Lake Keystone Dam (click image for slideshow)

Today I squeezed in a five mile hike on the bike trails north of the dam of Lake Keystone to the west of Tulsa before an afternoon appointment drew me back to Bartlesville. Nothing very scenic, but it was satisfying to stroll about in the woods and listen to some podcasts on a trail that was new to me.

I’ve enjoyed day hikes in the Ozarks since childhood, and incorporated hikes into several of my summer trips to the beautiful Pacific Northwest.  But it wasn’t until July 2009 that I became obsessed with going on as many day hikes as feasible while snapping nature photos and then posting everything to my blog.

Now it is also standard procedure for me to track my day hike using the MotionX GPS application on my iPhone 4, which thankfully has better battery life and multitasking than my iPhone 3G ever did. At the end of a hike I email the track to myself for later viewing in Google Earth, and I edit a screenshot from it to include with the photo set.

Happily all of the exercise also helps me combat the slowing metabolism of middle age, although soon I’ll have to give up those delicious sugary soft drinks if I don’t want to become too thick for my clothes. Unfortunately for me, restaurants don’t carry the one diet drink I can stand: Coca-Cola Cherry Zero.

I’ve tracked my hikes over the past fifteen months in both a Google Map and a spreadsheet, linking them to both the relevant blog posts and Flickr photo sets.  It turns out that I’ve now hiked almost 350 miles over 54 days, averaging about 6.5 miles per hiking day.  And I’m looking forward to many more hikes this autumn.

My day hikes since 7/2009; click image for an interactive map

My day hikes interactive spreadsheet