Radix Fidem Blog

Virtual Fire

Posted on November 2, 2016 by ehurst

In the human soul, nothing can match the sheer joy and sense of relief that comes from having someone you can trust. Without that, we are dead people walking. It is inherent in God’s image of kinship and covenant. Our human nature is so desperate for it that we place all kinds of trust in folks we should not, including trusting ourselves too much. One of the primary reasons for the rise of AI and virtual reality is that those things appear more trustworthy than any human. This age suffers a deep poverty of loyalty; it’s the final exposure of what is the skeleton of Western Civilization.

This is a time of visitation from God Almighty. He has sent His angels to investigate the state of things in our society, as He sent them to Sodom and Gomorrah before they were destroyed. Our destruction will be no less catastrophic, but His angels also carry the message of redemption for those who can hear it. I sincerely believe the angels have found more than five souls with the mark of His favor, so our destruction will be of a different kind. But you should have no doubt that the bar has been raised; He makes a demand that our society has never known. We had better figure it out quickly, because it is the key to what type and how much destruction we face.

On the one hand, the message of heart-led consciousness as the true path of faith is the key. On the other hand, we should never imagine we are the only ones who have that truth. We aren’t the sole franchise, but we are one that has a distinct mission.

This is the new reality; to some degree we are helping God forge a new one. We are the tools and His Spirit is the fire. Our hearts know this truth: Somewhere, somehow, a critical mass of believers have come to understand the heart-led way in one sense or another, and now there is enough of us — just barely — that God can justly demand it explicitly. It’s not that He never blessed previous generations lacking that truth. They had their good things from His hand. But now His plans include this one factor that, to all appearances, has been missing for quite some time in human existence on this earth (although folks in the New Testament seem to have taken it for granted). At any rate, we need to understand that our mission hangs on this truth, and the establishment of this truth will fundamentally change more than we could possibly know.

At a minimum, you and I can see clearly at this moment that the dire need for trust among humans is frankly nigh impossible without a heart-led consciousness. We can neither offer nor seek even so much genuine loyalty as humans can share without discerning things first in the heart-mind.

All that follows for us from these days hinges on a vision of reality having shifted to a place where heart-led faith is God’s requirement for inclusion as family in His Kingdom. It’s actually a revival of an ancient requirement of the Covenant of the Cross that was long forgotten, but it’s back in play now. Indeed, even for people who don’t yet “get” the Cross, it’s a requirement just to live in some small measure of His shalom.

Perhaps I could offer this parabolic explanation: You and I cannot know at what point Our Creator and Lord decides to include someone in the full privileges of His household. We can be assured only for ourselves. A great many people are in His household as servants but not family, and a great many more are in His flocks and herds. It’s not discrete levels so much as a sliding scale, because not everyone in His family gets the same blessings. At any given moment, we all can be found standing somewhere between morally dead on one end, and the incarnation of His Son at the other end. If you get to fly up to Heaven without dying, you’re pretty close to the high end of that scale. It’s happened a few times that we know of, but short of that, stay humble and know that you’ve got some room to grow.

And the key for us today is the heart-led consciousness. I don’t care what you call it, but that’s the term we use in this virtual parish.

Which brings us to another point: The virtual world will soon take a much greater weight in human affairs. I’m quite frustrated that so many of you live so far away; I can’t sit down and gaze in your eyes or give you a hug. My little slice of human meat-space includes precious few who have the slightest inkling of heart-led living. Part of my eagerness to ride a bicycle is just getting out where Creation itself dominates against the suffocating presence of fallen nature. Nothing in my life can replace being alone on a wind-swept hilltop far from other humans. If I could just cultivate a few heart-led friends, I could stand to share that hilltop with others.

This is not a question of plowing fallow ground, but of removing vast piles of rubble first. We have so very much to overcome just to get started. But whatever it is we do, it must start with walking first in that heart-led shalom, carrying it everywhere with us, and applying the resulting sense of moral consciousness to everything we do. Your heart will make your brain smarter.

I was never half so useful at tech support as when I consciously sought the leadership of my heart-mind. I’m telling you now that learning how to build trust in virtual space is something worth studying. That’s behind a lot of my blather about the Internet and computer technology. As much as you can bear, a major field of opportunity is adept handling of virtual space; God created that, too. This is where our world is headed, and we have to understand how to reach that world.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged heart-led, heart-mind, mission, moral discernment, sensory heart, tribulation, western civilization | 1 Comment

A Rough Mental Outline of Evangelism

Posted on November 1, 2016 by ehurst

Let’s keep it simple.

