Cycling: Twin Lakes

Just a few photos today, the only thing that made this worthy of a post was the distance — a new record for me at 37 miles (59.5 km). This began pretty much like the Casino Loop. I headed out on SE 44th but at Harrah Road, I could see in the distance the washouts there were still unrepaired. Downslope less than a mile away, in the low spot before the next rise, I could make out a substantial high berm of road fill material completely blocking the road. So they had the materials but no crews had gotten there yet to do the work.

That meant a couple of miles south on Harrah to SE 74th, eastward to McLoud Road and over the hump onto WesTech Road. This time, instead of staying on it all the way to Dale, I turned south on Stevens Road. So after a mile of caliche on WesTech Road, I had two more miles of something even lower grade — just plain old gravel dumped on top of native soil. Stevens crosses over the Interstate and I could see the Casino Hotel tower gleaming in the mid-morning sun a mile away.

I crossed SE 89th and headed south on something most folks wouldn’t notice. The gravel here was crushed much finer and the source was clearly from southeast of there. Somewhere between Shawnee and Seminole the surface soil of Oklahoma turns from red to yellow-brown. This was crushed river bottom dredge sand and gravel, so the color was extra yellowish and really stands out as an import in this area. A road grader was working it. The stuff packs down quite nicely, but it does tend to drift and grader was pushing the excess back into the center to form a rain-shedding peak. For me, that meant trying to dodge the grader by riding through the loose sand now piled in the center — tricky on a hybrid bike.

Stevens dead ends at what would have been SE 104th if it went all the way through. This was brand new asphalt and very well done, running east-west alongside lake #2.

Channel between the Shawnee Twin Lakes.

Just a short distance up to the dam and I turned back south. The dam is nearly a mile long, and sits at 90° to dam #1. There really is no way to capture the two together because the ridgeline between is about a quarter-mile long. Still, the water level balancing channel looks really nice right now with a good high water level. When I was last out this way six years ago it was covered in rushes growing in damp muck with an inch or two of water here and there.

This is a swimming lake, but only in designated areas. However, I’ve seen kids splashing around in the channel and I could hardly blame them. It’s a really nice place for diving and such. I stopped for lunch at a small park area on lake #2. The picture should indicate how long it has been since the water was up this high. There’s a wooden lamp post out a ways from the current dry shore, visible out beyond the picnic table. I sat up on the table because this is still tick season. The grass was freshly cut and it’s the kind you often encounter in this part of the state. When cut, for at least the next two days you can smell the sugar content, almost like candy.

From there I took the main road between the lakes back west. It’s called Homer Lane, but for some reason the map services add “road” to the end. At any rate, Homer Lane turns into SE 119th. It was a quiet ride that grew humpier as I went until Harrah Road. It really doesn’t go anywhere beyond that, so I turned north and grabbed SE 104th back, covering in the opposite direction the same leg as part of another previous ride. This time I decided to go north on an orphaned section of Indian Meridian. It was pretty hilly, but when I got to SE 89th and turned west toward Choctaw Road, it was almost too steep for asphalt. It was a razor-back ridged that dropped down steeply into a creek that flooded badly when an upstream dam broke about a month ago. The ponds behind the dam were huge. So the water marks were still somewhat visible to my eye, and it was another brutal climb up in front of the super house on the corner of SE 89th and Choctaw Road.

In the pictures I took a while back it looks yellow from the south face, but it’s actually a natural stone color, made entirely of large blocks. The fellow who built this got tired after having lost two previous mansions. Being insanely wealthy for this part of the country, he paid for solid stone and poured concrete, with a heavy steel roof. The place is massive, big enough to be a hotel. The whole place is ringed with high painted steel fencing and rock-faced pillars, many with statues on top. The front drive is all sorts of statuary and massive stoneworks. It was this fellow’s ponds that overflowed when the flood hit on the low side of his property, washing over his pond walls and into Hog Creek.

The only reason I took Choctaw Road home was to see the progress on the preliminary work before widening. Right now there are tons of trees to remove, and many of them are substantial hardwoods around a meter in diameter. Then they grade the surface down, followed by trenching and burying the utilities. Finally the grading will begin in earnest, and that usually means flattening the road somewhat — cutting the hills and filling the low spots. Given what I’ve seen in the past, it will easily take a full year before it’s released from contract.