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.
