Cycling: Giant Loop

I really don’t know how far I rode, but it took 5 hours and my body said it was farther than I’ve ever ridden before. I suppose it felt about like 45 miles.

From the apartment complex I headed west down Reno, jogged north to NE 4th on Vickie and got on the Katy Trail. This time I rode it out to the end, which is about where Grand Boulevard crosses under the NE Expressway. You can see the overpass in the background (image to the right), and the paved trail ends in a big circle; the foliage beyond marks the bank of the Deep Fork River. It was a simple matter to jump onto Grand and keep going north, but I stopped to catch this image (left) looking upstream at the Deep Fork standing near the circle. So far as I can tell, this is all native foliage.

Just beyond that overpass is NE 63rd, clearly marked as a bike route. The signs also instruct drivers to use the inside lane for passing, as cyclists are permitted to use the entire outside lane. It’s the hilliest part of the loop heading west, but none of them was more than bite-sized. The traffic gets heavier approaching the Broadway Extension (AKA I-235) and the bike route signs disappear. However, it’s not dangerous, just requires alert traffic negotiation as the street narrows and becomes NW 63rd (Santa Fe is the north-south dividing line), though remaining four-lane. You could divert to where the old Grand Boulevard route swings south, but I knew it was already going to be long enough. Where Grand crosses again marks the start of Nichols Hills, a legendary old-money neighborhood. The streets are narrow with slow speed limits to discourage drivers from passing through. I could have easily stayed on the street, but the path was just too inviting, winding along a green belt that parallels Grand Boulevard quite some distance. This is your chance to view some of the fanciest homes in the county.

Grand eventually passes out of Nichols Hills, crosses May and then I-44. This drops me directly into the Hefner Lake park area. There are better images of the lake on the Net, but I chose this view to show that there are some quiet inlets. There’s a floating dock in the near view, the marina hidden off in the distant left, and the main body of the lake is distant right. It’s typically very windy out there on the water. This leg was much longer than I had expected. I could have stayed on the road, clearly marked to give cyclists some right-of-way, but the path was too interesting. It wound all over the lower end of the lake, up to the marina (image on the right) and all the way around. However, I was looking for the mouth of the canal that connects with Lake Overholser. For most of the way, there is either a canal road or bike trail following this canal. The recommended bike route went much farther north to Britton Road. I decided to stay close to Wilshire and jumped one curb to get back on the path near the NW Expressway. It was a bit of a wait where Wilshire crosses the expressway, but the bike lane from there is clearly marked. It was mostly a matter of having a much wider than normal gutter pan marked for bicycles.

The extra bike lane dies at Rockwell, and if you don’t know there’s a bike trail catty-corner from there, you might not see it. There are no helpful markings how to negotiate the intersection, but I managed it well enough. This bike path runs across the north end of the famous Wiley Post Airport, then down at an angle along the west side of the runway where the canal goes. Yes, those are one-ton hay rolls in the foreground. No sense in letting all the grass go to waste, no? It’s a long quiet ride and I was facing a southerly headwind. The airfield is another of those high open prairies in this part of the country.

At the southerly end is NW 50th and the bike path ends unceremoniously. Again, no markings betrayed the preferred route, but I knew it meant taking 50th a ways west. Suddenly the route markings reappear and it drops back against the canal before heading south. The street ends in a bike trail and runs down to a small dam at the lower end of the canal. After passing behind this thing, the bike trail ducks under the 39th Street Expressway where I turned back to get this shot (left). At this point I am less than a mile from the western boundary of Oklahoma County.

On the right here is an image showing the flow channel of the North Canadian in the foreground, a berm, and then the main reservoir behind. You can see this channel on the maps running down the east side of the lake. Down about a mile is a bridge out to this long berm, and there is a very popular fishing shallows that extends far out into the lake up on this corner. Recall that there are no natural lakes in Oklahoma, and the natural topography of Overholser drains southward into the North Canadian. You could think of Wiley Post Airport as a high point along the watershed between the North Canadian and the Cimarron River. Hefner is dammed on the north end and would normally drain far to the north into Cottonwood Creek, a tributary of the Cimarron River. The Deep Fork starts in OKC, sort of inserting itself as an extra tributary to the North Canadian, but does so far downstream (Lake Eufala).

