Random Photos 15

Just a few random shots from recent rides.

I recall seeing this place gutted a few years ago. I believe there was an outbuilding removed, because the yard wasn’t this large. Sometime since then, the place was rebuilt and is now occupied again. This is part of the old wealthy neighborhood just north of our Downtown OKC. Some of the biggest bigshots in city and state government live in this area in historic homes built when OKC was just a small town.

When we moved a couple of miles south, my habitual routes changed, of course. I used to run west on Reno Avenue to Vickie and then north to NE 4th Street to get to the link up of several bikeways. This is a picture of NE 4th looking westward toward Downtown OKC. I was standing on the bridge over Cherry Creek and the colors of the trees as they just began changing struck me. In the distance, the street turns sharp right to cross railroad tracks, so it appears to end on those tracks.

The prolonged lower water levels at Draper Lake have changed the flora significantly along the shore. There are new growth grasses and shrubs were previously it was bare shoreline. This is a cove along the bikeway route on the eastern shore of the lake. In years past, I could dismount here and walk down to the water’s edge. On this day, I would have had to wade through a lot of dry undergrowth to get even close to the water. So many things have changed due to low water levels. It’s not even the same lake.

The same Draper bikeway drops below the dam, coming from the eastern shore. The fall colors hit just over the past week in these parts. The dominance of scrub oak means the colors are muted, since they go from green almost directly to brown. There are several species of oak in Central Oklahoma, so there are slight variations in the brown, ranging from almost yellow to a deep purple-brown. However, the grass put on its winter coat last week, and very little green is left except in the wettest areas, or among the shorter grasses.