On a recent trip to South Dakota I took the time to find geocaches in four new states, South Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the above in Iowa on dirt road miles from nowhere. I guess you can already tell that my wife was not with me on this adventure.
Camouflaged
Camo is an easy category for me cuz I’m an avid geocacher. My fellow geocachers are fiendisly clever. Fiendishly, maybe “Fiends” needs to be a Scavenger item, Whattyathink Ashley? Huh? Uh, sorry, I’m off task, time to either take my meds or get back on track. What do you see, Fungus? Maybe?
Nope, it is a geocache. See what I mean about fiendish. This is is downright evil.
Nutty
Nutty I’ll tell you wht is nutty are the bikers who ride the “FroFlo” trail on Turkey Mountain here in Tulsa. You can’t tell very well from the photograph but you ride your bike up a ramp and then along a tree trunk for some distance. I couldn’t even walk it but the “FroFlo” bikers do it with ease. If that aint nutty, nuttin is!
Alike
Some people think that water is all alike. Boy are they wrong. The bottle shape actually changes the molecular configuration of water. A cooler bottle makes cooler water. I bet you didn’t know that did you? Wake up Sheeple!
Identical
Son and I have many similarities. Cheerleaders like to hang around him.
And they hang around me too!!!! Son and I are both chick magnets. These ladies are actually fellow geocachers. They have given up on the Dallas Cowboys. Speaking of the Cowboys they have a little crisis going on. Did you hear? Their 1990’s highlight tape is broken. What are they going to do? Their tape is broken and their cheerleaders are deep in the woods looking for tupperware. Its not like they have anything to cheer about for the last fifteen years do they? Sis Boom Bah!!
Jaunt
I also like to do trail runs. They are great way to run outdoors and everybody is friendly. You get to run, walk, and climb all you want. The rest stops have major food like hamburgers and baked potatoes. It is quite the scene, if a little exhausting. Unless you run it the way I do. I don’t get get exhausted. You want to know my secret? The secret is to start off slow and then taper off. Works my friend, you’ll get last place every time. Or at least you and me will be fighting for last. That’s part of my competitive spirit.
These two guys manned a beer stop on my last race. I come cruising up and they said “Wanna Beer?” and I replied, “You got any other stupid questions, or is that it.” Or something to that effect. As a blogger I have the right to change the dialog over time. It’s in the bill of rights. Don’t like it, don’t talk to me, talk to Al Gore. He’s the one who invented the internet, not me. I’m just exercising my Constitutional Rights.
Well that’s it for this week’s entry. Check out Scavenger Hunt Sunday by Ashley Sisk.
Wednesday evening after work I headed to Turkey Mountain. Much has been happening lately and I can always get my head on straight up on the Mountain.
It has been raining lately so the trails are not as dusty as they were last summer.
There are even some sizeable puddles alongside some of the trails.
I’ve been experimenting with puddle reflections lately. You can really do that during a drouth. The above is one of my favorites so far.
The Westside YMCA runs a day camp on the north side of the mountain. They had spruced up their trail signs. I could hear some loud drumming and yelling going on. I was curious about what was going on but I stayed away.
I did stop and take a pic of their fishing pond though. Nice to see them starting to fill up again.
A previous employer of mine has a pipeline that runs across the mountain. I’m big into connectivity and I’m very familiar with this pipeline and the network it connects to. If I bang it with a hammer (I’d never do that of course it would damage the coating) I can just imagine the sound traveling from here to almost every state in the lower 48 and Canada and also Mexico. I have maps so that I can show you just how that would work. Of course, you would have to put your ears to the pipe and listen very attentively to hear me hammering.
My new trailrunning friend. We ran together for a little bit but I was too slow for him so he waved and was off.
Sunday afternoon was a very pretty and very nice day so SuperPizzaBoy and I took off to Turkey Mountain here in Tulsa to do some maintenance on our geocache “Rock City” that I posted about originally in September 2011.
The trails were glorious. The sun was shining and the trees are just beginning to leaf out. There is nothing like the new green of Spring.
When we got the Rock City area of Turkey Mountain where the cache was we find a group of guys maneuvering their radio controlled vehicles around on the boulders. They were very nice and showed us what they were doing. Turns out they are here a lot and had found the cache months ago. They signed the log and otherwise left it alone. It always amazes me the variety of recreation that people find to do on Turkey Mountain. Geocaching, trail running, hiking, biking, riding horses and now radio controlled vehicles.
The cache was in good shape. Somebody reported that the recyclable camera I had planted there was full so I replaced it and had it processed. That was actually the second camera. Somebody took the first camera. So here are the photos of the people who have found the cache and took photos of themselves or others.
As you can see geocachers come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, ages, and gender.
Dogs and even a ferret.
They come in warm weather and cold weather.