You’ll notice there is not much effort to control natural vegetation, particularly along the margins. I took this shot (left) of the Overholser Dam on the high side along the fence, which is thick with tall grass and flowering weeds. This second shot is taken from a hill, the same dam on the low side, showing how wide it actually is. Remember: This is the main channel of the North Canadian River where it drops south around the southwest corner of the OKC Metro.

Just a few months ago the Parks Department finished this West River Trail. By the way, whatever the construction crews used to flatten the asphalt left a faint corduroy to the entire 7+ miles on this bike path. Sometimes you could see where silt had collected, but you could always feel it while riding at any respectable pace. The trail parallels the North Canadian, but jogs around a now finished landfill (left side of the image) and close to OG&E’s Mustang Plant. Then it runs under Reno Avenue, followed by I-40. While you can see plenty of residue of previous human occupation, this route runs right through a fallow regrowth of vegetation most of the way. Eventually we come to the point where Mustang Creek joins the North Canadian and it turns east. This is where we start seeing lots of fenced truck lots and similar industrialization out on the western edge of the Metro.

For example, here’s Crystal Lake (image to the right). It was formed as the water table filled in a sand mining pit. I climbed a high embankment on the southeast corner of the lake for this shot, but right behind me through the foliage is a very active sand and gravel mining pit. Off camera to the left is one of the largest massive landfill humps I’ve ever seen. While the picture looks nice, you can’t escape the pervasive nasty smell. Farther along this West Lake Trail eastward is a water treatment plant you can’t see just to the north. It made me wonder what kind of easement negotiations the city had to go through. At the same time, you have to wonder at how hard it is to escape such necessary and unpleasant sites.

The West River Trail ends right after passing under Meridian Avenue. This is just north of the Will Rogers International Airport, the real commercial flight hub around here. As you might expect, there are dozens of expensive hotels and eateries, plus a lot of Western Wear shops from long ago. This was grazing land before Will Rogers was built. It’s also the section of the North Canadian where bum camps are thickest. Despite the smells, I’d been seeing signs of ad hoc occupation, some obviously well established and long-term. Most of it is partially obscured by foliage. The West River Trail ends right next to a woody patch where a couple of makeshift tents were just visible from the river bank.

Supposedly the bike route connects to the south bank via a sidewalk on the Meridian Avenue bridge, but there was some kind of heavy construction on the that side, so the way was blocked. In fact, the four-lane traffic was restricted to the two western lanes. Someone nicely gave me a chance to get into the flow and cross the bridge, where I quickly left the road, ducking behind the cones and barriers. The equipment was idle because recent rains have hindered the dirt work, so there were no workmen to dodge. I made my way across a restaurant parking lot to the south bank of the river. Here the bike trail is a very wide, concrete walking plaza behind three very high-priced hotels — lots of fancy benches and planters. Eventually it gave way to the Oklahoma River Trail, covered in previous blog posts.

It wasn’t that far to the Dell campus and a long slog to the regatta zone. Where the trail currently ends is a gravel route I’ve used before, running along the bank near the unfinished Native American Heritage Museum. This time it was all mud puddles. By the time I got to the start of the Eagle Lake Trail, I had plenty of mud encrusted on me and the bike. Our last shot here is the spot where the trail loops around under the bridge that crosses Crooked Oak Creek. I managed to catch my own shadow, but there seems no good place to stand and capture the whole thing. In the image, the trail loops off to my right and climbs up to where I’m standing. It crosses the bridge and turns sharply right along the creek bank. Just a couple hundred meters along there it turns sharply left into the lake park and the trail becomes a rough gravel path.

So as soon as I got home I had to brush mud off myself and the bike, plus lube the bike chain from all the water splash. I was dead tired.