Recently, I went into such woods here in Tulsa in search of geocache. I parked at a lumber store and found a trail along a flood control creek. I knew that I would have to walk about a quarter mile up the paved trail before I had to get off of it.
When I get close and my GPS tells me that I got to start looking to go “off trail” I start looking for a little “crease” in the woods. For what park administrators call a “social trail” which they hate. People are supposed to stay on the designated trails. Here in Tulsa on the Riverparks, you have to get a permit to hide a geocache and you agree if your cache results in a “social trail” you are in trouble. Oh, sorry, I’m off topic, this evening I found my crease in the woods:
I know, its kind of hard to see, its easier to see from the other side once you go through it.
You have to keep in mind, that when people hide geocaches they rarely just blindly blunder through the woods. Almost all caches are hidden with 25 feet of a trail. They key is finding the trail. They are often social trails.
Once I got through the crease its a matter of following the trail.
I know that it is hard to see but there is definitely a trail there.
And about 20 feet off the trail I found the cache. Actually I stubbed my toe on it so I heard it before I saw it.
Nearby was an old homeless person’s camp.
I’ve blundered into lots of homeless people’s camps over the years while pursuing my geocaching hobby. Many have been abandoned like this one, others you could tell are current, and more than once I have found them complete with the resident(s).
Sometimes they will have a tent but it seems lots of them sleep in the open. Lots of plastic gallon water jugs. I don’t see too many fire rings. I think fires attract too much attention. All in all, it looks to me like a miserable way to live.
Geocachers and homeless people have a lot in common. We both spend lots of time walking around looking at what is going on. Cachers are looking for places to hide caches. Homeless folks look for places to hide themselves and their belongings. In urban areas both groups gravitate to the “squalor zones” away from the nice, neat, and tidy buildings. Those usually have security cameras and guards.
There are homeless people all over Tulsa but I think the biggest concentration for various reasons is in the downtown area. I mean you have the Day Center for the Homeless, the Salvation Army Shelter and a bunch of other organizations that specialize in serving the homeless. (Sometimes, forgive me, I think some regard the homeless as a commodity, but that is another subject.)
Here is a geocaching.com map of downtown Tulsa.
This map is from my own account. So the smiley faces are caches hidden by others that I have found. The stars are caches that I have hidden myself. You can see that I have several downtown. Now what you don’t see are caches that I’ve had to abandon downtown because they are repeatedly vandalized. Also if you look at the star at the bottom of the photo you will see that it has a grey background instead of white. That is because I have temporarily suspended it. In fact I am going to delete it. Why? Because it is a nice little secluded area that I found that was perfect for a cache but has now been taken over that a homeless person as living quarters.
What the photo doesn’t show is that I have hidden over twice as many other caches downtown that I have had to abandon, almost all due to homeless people.
Nobody is more observant than homeless people. They live hand to mouth and they live in nature and they see everything. I have found all sorts of nooks and crannies downtown in my wanderings looking for spots to hide tuppwerware and I have found places big enough to hide a small car in but they are all previously occupied. I have found people sleeping soundly in a safe little nook maybe 25 feet from the busiest intersection downtown.
So do you run into homeless people regularly? Do they scare you? What do you think of them?
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Really interesting post for the day! Always fun to read about your passion for geocaching, but your observations of the homeless are so true for our current stage. Seattle is overrun with homeless as is Portland and I find it a sad sign of our times. I do think a lot of them simply don’t want to work, don’t fit in with “regular” people — whatever that means???? But, of course, there are the ones who simply cannot find work of any kind that they’re qualified for and are forced to live as they do. It’s sad and I surely don’t know what the answers are, but I suspect instead of getting better, we’re likely to see it get worse. And now, with that cheerful statement, I’ll wish you a great weekend of successful geocaching and lots of fun with SPB and Sweetie!
Sylvia
Well, hmmmm. Yes, I’ve had many encounters with homeless people. My thoughts would be to long to post in the comments section, so I’ll be as brief as possible. I encountered them every single Sunday when I used to attend church at Trinity (Iron Gate is in the basement of the church). They never ever bothered me there and I wasn’t scared of them. We have a regular homeless guy who walks down our street a couple times a day. I think he’s got some mental illness issues and I don’t find him frightening at all. Actually, sometimes I wish I could help him. But then there were the random homeless people that I ran into when I worked at St. John. They were the ones who made me a little nervous and I felt were bilking the system. They were more aggressive and hung out in stairwells or other secluded places. And of course the ‘regulars’ in the ER. But like you said, that’s for another post.
So…have a great weekend, go find some caches!!
Great post!
Thought-provoking post. I live in the suburbs of Leeds so see little or nothing of homeless people. All we do have is a tramp who seems to appear every spring and disappears in the autumn. He’s an alcoholic, appears to have money for his cans of beer but keeps himself to himself and is certainly not a nuisance or, at least, not that I have seen.
It’s a sad state of affairs but part of life I suppose.
The homeless have definitely found a home in the greenbelts and recreation path areas of Denver. They sometimes congregate in large groups. As a woman running or biking alone sometimes, I’m wary of the “group mentality”. I try not to take chances if I see a crowd of them on the bike path. I divert.
I used to see this one homeless man who pushed a shopping cart everywhere. He mainly was around the mid-town area. Never bothered anyone except the poor man smelled to high heaven. Years ago when I would stop in at this one little dinner he was always there. The man had mental problems (he had long conversations with himself). Most always I or someone else bought him breakfast. I have never had a problem with the homeless people around Tulsa. Just heartbreaking to see them like that though.