Today’s ride was the typical Draper Loop. It’s nothing special, but during the summer, it means facing the headwinds on the outbound leg, and getting a tailwind boost on the way back when I’m tired.
I rode out on Hiwasee to SE 74th, but the barricade is still up for southbound traffic from there. I can just make out a digger sitting down at the West Branch Hog Creek washout, but I suppose it’s not progressing hurriedly; it was there last week. Straight west on SE 74th dead ends at Post Road because of the lake, of course. It also reminded me why I’m not too fond of the Edgewood in steep hills. It’s just not geared for that, though vaguely possible for a hard-head like me.
Heading south on Post Road I pass the mountain bike trails facility. They claim to offer some 10 miles of wandering paths there northeast of the lake, but it’s way too much soft sand for the Edgewood with it’s narrow hybrid tires. A short distance beyond where Post Road bends a bit east, it morphs into Draper Lake Drive, which is a loop, starting where SE 89th comes into it from east.
By now the sand plums have virtually disappeared and only in a few sheltered spots do we find a few late crop blackberries. Virtually nothing like that produces during the heat of our summers. I did find plenty of ribwort, which is fading around my house, but still easily found around the lake. I took the lake drive clockwise today, so it meant staying southbound, more or less. This being Saturday, I encountered quite a few other cyclists. Most of them appear to be all serious about it with their expensive road bikes and fancy competition clothing. I look quite the duffer sitting upright and wearing a baggy t-shirt billowing in the wind.
The drive winds all the way down around the southern tip of the lake before we get to the dam, which sits on the southwest corner. While there is no good camera angle, the view down the primary valley dammed for the lake is neither majestic nor ugly. There are plenty of scraggly and dead trees standing well above the common foliage height, and you can tell there was a serious fire at some point that killed off some of them. This is easily the windiest spot for miles around. Oklahoma is windy enough already, but the dam stands quite high above the southerly summer winds.
In accordance with Bernoulli’s Principle, the wind driven up the valley and against the dam is compressed and moves at a higher velocity at the new ground level of the dam. Of course, looking back the other way, you have a vast flat water surface to allow northerly winds of winter to build up to full surface velocity to make it windy for a different reason. So regardless of the season and prevailing wind direction, the air is virtually never still on top of the dam. Here’s a shot of the water column monitoring structure showing the view back across the lake.
It’s a good few miles before we reach the point where the lake drive turns back east across the north end, and where the bike path runs west toward the pending better organized bike route across Del City. I turned right onto the section that has been under reconstruction for the past year. Several passes in the past few months went from watching them plow up the old road, then landscaping it from scratch. For quite some time they worked the soil and completely rebuilt the two water crossings — those took up lots of time by themselves. Then several layers of gravel and a stabilization fabric.
The last was to add what I thought were concrete curbs. Turns out it was the fill line, so that means we have several inches of fresh asphalt, heavy enough for just about anything with wheels. This shot looks back across the point where Douglas Boulevard comes from the north and dead ends at the lake drive. It’s a study in contrast between the new and the old.
On the one hand, Draper Lake is one of the best developed for recreational use. While there is officially no swimming permitted, there is ample boating facilities with a marina, several boat ramps and docks. Despite being right in the Tinker AFB southern flight path, there is a long standing model aircraft facility, Baxter Field. Way back some forty years ago I remember coming out to run on the dirt-bike trails. There was still a lot of that when we returned from Europe in 1993, but since then it’s all been closed off.
Now there is a devoted area on the west side with fancy parking and camping facilities for off-road riding and it requires a permit you can buy at the marina. Meanwhile, there are stables in the area and extensive horse trails where the dirt-bikes used to be. However, we must not forget the primary purpose is water treatment, much of which is sold and piped off to Atoka Lake some 100 miles away to the southeast. I wasn’t able to get a good angle to capture the massive field of white pipe segments they use for this kind of thing. They had to be at least 4 feet (1.22m) in diameter.
Eventually I rolled over the dilapidated road section between Douglas Boulevard and Post Road where I came in; the lake level is still just a foot or two below the road surface in places. This is where the hills are the steepest on the lake drive. Turning north on Post Road, I decided to stay on it so as to pass the old home place, roughly 4000 block of Post Road. When we first moved down here from Anchorage, Alaska (c. 1973), we rented a mobile home in a park now long gone, until my parents could take possession of a new mobile home they ordered from Chickasha Mobile Homes (can’t find a listing for them as a business any more). The house was sited on some land that was then quite rural. Our spread was 20 acres; my dad owned half, and the other half was split between his two brothers. We were the only ones actually living there. Today you could probably find the septic system I had to help dig as a teenager, but you’d have to know where to look and poke around for it in the ground. Meanwhile, a beautiful house stands right about where we had a huge pigpen. Nearby, lots of old homesteads have been replaced with housing developments.
At any rate, I was surprised to discover that sometime in the past few months, with no fanfare at all, Midwest City designated Post Road as an official bike route. Those signs are brand new, and you can see them at least once in each mile section starting near the lake. And since Post Road’s hills aren’t that big, I suppose this will become the new best approach to Draper Lake for me. Of course, the signs end at SE 29th because there’s a multi-use path running along the west side of the street for quite a ways north. However, my route home means turning back east at SE 29th.