If you can absorb our most recent lesson in Psalms 119, you are aware that just walking in faith is itself a witness to others. At some point, you have to put words with that walk to answer those who will want to understand what they see.

In broad general terms, if this person has been influenced by mainstream Christianity, we take a different conversational tack. People outside that influence might have all kinds of different backgrounds, but in my experience, it’s not too hard to simply start with talking about a heart-led focus of awareness. I can even mention being Christian Mystic without having to fight off too many false assumptions about the label. If I’m dealing with the mainstream Christian bunch, it usually requires starting somewhere else.

Most of the time, I remind them that the Bible came from Hebrew people, and that such people had a totally different set of assumptions about this world (epistemology). That should be patently obvious, but by the same token, most folks aren’t aware just how radical the difference is. So having gotten that point across, I next have to ensure they realize that our society’s worldview is not superior. That is a tall order in most cases. Convincing folks that the Hebrew assumptions are valid is often where the conversation gets hung up. I don’t mind spending time explaining it as best I can, but this is the single biggest failure point. When it fails, it’s as if the notion that God created the Hebrew worldview is simply incredible to them.

But assuming I can get past that, the next issue is making sure they understand that Judaism is not Hebraic in that sense. This is the second biggest failure point. As you might expect, adherents to Judaism have done a very good job of selling the idea that they are faithful to the ancient traditions. As you might expect, this is when I run into Zionist sympathies.

The final few who tolerate that idea are ready to discuss heart-led faith.

We aren’t selling conversion. Conversion is a reasoning process on the human level; it should be a natural result, not the objective. We are pointing out the path of truth so that the hearer can know, and only their own faith can make it happen.

Posted in eldercraft | Tagged epistemology, evangelism, heart-led, mainstream christianity | 1 Comment

We’ve Got Work to Do

Posted on October 31, 2016 by ehurst

You need not take me seriously when I insist that reality has shifted. If your heart doesn’t verify it, don’t worry about it. You have to walk your own path. However, I need to explain where my head is so you can gauge your filters accordingly.

I’ve been contemplating this for some weeks now; for me, the shift in reality became noticeable after the collision back in April. I now believe that the huge spiritual moment for me back on the bridge over Crooked Oak Creek, just before the collision, was a moment to confirm that I was ready for whatever God wanted to do.

Some of you have been hanging around this blog long enough to remember that I had proposed a big change in our ministry last fall. For once, I requested donations directly. I wanted to host more of my ministry here at home. I got enough money to buy a respectable machine. That was before the bike wreck and the shattered knee cap. I’m still using that machine because it’s very powerful and runs demanding software quite easily. It’s not wasted, but I still use my laptop for most writing like this because the posture is much more comfortable for long periods. I can sit in my recliner and stay focused. This has become increasingly important.

Much of what I was anticipating in my heart shifted along with reality after the wreck. God is a real Person; He’s not some collection of logical principles that you can nail down with theology. His nature is complex and ineffable. It’s not like He never changes His mind. Further, He stands ready to handle each of us according to our personal moral development. When we cross certain invisible thresholds, He changes what He will do with us. Drawing closer to Him in desire and commitment changes what we see coming from His hand. And sometimes, just like any other person, He decides that a new opportunity for showing His glory has opened up and He can move things along another track.

This reality in which we live is fungible. It’s more than just a matter of “perception = reality.” I’m convinced that God has shifted things around both past and present. And it’s totally up to His whims whether everything is changed to match. It could well be that God in His divine wisdom didn’t change every single trace, so that archaeologists keep finding stuff that actually doesn’t mean anything at all. Does God play head games with humans like that? You betcha, because our heads are untrustworthy in the first place. He runs this reality according to His own moral character, and you cannot understand it with your head. If you learn how to reason from the heart, you realize none of this is scandalous. It’s just His way of demanding that we shift back into the heart-mind. Nothing can require Him to make reality rational, and I’m utterly certain reality is not supposed to be rational.

