Thorpeland Photography

Back From the Wilderness

This past weekend was a true guys weekend. Myself, Brotha James, EVP and Little EVP (james), packed up gear... loaded it all into my Sportage and headed up to the Wichita Mountains in Southwest Oklahoma for a weekend of hiking, camping and exploring. This was EVP's first time up there, so I knew he and the kid would have a blast.

Our first stop was at the famous Meers Restaurant for one of their giant longhorn burgers, some onion rings and some cold drinks. Needless to say, we were all stuffed by the time we left. Figuring we needed some time to let things settle before starting out on our big hike for the day, we decided to make a stop at Mt. Scott. It was a fairly short stop. We took pictures of the vista's overlooking the mountain range. Great views on that hazy, cool morning!

From there we drove down the road to the Elk Mountain trail head. This is a hike ive done a few times before. Its only about 2.5 miles, round trip which I thought would be the perfect length since we had Little EVP with us who is only 7. Despite it being a shorter trail, it still had its challenging times of climbing as we navigated our way to the top. Finally we reached the summit and were rewarded with an incredible view of mountain tops patched together with tree filled valley's. There was a strong wind blowing across the top of the mountain, so we all just relaxed and let the breeze cool us down after the climb up there. While up there we hunted for the large lizards ive seen in the past, sunning themselves on rocks. But were unable to find any.

We hiked our way down and drove to the campgrounds. We arrived at Camp Doris to find it was a popular weekend for camping. All the prime spots had been taken, so we had to settle for one that was closer to other people camping that we had hoped. A cool thing happend as I was setting up my tent. Something moving out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. I looked up and it was a deer just casually walking down the road near the campsite. Then a few minutes later, we saw a doe and a buck casually walking up from the nearby lake. Again, they were walking almost right thru our campsite very casually. I took out my camera, put the 300mm zoom lense and began snapping pictures of them. The buck began walking towards me and I was having to zoom out to fit him into the frame. He kept walking towards me and before I knew it, I had to walk backwards to get him in the frame because he was TOO close for that lense!! When I backed up, he saw me and stopped. He then looked around for the doe and trotted over to her quickly. It was a very cool thing to see them so close up. After we got the campfire going we cooked some chili-dogs and smores' for desert. Good stuff! The weather was perfect all night. Mid 60F degree temps made it easy sleeping weather. Although the ground was so hard I kept waking up to rotate my self in my sleeping bag. When I woke up for breakfast, my back and legs were a bit sore, but I stretched out and felt better. We cooked scrambled eggs & bacon for breakfast and had some banana's and apples to top things off. With our stomachs full, we packed up camp then headed out on a short hike to finish off the trip.

The ride home was pretty quiet. Everyone was exhausted. Little EVP lasted about 15 minutes into the ride. He was out like a light very quickly. The others drifted in and out of sleeping. I wanted a nap so bad, but I probably should stay awake since I was driving. We got home about 3:30pm and began the unpacking. It was a great trip and I hope to have the pictures up very soon on my site! Stay tuned!