They just love finding things way deep in the woods.
The Radio Control Guys told me that they used the last exposure to take a pic of their machines.
Have you ever hid a camera out in the woods?
If you are in the energy biz you probably spend a lot of time in Houston. I know that I do. It is only a 75 minute flight from Tulsa so most of the time I just run down and back for the day.
Last week I spent a rare overnight trip there. I spent the night downtown. It had been years since I’ve done that. I thought I would go geocaching. I found one and then was done. It was cold, I mean freezing.
So I retreated to the tunnels. Downtown Houston has about 6.4 miles of tunnels downtown. I called it quits after a dozen blocks or so. The thing about tunnels. They all look the same. Especially after hours. During the day there is a lot going on and lots of shops and restaurants and such. After work it is all deserted and not very much fun. It is warm though!
I finally found a decent sushi place and had me some very good raw fish and a couple of malted beverages for dinner and then made the long, cold, windy, dark, deserted walk back to my hotel.
The next morning I had a meeting with a customer and then headed back to Tulsa.
I’m linking up again with AshleySisk dot com’s Scavenger Hunt Sunday where she provides five scavenger hunt items to hunt for ever week. It’s tough and challenging and also a lot of fun to see how the various participants interpreted the items. There are lots of creative photographers that participate (and then there is me.)
Without further ado, lets get to work.
1.Outside
I’m happiest outside, headed down a trail. In the woods during Autumn is wonderful but not necessary. The beach, a praire, a city park, downtown, I’m not picky. I love to walk and check things out.
2.Backside
I’m fascinated by alleys, the backsides of building. The front side is where the money is spent and customers come and go. The back is where the electricity and gas connections are, deliveries sent and received, and where the dumpsters are. The alleys are generally a lot more interesting than the front.
3.Little Things
I’m a geocacher. A high tech treasure hunt where “caches” are hidden and the GPS coordinates of the cache are posted on geocaching dot com. The finders download the coordinates and go find them. Usually they are tupperware type containers. Sometimes they are like the cache above which was hidden by the geocaching owner of a high rise in downtown New Orleans. He has the building engineer escort you up to the elevator penthouse for the search. Talk about the mother lode.
The other extreme are these tiny pill containers just a fraction of an inch long. They are extremely hard to find but some of them look like Christmas ornaments.
And some geocaches are hidden deep in the woods inside the homes of elves.
4.A Cup of…
You know I still like it when I order a latte and the barrista takes the time to make a design.
5.Reflect
Son and I went to Natural Falls State Park here in northeast Oklahoma last week. It is a beautiful and serene place with water falls and a nice lake set in a deep canyon. Much of the 1974 film “Where the Red Fern Grows” was filmed in the park.
Scavenger Hunt Sunday
Saturday, SuperPizzaBoy and I took a road trip about 75 miles east of Tulsa into the Ozarks to Natural Falls State Park. It used to be a private park called Dripping Springs and when Oklahoma took it over they renamed it because we already had a Dripping Springs Park.
We pretty much had the park to ourselves because of the cold and windy weather. One of the things we did was log an Earth Cache named “Dripping Springs.” Earth Caches are part of Geocaching except that you don’t look for a container. They are more educational in nature and lots of fun.
The star of the park is of course the waterfall. You can’t tell it from the photographs but the water falls about 77 feet.
Down in the canyon where the water lands it was much warmer. No wind of course but I would guess the temperature seemed at least five degrees higher than up top.
There is something about falling water that is very peaceful. The park was used in the filming of the 1974 version of “Where the Red Fern Grows” based on the book by Wilson Rawls.
There is a bridge across the chasm. Hey, who’s that kid up there?
SuperPizzaBoy, that’s who. I wondered where he got off to.
There is more to the park than the falls. The creek flows from the falls to a small lake.
You can tell this dam has been here for a while. Full disclosure, to keep the falls falling, they pump water from this lake back up to the falls. We have been having a drought here and the falls would probably be a trickle if anything.
Son and I did a big part of all the trails until we called it quits.
I love the goofiness found in some of the State Parks.
We only went about two and a half miles but it was fun.
The trails vary from easy level hikes through the woods to “where did the trail go?”
You can follow our very slow route on Garmin Connect by clicking on the green tag above. It will take you to another screen. Click on the button that looks like your “play” button on your dvd player.
Anyway a great time was had by all.
Saturday, I had several free hours. Anytime I have a few free hours I’m going to running and geocaching and photographing. Most likely I”m going to do that on Turkey Mountain. Tulsa’s urban wilderness area. Its close in and convenient.
So I hit the trail with a bunch of equipment. My running GPS enabled watch, my Geocaching GPSr, a camera, and my smartphone. And a pen. Can’t go geocaching without a pen, and a knife. Right?
