Adler's Midwest Meandering Spring 2021

 It's another windy day here in Oklahoma, but the high temperature was 84.  We are to have a cool down tonight.  It didn't seem that warm with the wind. We are to get some showers overnight but they need it. 

This sign greeted us as we entered the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.  It is 59,020 acres in size, and it was dedicated on July 4, 1901 and became the WMWR on June 4, 1936.  It is on the National Register of Historic Places.  It is common to see Texas Longhorn cattle, bison, elk, deer and turkeys. Don't expect the Rocky Mountains here, but they are soft rolling mountains instead.  

Three geo-caches took us up the paved road to the top of Mount Scott.  The elevation is 2,433 feet.  It's quite a view from the top, and windy!  All the geo-caches that we are finding in the refuge are either earthcaches or virtual caches, meaning there is nothing tangible planted there but the coordinates take you an interesting or scenic place.  That it did!  

We saw several herds of the Texas Longhorn cattle.  I decided a nice close up was better than just seeing dots out in the prairie!  The Texas Longhorn are wild, and should be treated as such. 

We did a hike to a geo-cache, and I saw this small tree starting to leaf out.  I wanted to add a little flora and fauna to the blog.  We are seeing the Redbud trees in the refuge, also.  The trails aren't very well marked and we ended up doing more miles again today than we had planned.  We should have stayed with our first thought, as that was the correct one.  

This is the geo-cache that our hike took us to.  From what we read on the cache page for description, we thought we were going to see an old piece of machinery, but this is it!  More rocks!

We kept seeing a sign for Holy City and we hadn't read anything about it, but we did see it on the map that we picked up at a post along the park road.  The visitor center for WMWR is closed due to Covid.  We had a cache near this Holy City, and when we crested the hill and saw this before our eyes, we were so surprised!  It's a Holy City built out of the red rocks from the Wichita Mountains.  They had just finished their 96th Easter Pageant and they were gearing up for the tourist season.  We didn't see anyone with masks on there, except us!  The person in charge the gift store told us that we didn't need to wear a mask, and I replied, 'well, we think we do'!  We had seen on television that the people in Oklahoma don't mask, or socially distance, and they don't want the vaccine!  Oh, boy!  We feel good that we got both shots of Moderna in February and March, but we still mask up when there are people around.  The above picture is of the chapel.  

                                            This represents the cave where Jesus was taken.

                                                   This shows a wide span of Holy City.

                                              And then, I found my chariot!  Onward, James!

                                                    This is the dam at Jeb Johnson Lake.

        We found the bison heard about halfway through the park.  We saw a total of a dozen in all.  

                                          This is Quahan Parker Lake and it was a pretty area.  

We found the perfect place to wear our new t-shirts that our children and Jim's sister, Barb gave us.  They were for Jim's birthday and they designed them and had them shipped to us.  We couldn't open them until we were all on a Google Meet together.  I purposely took this picture with the bison head and the front of Jim's shirt, as it says, 'You are never too old to play outside'.  He is standing in front of the marker for the Town of Cache, OK where a small nano was hidden behind the letters.  

And the bison is showing his 'behind' and I am showing the back of the t-shirt.  It has a spiral of geo-cache numbers that when deciphered and the puzzle is solved, it says, "Happy Birthday, we love you".

Maybe you can zoom in on the picture and see how they had the numbers positioned with hikers in the middle.  It was a wonderful day of exploring in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge.  We will go back for more tomorrow.