Last Wednesday evening after work I headed over to Turkey Mountain here in Tulsa to go running and find a geocache.

It is hot here in Tulsa and when it is hot I like to go running in the woods rather than the concrete and asphalt. It also just so happens that there are lots of geocaches on Turkey Mountain, good ones, hard to find ones.

The map to the left shows the caches on Turkey Mountin. The happy faces are the caches that I’ve found. The stars out caches that I have hidden. The little green boxes and the question mark are the ones left to find.

Wednesday night I went looking for the xSTINKt Cache. I had looked for it before without any luck. It is hidden by a very clever geocacher who goes by the tag adairmd.

I took along my geocaching GPS receiver and my running GPSr and my Ipod touch. It has a camera and I am using it a lot these days. Lots smaller and easier to carry than a regular camera.

A good omen about six minutes into the run. A deer! I’ve seen lots of deer on Turkey Mountain but they don’t generally stick around long enough for me to fumble around with my camera. It is right in the middle of the photograph above just to the right of the slender tree in the middle. Makes me think I need to carry a better camera! One with a zoom.

Turkey Mountain has lots of ponds from one end to the other.

I popped out onto the powerline right of way for a little bit just as another runner went running by.

That evil adairmd, owner of the cache, has promised to delete all logs of the cache that show spoilers. Sorry adairmd, it is my journalistic duty as a blogger to leave nothing out. Above is a look of the sky from the cache location. Below is a pic of my GPSr.

The dead giveaway is the leaf below. Study it carefully, when you see a leaf exactly like that then you are within three feet of the cache. In all serious, I’m not giving any hints, except for the leaf. This is a unique cache and he wants you to find out what is unique about it for yourself. The cache was placed in April and I was only the fourth one to find it. It’s almost a two mile walk from the parking lot to the cache site. Most people are not going to go that far especially if they are not familiar with the trails on the mountain.

It started to get dark on the way back. I’ve never run in the dark on Turkey Mountain but I have run in the twilight. I love it.

It’s still hot on the mountain but you are out of the direct sun and off the reradiating hard surfaces of the city. Also, there are not very many people up on the mountain. It’s pretty quiet except for the mountain bikers getting a little rambunctious.

The sun gets really low and really colorful.

It’s a great place to gett your head on straight.

I uploaded my run to Garmin’s website. You can see my route and a whole bunch of metrics on the run by hitting the green button below. You’ll go to the website. And then hit the little triangular “play” button like you playing a cd player. You’ll be amazed by how slow I run and how long it took me to find the cache.

Hey, you can do better? Get after it!

And by the way, adairmd is a nice guy

Geocaching 101