Photo Log 5: Brutal Loop

No pain, no gain.

Today we cross over into Cleveland County to the south and visit the nastiest hills in my area. The baddest climbs are on Hiwasee Road south of where I reside, but we have to take a detour over to Anderson Road to avoid the washout I mentioned in the Draper Lake ride. Once we get back to Hiwasee, we continue south over the toughest terrain until we get to SE 149th, AKA Stella Road. Follow Stella far enough east and you’ll come to the very old unincorporated community of Stella, but we will come back north somewhere short of that, taking Indian Meridian up a mile, over to Triple X and back up to SE 59th so we can hit last Saturday’s 3 grueling slopes in reverse order. This comes out to about 26 miles of a near complete absence of flat ground. Woohoo!

By the way, Stella Road westbound passes just a quarter-mile south of Draper Lake and runs off into Moore — just about the middle of the highest tornado zone — and into far South Oklahoma City. It dies just west of our Bailey Turnpike that runs down to Lawton. The reason it stops is because it runs into the “South” Canadian River (popular label, but technically the main branch of the Canadian without any prefixes). Stella Road eastbound runs into one arm of the Shawnee Twin Lakes. Did you know that Oklahoma has not a single natural lake? Every stinking lake and pond of any size has at least one man-made dam on it somewhere.

I love Hiwasee heading south. Once we turn off SE 29th, we have an easy mile of low humps, followed by a steep drop from SE 44th and our first brutal climb (pictured above left), not even two miles from home. Then it snakes east in order to jump over Interstate 40 using SE 59th. By the time we rejoin the original surveyed route of Hiwasee, this diversion has added a mile to the journey. But it’s worth it, because Hiwasee is such a beautful run. On the right is a view from SE 74th with the far crest two miles away at SE 104th.

Of course, we have that detour at SE 74th over the Anderson, down SE 89th and back to Hiwasee. While this whole thing is bisected by the West Branch of Hog Creek (which is the source of the washout requiring this detour), we still have matching razorback ridges on both sides of the valley before we get back to Hiwasee. Even the detour is brutal. Once we turn back south on Hiwasee, it is one long mile of climbing all the way to SE 104th. Just beyond is the physical crest of the ridge and I took a shot (above left) showing this vast, wide valley some three miles across before we start the final climb to Stella Road on the far hazy visual crest. There are a couple of intervening humps, but what makes it epic is the last three running up to Stella Road. Each one looks like this beast (right), requiring I gear all the way down to A-2 to make it.

But Stella Road itself is all hills. Here (left) I shot from just above Choctaw Road looking back west the way I came. Down in the bottom is Choctaw Road, which we will see again as the only route I can reasonably take to get down to Lake Thunderbird. While the little Indian community of Little Axe perches on the far east end of Thunderbird, everything near the lake belongs mostly to Norman. In fact, during the annexation battles over the past century, Norman at one point grabbed up a bunch of oddly shaped pieces up north of Stella Road. Most of the section lines out here have twin designations, from both OKC and Norman. The latter reverses the scheme, labeling the north-south roads as numbers, and the east-west lines are all named. I’ll try not to confuse you; I’ll chauvinistically use the OKC scheme.

I’ve always marveled at the beauty of Hog Creek Valley here (left and right) where the main stream runs into Lake Thunderbird. It continues feeling good until I top the rise at the end of Indian Meridian at SE 134th. I’ve not discussed it much in this photo log series, but I do manage to ride with my sensory heart active, and something about this area annexed by Norman feels very different, just a tad unpleasant. It stays with me over the continuing humps and razorback hills, and all along Triple-X as I head north. While Hiwasee was epic, Triple-X is just plain mean in both terrain and the odd feel in the place. The people are okay, but the moral ambiance is just a little foul.

Over the years I haven’t seen too much roadkill. The Watkins Lake Loop offered an awful lot of flattened snake, but today I saw mostly squirrels, both alive and dead. However, I also had the rare sighting of a live snake. A six-foot rat snake (AKA black snake) whipped across the road in front of me, way too fast to catch it with the camera.

Once I hit 104th, the ugly feeling faded. On the left is the view northward on Triple-X from SE 104th. Before I got into decent shape, I used to come out only as far as 104th, and that was pretty wild in its own right. You’ll notice it snakes a bit (right), deviating significantly from the survey line. With the ragged and sharp ridge lines and peaks out here, it’s just not possible to run a straight road. This is the one place to see blind curves that match blind crests. Witness SE 89th where it drops down onto Triple X (below left).

Eventually we cross I-40 again. Now, with Hiwasee, it crosses just a mile from where I-40 and I-240 merge, and the latter is almost hidden until you get there. Here on Triple-X it’s a high overpass crossing a slight rise in the interstate. The main thing about the interstate is how noisy it is. Out here you can hear it well before you see it.

We run on north to SE 59th and turn back west so we can catch the last three brutal climbs. After we crest that truly massive ridge before Henney, flying down the hill you can just barely make the turn onto Henney without braking if no traffic prevents you swinging all the way over to the left edge of the pavement. But then you promptly have to shift down because it’s a steep climb immediately. Once past that, it’s just the normal easy humpy terrain two miles back to the house.

With stopping for pictures, it took almost 3.5 hours.