Feel free to blame me if you think I was misleading you about all those plans for how this ministry would explode. In the context of that moment, I was utterly certain of it. I wasn’t wrong when I suggested that was where things were headed; it’s just not heading that way any more. We were approaching apocalypse, but God changed His mind. I cannot shake the feeling that the change is actually toward something more glorious, and that it rests at least in part on my willingness to invest the much greater effort. Not so much more work, but more dangerous work. And some of you are sensing that shift in reality with me because you have also accepted the mission. So because I was morally ready to face the huge injury and the year-long recovery process, and you were ready for whatever extra demands God might make on you, we are on a new path. We are blessed to see and grasp the nature of this shift and not go insane the way a lot of other folks are going.

Granted, it took awhile for me to gain an awareness of it. There was the huge distraction with my broken body, and another distraction with my heart acting crazy (and no more caffeine!), plus a lot of preparatory thinking, but I eventually caught onto it. For several weeks, I was consumed with just getting to ride again and take lots of pictures, but now there’s a whole new range of stuff dawning on me.

For example, we will still tribulate. However, God has allowed things to take a different course and the tribulation will take a different shape. I no longer see a massive economic crash coming. Banking crash, yes, but I sense God has plans to keep things working so that we can ride out the shock of that. It’s not just here in the US, but a lot of people are now in place with a mind to keep things working despite a general failure of the credit banking system. There will also be some social shocks that vary widely in different places.

I now honestly have hope that America will withdraw from the empire building. That in itself will be a sea change here in the US; perhaps you can estimate how it will affect other countries where some of you live. We are unlikely to see the police state pull back any time soon. On the contrary, it’ll probably get worse in some ways. I believe the right-wing backlash will face less resistance, which will change the character of what drives it, and the character of the results.

And if it turns out I’m totally wrong, it’s about time I learned what kind of fool I am so maybe I can recover and do something else. I’m ready to face that prospect, as well. Right now, my faith has been consistent for weeks regarding how the election will turn out. As previously noted, it’s not because I like any of the candidates (five have made the news); the issue is what kind of tribulation we are facing with each one. I’m preparing myself to handle the brand of sorrow we get with one particular candidate. If that fails, all my expectations are wrong and I’ve been misleading everyone else. But my heart can do no other.

Instead of piling up canned goods and hand tools, I’m investing in cyber defenses. I still believe we’ll see some crap from the Zionists, but I can’t guess what it will be. We will see plenty of ugliness and warfare, but nothing like where we were headed before. Indeed, I’m convinced that computer networking stuff will be the main battle line, though not the only one. The stage was set when the US finally let go of controlling the Internet naming system. This opens the door to all sorts of mischief we can’t imagine. Not that the US was doing such a fine job, but the surrender of control changes how big shots think about all of it. Actually, the US still has indirect control over the most of the current physical infrastructure of the Net, because US companies still own and host most of the backbone traffic hardware. Still, because of how it changes the perception folks have, it will disrupt the status quo in a big way. I’m expecting more trouble in computer networking than almost anything else I know about.

And with that disruption comes a whole boat-load of cascading disruptions in other areas of human activity. We will tribulate; get your head ready for it. For most of us, it’s too late to consider moving to another place. I’m hoping you have obeyed your heart and sought out where God intends to plant you for the coming mission. I’m quite certain I’m where I belong. Still, the worst that happens with a sudden change in residence is having to discard stuff that I like. I keep reminding myself that it’s just stuff and God can provide everything, but it’s much easier to face the mission if you sense that what you have is only what God has provided for your mission. Before that changes, a lot of other things would have to change first, I truly believe. So for now, my heart says just hang on through the winter before giving it any thought.

I’m not worried about who’s going to win the election. There are too many follow-on events that could change everything in ways we’ve never seen before (electoral college, rioting, assassinations, etc.). My convictions have granted me a broad general expectation of where it will all end up, never mind the names and faces. Those same convictions suggest I’ll see less bloodshed near my door in favor of other kinds of social disturbance. Most of the world has no clue that God has changed His plans, and those changes have to do, in part, with a fresh new requirement for living heart-led. This whole thing rests on our willingness to spread the message of subjecting the intellect to the heart-mind. If we are faithful, then the world will have no excuse for clinging to human reason. We’ve got work to do.

Posted in prophecy | Tagged computers, heart-mind, mission, tribulation | 4 Comments

Photography: Tramping Upper East Elm Creek

Posted on October 31, 2016 by ehurst

As always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

Today was long, not because of the distance I rode, but the time I spent tramping around in the woods after I got there. After reviewing the older satellite photos of the Draper Lake area, I discovered there were quite a few pockets that might be worth seeing if could get to them. I reached a few of them today, so refer to the satellite photo of the area posted above left. The dark red numbers match my photos in numerical order as posted here.

