This map is OKC Parks and Rec’s publication showing the relative location of the new Deep Fork Trail. The idea has long been to replicate the old Grand Boulevard Drive as a bikeway. Grand used to circle the old city limits. The Deep Fork Trail is under construction in four phases. The first is now finished and I went to visit the other day.
This is the finished bridge across the Deep Fork River at the northern end of the Katy Trail and the eastern end of the Deep Fork Trail. The bridge is what links the two bikeways. They’ve spared no expense in building it, but I’ll warn you that they have not yet begun mowing this new addition to the parks system. The trail is just a bit narrowed in places where the grasses grow up to three feet high.
There’s a lot of railing along the path simply as a safety measure, since it winds along the north bank of the Deep Fork. The river gets its name from being so very deep below ground level. Even though it’s just a few miles from the source here, it’s already a deep canyon.
The Deep Fork Trail is slated for construction in four phases, and Phase 1 ends here at Kelley Avenue. The trail crosses back over to the south bank and ends abruptly at NE 59th Street. There’s a fresh wide cutout on the south curbline, but then grass. Phase 2 will take off from there, run south along Kelley Avenue and cut across it where the river bends, somewhere close to NE 57th Street. Then it will run west through forest and underbrush land that belongs to an abandoned mansion that I believe the city owns, and will connect to Lincoln Boulevard.
We won’t see any of that for another year, at least. Two more phases will run from Lincoln Boulevard to Interstate 235, and then from there through Canyon Park to connect with the old Grand Boulevard again.
Your trails are so square conpared to here. I guess you can do that if you don’t have to worry about hills.
Quite so. We do not have terrain to circle around; our hills are mostly climbable within the broad flat North Canadian River Valley, which is where OKC sits. Even the hills we do have are all outside the city some ways.