Good Medicine

This weekend I finally had a chance to get out of town on a trip that was purely for pleasure. Destination of choice was Medicine Park, Oklahoma in the Wichita Mountains. Some other good friends were coming along with us, but at the last minute had to cancel, so we arrived as a party of two and set to exploring the beauties of the region.

In the wildlife refuge, longhorn cattle and buffalo are free-ranging. There's also at least one decent prairie dog town. The prairie dogs will chitter and chirp at you, but they'll watch you long enough to decide what you're up to. One very bold coyote came walking across the prairie dog town to much hue and cry- they have a definite code for signaling one another who is in the area, friend, foe or silly two-legged-thing-that-may-bring-edibles alert.

One feature of the local landscape is that bowling-ball shaped and sized rocks abound, and so when the community was founded, they clad their homes in these cobbles. You can see they are embedded in mortar in fence rails and they are a delightful feature of many of the area structures. The picture of the waterfalls shows Mount Scott in the background.

Atop Mount Scott, one very coy and famously camera-shy dog offered up a pose for the blog, so here 'tis. The lake in the background is said to be a small-mouth bass lake, and I hope I'll be fishing there with my dad in his boat sometime soon.

At an eatery overlooking the water of Medicine Park Creek, enormous carp fairly boiled from the water when offered goodies from the table or from passersby with bags of cornflakes and such. You could scoop up the bluegill from the water there, they were so profuse.

More photos to come from this trip. Some will be of elk, some of prairie dogs and coyotes as well as baby bull dogs. All in all, it was a lovely and restorative weekend.

How'd Monday get here so quickly?