knocked around Oklahoma and Texas for a time and then went to Washington State and the West Coast.

And then somebody took it to Germany where it spent years with one side trip to Greece and France. It is now in the Netherlands. I’d love for it to come back to the States some time but Europeans are taking very good care of it.

All told it has travelled 16,639.7 miles and has been moved between caches or between people, or “discovered” 367 times. I think that is pretty remarkable. Many trackables disappear long before then.

I have been wanting to launch another travel bug but have been discouraged because of the high disppearance rate but I saw a product on Amazon that I just had have. It is a large travel bug tag that is magnetized so that it can be attached to a large metallic object.

Travel Bug

So I bought one and attached it to my car, a Kia Soul. I named the travel bug “All is Well With My Soul” after my second favorite Baptist Hymn. (My most favorite is Softly and Tenderly by the way.) I was pretty excited about this. Heather is a lot more reserved in her excitement. On facebook where I first announced my new travel bug she wrote, “Eyes rolling and sighing……”   I know that she will come around. At least I hope that she does before she finds out that I am preparing to turn her car into a trackable also. If she doesn’t come around I might have to ask if any of my fellow bloggers out there have an extra couch that I could borrow for a a brief time.

So Saturday I went geocaching in midtown Tulsa and at an isolated lake southeast of Tulsa. I found six total. I am not looking for any geocachers to steal my car to log the cache I’m hoping that a few geocachers spot the tag on my car and log it as a discover. We’ll just have to see what happens. So far I’ve only logged 20.5 miles on my new trackable.

What is the point of turning my car into a trackable? I don’t know its that I like connections. Who knows who’ll log it and where they are from and what they are doing. 

Our World Tuesday

Enhanced by Zemanta

Water Tower Wednesday – The Granite Water Tower of Dell Rapids

DSCN0838

I found this beauty back in August during a trip to South Dakota for a family reunion. The old water tower was built in 1894 out of Sioux quartzite, a locally quarried stone. The forty five foot tower was operational until 1960 until replaced by a new tower. The old tower is now on the National Register of Historic Places. It looked pretty sturdy and well maintained to me for a 119 year old water tower. I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t last another 119 years. The water tank was placed at the top of the tower. There is more information here.

As a bonus, the water tower has its own geocache, “Dell Rapids Historic Series: Wasser Werks.”
The people in the photograph above from left to right are my Sister Ellen, my Uncle Glenn, who was on his very first geocaching hunt, and the world’s greatest BIL Irv. And yes, we found the cache. Or rather Irv found it.

Thanks to Daryl of Out and About in New York City about getting me interested in Water Towers. She has a regular feature called Water Tower Wednesday that I borrow every now and then.