Photo Log 6: Almost Thunderbird

We’ll mark this up as “good training” again because I couldn’t get to the destination.

This route is more about mental discipline than physical. It’s tough enough, but aside from a jog at the start and end, it’s one long slog in a straight line south from SE 29th to Norman’s Alameda Drive. That’s 14 miles pedaling in one direction, for a total round trip of around 35 miles. But it was not to be.

Overnight heavy thunderstorms had me wondering if I could go at all. However, a check of radar analysis indicated the worst I’d face is a few sprinkles, maybe a light shower, and so it was. I was more wet from my own perspiration in this muggy dampness; even the road splash did more than the precipitation. There was plenty of water on the road, with several places where localized flooding ran over the pavement, often leaving deposits of sand and gravel.

My home is very near the watershed between the “South” Canadian and North Canadian Rivers. Consider the geology in this area: massive layers of hard-packed reddish sandstone, cut by various small water courses. Aside from the valleys, most of the foliage is rooted in a fairly thin layer of soil atop this hard surface. It’s quite solid enough to make excellent foundations, but soft enough that power equipment can dig through it with ease.

So if you’ve been following these little journeys, you could guess by now that Hog Creek and its branches constitute a major land feature around here. It runs south to form a major arm of Lake Thunderbird, and it happens that most of our run down Choctaw Road is parallel to Hog Creek one side or the other. Given all the tributaries and heavy rains overnight, it’s no surprise the creek is at flood stage today and water hiding the several culverts under the road where it crosses our path.

Otherwise, there was only one partial washout along the way. Starting from my preferred diversion to SE 29th Place, this is the only time I turn south on Choctaw Road. It’s usually pretty busy, but Saturday morning isn’t so bad. One mile down we run into the one section so far that has been widened into four lanes, along with some nice grading that raised the creek bottom up about eight feet. So it was pretty easy until we climbed the approach to Interstate 40.

This is the scene of some serious tornado damage back on 10 May 2010. There were two truck stops on opposite corners back then. On the southwest corner was Anderson’s, formerly known as Heins and quite a full service operation from before my birth. On the northeast corner down on a lower elevation was a newer Love’s Truckstop. This is the best single presentation of what happened that day, a video showing the damage. Anderson, owned by Pilot, was rebuilt on the same site, but Love’s abandoned theirs and crossed to the other side of Choctaw to perch on higher ground. In the image to our left here, viewed from the south side of I-40, you can just detect the low spot of their previous site on the right side of the picture.

From here on out the hills get awfully rough until we get to Stella Road, the boundary between far SE OKC and Norman. This is the gateway to Lake Thunderbird from this direction.

You have to understand something: Oklahoma was established during the Progressive Era represented by good old Teddy Roosevelt. It featured the early “scientific” approach to fixing everything in the world, the birth of very forceful intervention into every human concern. Norman is mostly about the campus of OU (University of Oklahoma), a hothouse of relative liberalism and social justice warriors. The folks here are just the type to have enthused about introducing kudzu, which is now an ecological disaster. So when I crossed the boundary, I wasn’t too surprised to find it smelled differently, and the roadside foliage was a different mix entirely. Some of it was the same as what’s just north of Stella Road, but native stuff is missing and something else in its place. I have no proof, but the entire rest of the way to Alameda feels alien and uncomfortable for me.

I saw the road closure signs, but you never know just how bad it is. I’ve managed to cross a couple of them easily in the past couple of weeks, so I thought it was worth a shot. I got two miles to Indian Hills Road, and just below in the next bottom found this washout. While the crews had delivered the replacement “tin-horns” as we call them out here, no actual work had been done. I suppose I can check back in the fall, but I’m sure it’ll be awhile before they fix this, given how very many I’ve already seen all over three counties. Not once has there been any sign of repairs starting because they are low priority routes, and it’s already three weeks from when they all washed out.

So there was nothing for it but to turn around and head back. The hills for the Norman portion are relatively easy, but between Stella and I-40 were several brutal climbs. Choctaw Road is different from other roads in this area running north and south. Here the big money is not farming or cattle, but horses. There are at least three spread along the way that are easy to see. While only one still has horses (seen here on the right), easily the most expensive property for several miles in any direction, none of them is suffering from neglect. The other big money is likely from a high density of building contractors with huge steel building shops and rows of specialized equipment parked back in the trees. You would think just about every third home site has now, or has had in the past, at least one welding rig.

I still got a whale of a workout.

Addenda: Just the next day after I took this journey and these pictures, one of the tributaries running into Hog Creek that runs across that horse farm that I shot (the yellow mansion) flooded when a very large pond two miles upstream broke its dam. The resulting heavy load of water ran across SE 89th just east of the house in a low spot, flooded further his already overflowing ponds and made Hog Creek really flood the valley downstream around SE 104th, rising into a few houses there. It took some hours for all the water to run down to Thunderbird.