At work I get every other Friday off. Usually Sweetie and I drop SuperPizzaBoy off at school and then go have breakfast and run and play. Yesterday Sweetie had a board retreat all morning. So I decided to go to Lake Bixhoma near Bixby, OK and do some geocaching.

Lake Bixhoma is one of the Tulsa area’s best kept secrets. I hardly ever see anybody else there. Friday morning I had it all to myself.

First though I took a little hike along this cliff. According to the geologists it is the remnant of a 300 million year old reef. In other words it is almost as old as I am. It has alternating layers of shale and sandstone. I like to look for fossils sometimes I find a brachiopod but not today. You don’t need a permit to look for them.

I took a few pictures of what may be fossils. I don’t know. I don’t hold myself out as knowing anything about them.

Poison Ivy anyone?

The first two caches were pretty easy. Both of them were by a road.

The third was a little less than a half mile from the end of the road close to the shore line. I thought, dumb me for thinking, surely that is a fisherman’s path alongside the lake. Surely.

Nope, it was bushwhacking all the way.

I found some funky trees.

And some funky stuff growing on the rocks.

And finally found the cache.

At this point I looked at the cache description and it said that there was a trail to the cache location. Hmm, I don’t see any trail. So being the real smart outdoorsman that I am I thought I would go straight up the hill from where I was and intercept the trail. So off I went.

Does this look like a trail to you? I didn’t find any &(^&&(*& trail. (Excuse the language.) At least up above the lake there were less rocks and thorns. (Actually I didn’t mind walking up there a bit, with or without a trail, I was like a pig in you know what.)

I got a nice view of the lake from up there.

And finally found my truck.

I found three caches total yesterday for a total of seven in the park that I’ve found over the years.

Anyways, I had some time before Sweetie and I were hooking up so I headed off to Washington Irving park to find a couple more.

I invited Mr. Irving along but he declined. You know he never goes anywhere anymore.

One of them I found reminded me a Christmas ornament.

And so that was that!