The first few images were just some effort to practice lining up shooting angles in urban terrain.
It was something to distract me as I rode through Bricktown toward the river trails. The first is from an elevated parking garage up on Deep Deuce. The second is a similar shot from a different location. This building (below left) from recycled shipping containers houses a restaurant and has room left for leasing to other tenants. I’m surprised by how much stuff they haven’t moved out of the way of “progress.”
For example, there is this elevated rail line (image right).
It’s partially dismantled; it was a linking line from the heavy industries east of Bricktown, most of them now gone, and it curved upward to meet the north-south rail line currently used for passenger rail between OKC and Fort Worth — the Heartland Flyer. You can still climb on that old rail line from behind the OKSEA building but you would surely get a citation for it.
I was still shaken by what I wrote in my previous post. Taking the north bank trail first, starting from the Chesapeake Boathouse landing, I soon reached the tree choir and stopped to chat with them for a few minutes.
Some of the pines were exuding a delightful odor in the warmish winds. Farther down I noticed a little water spilling over the middle dam on the Oklahoma River. We haven’t had a lot of rain in the past month, but I believe it rained pretty good somewhere upstream, so it’s enough fill the recreational pools on the river and still push some downstream.
After making the turn-around at Portland Avenue, I stopped for a snack out behind the Dell campus and spotted these old Marston mats. Way back in previous decades this was a well-used boat ramp, but it’s been seriously undercut and washed out several feet deep in places. They are still linked and I could walk on them with hardly any flexing in the plates, which shows how sturdy they can be.
Farther downriver, having taken the gravel road between the River Trail and Eagle Lake Trail, I stopped a moment at the place where I got hurt last April.
This summer the heavy weeds took over the spot; the soft sand and grass in which I landed have been totally eclipsed. This spot is in the shadow of that busy interchange between I-35 and I-40 shown above right.
Up and around the corner the trail brought me to the Crooked Oak bridge. Once again I stopped and prayed awhile.
This bridge stands over the delta of Crooked Oak Creek, the subject of one of my surveys on this blog. All of these images were taken with my wife’s little Coolpix pocket camera. I’m trying to ride as much as I can stand before the next blistering cold wave hits in the middle of next week.
Always enjoy the view of the city. Don’t see much of that in my region of the country
The interesting thing about Oklahoma is that our urban areas are spread out and not very dense. Even from downtown, a one-hour ride on the bike can take me out into rural property. OKC is like that; Tulsa comes closer to a genuine conurbation. I suppose Lawton is the next biggest and it’s simply not that big.