An old cistern. I don’t know but I get the impression that Turkey Mountain was a rough and ready oilfield and farming area. There is some oilfield debris still left but very little left of farmsteads and such.
Parts of Turkey Mountain seem very remote. I’ve been all over the mountain and some areas, you just never see anybody.
Lots of mysteries, like what is this? An old outhouse? Who knows.
There are a few old pipelines left. I don’t know if they are live or not. I can tell you, and maybe you should listen. You can’t proceed just on assumptions. Unless you want to bet your life on it.
At the far end of Turkey Mountain from the parking lot you run into the Westside YMCA. Nice place for urban kids to get some nature in them. The Y has a “Ropes Course.” I helped build part of it as part of a United Way Day of Caring event about 20 years ago. Ropes Courses were all the rage back then but you don’t hear that much about them anymore. The theory is that you take a group of coworkers out in the woods and have them work on things together and that leads to better teamwork.
Sorry to water on the parade but let me tell you how guys work. (Women, you have to speak for yourselves.) The way guys work is that you can take a group of guys who hate each other and put them on a team to do something and it’ll be great. They will work together to complete the task. When they are done, they still hate each other. I did ropes years ago, climbed the rope ladder, did the zip line, walked the cable, jumped off the poles, did the trust fall, the whole shebang, helped my team mates over the wall. I’m done. No more. How about some golf instead? Does just as much good!
I finally reached my objective, Pepsi Lake. Don’t snicker at it, we have had a drought and the water levels are way low. I came out here to look for a geocache. named “What are these doing here...” A cache that I’ve looked before and couldn’t find.
The “these” are Pepsi delivery truck bodies arrayed on the dam. Why they are there. I don’t know. There is a Pepsi warehouse closeby. Maybe this is where they send their trucks to die.
Oh, by the way, I did find a cardinal playing hard to get in the shrubs near the trucks.
I also found the cache. Not very many people have found the cache. I’d love to show it to you but the owner of the cache has threatened to delete the logs of anybody who gives a clue. DELETE the LOG, to a geocacher that is worse than any fiscal cliff, or the Affordable Health Care Act, or even the Designated Hitter Rule. So sorry no clues from me.
I will tell you that I climbed in, under, and on top of these before I found it.
I wore my GPS enabled running watch. It ran out of juice while I was searching for the cache. You can see me route to the cache from the parking lot, just hit the white triangle on the green circle. It’ll take you to the web site. Hit the button that looks like your DVD play button and you will see just how slow a runner I am.
This week’s prompts were challenging for me, which makes it fun!
1. Missing
One of my obsessions is geocaching that is a sport where people hide caches out in various locations and post the GPS coordinates on geocaching.com. Others go find the caches and log both a paper log in the cache and the online cache page. Sometimes I end up in creepy places like this long abandoned roadway near Tulsa. I walked down this road about a mile to the cache. This looked like a great place to go missing. Of course, not a soul knew that I was out there. If something happened to me it might a while before somebody found me.
2. Numbers
Good old number 103!
3. Purple
Christmas lights on Oklahoma City’s canal in the Bricktown area.
4. Music
A guitar tower at Seattle’s Experience Music Project. Talk about overwhelming. That was EMP.
5. Bracelet
26,000+ photos on Flickr that I’ve posted and not one bracelet tag so I’m cheating. This was my mother’s turquoise and silver handcrafted necklaces. Mom is gone and Dad gave me her necklace. I remember the day way back when Dad gave it to her. It was a great day for both of them.
Sometimes the spirit moves me to gather up a notebook, trinkets, and a recyclable camera and put them into a container you might use for leftover peas and then go hide the container in the woods for others to find.
The woods I’m thinking about are about a half mile from the house. I’ve been mystified lately because a photographer has been taking clients here in among the knee high weeds and garbage strewn from the McDonald’s across the street.
This is where they have been setting up their cameras and hauling out wing chairs and fancy sofas, tripods, reflectors, and other such things. I am a mere picture taker and not a photographer so what do I know, but I still don’t get it why this is such a great place for wedding photos.
For my cache location I pushed on well past where the photographers click and their subjects pose.
By the time I found a place, hid the cache, checked and double checked the coordinates, the sun was going down and the moon was going up.
Not bad for hand held moon shot, for a picture taker like me that is. A photographer would hide their head in shame.
This is your only clue. Go check out Strike a Pose! if you want to find it.
I would like to thank my fellow Americans, both Democrats and Republicans as well as the few independents out there for being so supportive of spending unrestricted billions of dollars for high tech satellites in space so that I can go hide tupperware in the woods. I salute you all!
If you were trying to find this cache first (FTF – first to find) you are too late. RobPillageBurn (What a name!) found it within hours of the cache going live. In the dark. He ran into some thorns that I forgot to mention.
Geocaching.com