It was a nice day and we needed some sun, so we went to Turkey Mountain to hike a few miles. Turkey Mountain is an Urban Wilderness setup on the west side of Tulsa for hiking and mountain biking. It is part of the River Parks system; the home page is here and a map here.

We went to the upper parking lot, which is gravel, less scenic, and uses port-a-pots, but the upper lot is in the middle of the hiking trails. The lower parking lot has a restroom building, paved parking, and a turkey monument, but it is on the edge of the trails.

The Turkey Mountain park seems to be biased towards mountain biking. Almost all of the trails are available for mountain biking, but only about 75% are available for hiking. There are also specific areas for practicing mounds jumping and boardwalk riding.

The area is not that large, but it is densely packed with trails. With good navigation skills, you should be able to hike 5 to 10 miles without much overlap. We have hiked both blue and green trails. The blue trails are too rocky for our hybrid city bikes. Some of the green trails might be acceptable, but we need to hike them looking for biking obstacles.

These two areas would be perfectly fine to ride our bikes on, but the trails intermix flat trails with rocky patches.

If we hit these rocks at any speed, there are quite a few rough spots on the blue trails that would damage our tires or rims.