My first attempt was pretty rough. I can tell you right now, I really need to wait until it’s cool enough that I stand to wear long pants for riding ten miles or more. My lower legs are a bit scratched up now. I rolled a ways down the power line clearing from Post Road and found a small meadow with tall grass disguising most of the open trails previous there. Keep in mind that most satellite images of Draper were taken years ago, not long after the policy was changed for ATVs. In decades past, it was wide open, but now it’s all restricted to that three-mile square out by the dam. So while the trails they once used are still available on the mapping services, they are now quite hard to find, because the foliage has taken over again. There’s no way I could ride my bike over most of it, and it requires a permit to do so.

Keep in mind that the contractors have been building a new road out in this area, so the difference is even more radical than what the maps show. In fact, I tried to avoid capturing the crews as they laid new asphalt, the second of three layers. That includes a new parking area that took out part of one old trail. Still, I found it easier to follow this trail on either side of the new pavement, but it was very rough and hilly. That fourth shot features grass hiding the junction between two very deeply wallowed out Jeep trails, one running up that hill. It was all pretty close to that new parking area.

I checked a couple of other trails on the east side of East Elm Creek, but they were impassible in shorts. I finally rolled on out to the main recreational area on the north shore of the lake. I caught sight of several more rugged trails before I climbed up the hill to take a few shots across the lake. After wandering around a bit here, I noticed I had the place to myself. Because the grass is mowed very short here, there is very little risk of ticks and chiggers, so I sat down close to the shore a long time and worshiped. It was one of those moments when my heart yelled, “Stop! This is the place.” (I never ride without praying some aloud at least part of the time.)

I included a lot of territory in the satellite image so you can get an idea of how much there is to explore out here. Just picking my way along the old overgrown trails would take days, and I can’t guess what visual treasures there might be. So while it might be fun to have today’s riding temperatures range from 66-80°F (19-27 C), it’s making the normal fall activities kind of rough. The grass and many trees are doing what they do for fall colors, but it’s not unanimous and it’s tough to go see until the temperatures drop. But stay tuned; the weather is supposed to turn in a couple of weeks — just a little.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, Draper Lake, geography, photography | Comments Off

The Failure of Evil

Posted on October 30, 2016 by ehurst

The problem with great evil is that it always rests on human frailty.

Review: God created all things according to His own moral character. Reality itself is consistent with God’s personality. Second, He created a universe that rests somewhere within Creation as a relatively small part. It also responds to His moral character. Then He created us humans as the agents of management with a built-in awareness of His character, same as the rest of Creation.

Somewhere in our response after everything was established, we chose to rely on our human intellect and talents. Granted, we were given these things to help us obey, but the ultimate question of what is and is not morally right is beyond the intellect. Only the heart-mind can handle this question, and whatever it was we get from the narrative of the Fall, we must understand that mankind made a choice to assert intellect over the heart. Sadly, that means the heart becomes silent and mind is left to face the task of living and making sense of our fallen existence, and it cannot possibly discern the true nature of things. So relying on human reason is, by definition, a rejection of God’s character.

With the intellect alone, it is virtually impossible to grasp that Creation is alive and is imbued with a moral quality from God. While great efforts have been made to reawaken some higher consciousness, the mind cannot make much sense of things without a heart directly connected to the Creator. Thus, we can go back into human history and dig up all kinds of records indicating people did have some awareness of the superiority of the heart-mind, but the answers they record from their efforts in that direction are all mutually inconsistent. There is a certain similarity across these various attempts, but each one contains noticeable flaws that leave the practitioners powerless at critical moments.

The failures are manifest in all flavors. One of the most significant failures leads people to attempt pulling their fellow humans under one centralized rule. In the Bible, individuality is not central, so that’s not the answer. The answer is the family, branching out across ties of kinship and covenant. We note in passing that the Bible makes it plain that covenant takes precedence over blood kinship, but that the ideal is to have both. However, it also requires keeping family stuff within the family. More authority over more people must of necessity mean less detail. It should be obvious even to those with mere intellect that a proper daily life of peace and stability requires keeping things on a manageable scale.

