I had a couple of shots from last week still in my camera, so I’ll give you this rather random shot of the what’s left of the old Townley Dairy. Since shutting down some years ago, the old place has suffered several different fires. With the last one, parts of the outer wall on the north side were torn down during the attempt to put it out.
This was from two weeks ago. This is that last link in the bikeway below the dam. It sat like this for roughly two months without any work done on it. Dirt was piled up to cover a culvert, but nothing had been put down in the creek bed yet.
This shot was from today’s ride. The equipment is in place and culvert sections have been trucked down and ready to start installing. The crews have added more dirt and some gravel, but there was no work going on today.
This is another angle showing the scale of the planned work. Notice that this will be a very large culvert (4’/1.2m sections). There’s a lot of dirt so the surface can be raised considerably to match the existing paved section on the west side of this feature.
I’m not ready to try riding the packed trail through the woods, but I did take a brief detour down SE 134th Street toward the lake shore so I could inspect the work where the trail crosses the road. This is actually a rather steep slope down to a sharp corner off into the woods. All of this massive landscaping to prevent using the existing road because it would run the path into the road instead of across it.
This small pit was right next to the previous photo. In order to block motor vehicles from using that old lakeshore trail, now a bikeway trail, the crews borrowed from this spot. In the process, they uncovered something rare in these parts. While the colors didn’t come out well in this image, the sandstone ranges between pale yellow through orange and red, to deep purple. The darker hues are quite rare. I’ve never seen that around Central Oklahoma.