But mere intellect cannot see the ultimate value of social stability, and demands social conformity instead. It’s easier for the intellect to handle ruling that way. The problem is that without a heart-led awareness, the mind imagines all kinds of things it might accomplish, mostly things that the heart would know could never work. The intellect cannot understand peace and stability the way God promised to grant it, so it imagines efficiency and centralized control — such control has never worked. Whatever it is you want to make of the narrative about the Tower of Babel, you should at least understand that empires grate on God’s moral character. It’s not that He makes no allowance for them to rise, but He always ends them sooner or later with horrendous wrath, and totally humiliating the rulers. The empires with the best historical records are those that remembered there were limits to central authority. They allowed the folks closest to the subjects to make decisions that affected them the most, and always assumed an Eastern feudal social structure.

We don’t have space here to dig into all the details. The Law of Noah remains binding upon every government until there are no more rainbows in the sky. I’ve written whole books exploring that Law; what matters here is that we realize they apply as a formulation written to the heart, not the intellect. Without the heart-mind in the lead, you cannot really obey Noah; you cannot possibly get it right. That means every government lacking a presumption of heart-led moral orientation is, by definition, evil. It matters not what the rulers think of themselves; they are evil who rule outside the heart-mind.

Even when those who conspire to rule embrace that moral judgment for themselves, they are unable to keep it all working for very long. Whatever it is they do will always be crippled by the lack of heart-led moral conviction.

It is utterly impossible for any human to actually personify the Antichrist. Satan doesn’t work that way; he is not permitted to pull that stunt. The heart-led truth of the Bible means it’s all parable, metaphor and symbolism. The biblical image of Antichrist is an influence on fallen human nature, not a literal individual figure. The antihero is a legend of the West, not from the Bible. You can easily read such imagery back into the Bible if you ignore the vast wealth of Ancient Hebrew intellectual traditions of mysticism, but you’ll get the wrong answers. Someone determined to be evil has already bought into the lies of Satan, and they cannot come up with a plan to take over the world that would actually work. Satan doesn’t work that way; he doesn’t lead people to some diabolical truth about universal power in this realm of existence. They have to be heart-led to understand it, and turning to evil means you don’t get it.

So the visions of a literal or semi-literal Apocalypse are just Western fiction. What really happens is that God sends some tribulation now and then, and the classical Apocalypse is merely a symbol of what it’s like. And here we sit in our day and time facing a very real threat of people who think their human wisdom makes them fit to rule over the whole world, but it will never happen. It may even start to look like it, but it won’t really work. The only people who really understand how it all works are people who have no interest in ruling.

That’s you and me, along with a bunch of other folks out there who remain unknown because that’s an element of divine wisdom. Just how much attention do you think we get here at Kiln of the Soul? We have no idea in our heads, but I’m willing to bet your heart tells you there are lots of folks who are heart-led, either consciously like we are, or who somehow manage to stumble upon it as some of us did before we tried to make it conscious. And the only reason we have this much is because God called us to it. We aren’t better, wiser or more talented; we are available.

Meanwhile, the desire to rule is proof of an evil moral nature. It’s not the same as ambition, by the way, but ambition can be bad or good. Most of the time, ambition falls somewhere in between, perhaps ranging back and forth some in the human soul. Some ambitions are clearly much less dangerous than others when you see it with the eyes of your heart. And your heart will tell you not to fear some satanic evil ruler taking over some major portion of the world, because even if they succeed for a time, we aren’t tied to this world in the first place.

And because we are tied into Heaven, there is an awful lot of audacious prayer requests that God will answer. That includes some of the most radical shifts in human political trends. Think about how much God was willing to spare Sodom and Gomorrah for just a handful of righteous souls (Genesis 18). You and I as heart-led servants of God qualify as “righteous souls” by God’s definition, and the definition Abraham used in his intercession. Because living heart-led makes us humble, we struggle to imagine the massive things God will do when we find the faith to ask. So take a good look with your heart at the current situation in which you live and let faith dare to ask for great and mighty things no mere man can do.

Great evil always fails because it cannot see its own weakness.

Posted in teaching | Tagged evil, government, heart-led, heart-mind, intellect, moral discernment, politics, Satan, the Fall, tribulation | 1 Comment

Psalm 119: Vav 41-48

Posted on October 29, 2016 by ehurst

The psalmist shows us a Life without Shame. The emphasis is on what the New Testament refers to as our witness before the world.

We start off with a picture of a servant’s petition for God to permit His Covenant loyalty — mercy and kindness to His vassals — to come and rescue him from human spite. He notes this is what God promised in the Covenant. This will help him answer those who pick at him according to human wisdom. He can offer calm words of assurance that his path, though seemingly fruitless and silly to some, will bring him the rich provision of his God. The psalmist pledges to demonstrate to all his trust in God’s promises.

Indeed, he prays that God not allow His Word of Truth to escape from his mouth, but to keep it locked in his heart. Then he reverses the image: In the grip of this Truth, the psalmist has stood ever ready for some command to carry out God’s whims, just hoping to be a part of His glory. He wants a part in making the Law of God persist in this world as a constant challenge to others.

In this way he can walk with princely self-assurance, as if nothing could stand in his path as he goes about seeking opportunities to act as God’s emissary. With such a commission, it’s entirely natural to promote God’s interests from the lowest to the highest of human authorities. Are they not all subject to the will of God?

He holds the Word of God as his dearest friend, a companion so delightful he can’t get enough of it, gazing with rapt attention and deep affection. He refers to a ritual act of lifting his hands, roughly equivalent to demonstrating some total dependence and devotion to someone, for the revelation of God is as much of His real Presence as we can bear. This ritual is performed with glowing pride, utterly shameless. He feels like there’s never really enough time in his days to give due consideration to the implications of what God has commanded.

Posted in bible | Tagged hebrew literature, psalm 119, scripture | 1 Comment

Not Competing

Posted on October 28, 2016 by ehurst

Yesterday I had a conversation with someone who attends, and loves, Life Church. She was attempting to play the evangelism card, but of course, that doesn’t amount to much with Life Church folks. I confirmed my faith in Christ and, picking up on verbal cues, noted that I had been ordained to the ministry since 1984. That meant something to her and stopped the conversation from going in a senseless direction.

At one point I mentioned my impression that Life Church is organized as an entertainment franchise. I hastily added that for a lot of folks, that’s enough. Not everyone needs much more than that, and Life Church does it quite well. We aren’t competing for those folks here at Kiln of the Soul parish.

In fact, I’ll be the first to warn you that our target audience is quite small, and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. The folks who attend Life Church aren’t bad people; they simply aren’t our kind of people. My prophetic ire is aimed at the way our culture has virtually eliminated any serious effort at digging deep into the murky places of the human soul. And when it has attempted to do so, we have ended up with even worse showmanship with all kinds of wacky and bizarre heathen ritual “magic” with Bible verses pasted on the outside. They attack the right problems with the wrong weapons.

Nor do I proclaim that we have the answers, but that we strive to reduce the clutter so that you can find God and His answers.

That appeals to a very narrow audience. Most people are so deeply conditioned to expect everything neatly packaged when they show up, that they cannot imagine the dire necessity of coming face to face with God the way we do here. They simply aren’t ready to build up their faith through a heart-led awareness. Instead, we end up with a lot of people were traumatized by the neatly packaged systems. If not that, then they have at least been carrying around a profound sense of unmet need. That indicates people who were already sensitive to their hearts and didn’t have the language or concept for it.

So this lady is not one of us in the first place, because her heart seems sound asleep. When we discuss the business of the heart with the world around us, it’s not going to ring a bell with a lot of folks. Unless Our Creator has awakened them in some way, our words fall on deaf ears. This is the reality with which we live. At the very least, we have to prepare the ground for such a discussion by demonstrating the power to live that comes from surrendering to the supremacy of the heart.

Most people know that I am some kind of believer. Living by the Law of God in your heart and harvesting the blessings He promised makes it pretty obvious to almost everyone. It’s not that we have no sorrows, but that we handle sorrow differently.

Posted in teaching | Tagged church politics, evangelism, heart-led | 4 Comments

Photography: Not So Muddy Banks

Posted on October 28, 2016 by ehurst

As always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab. I refer you to a previous trip I called “Muddy Banks” for context on today’s ride. Today I traversed the same route in reverse.

“Unseasonably warm temperatures” says the weatherman. Aside from three cool mornings when I actually had to wear pants for a few hours, I’ve have yet to yield my summer costume of shorts and t-shirt. I have to leave later in the morning only because the time change has been artificially delayed in the US; by the time I get enough light to pick up the trash outside, I don’t get to roll out before 9:30 AM most days. But that we are in a short-term drought does have its blessings: The mud pits along the river were mostly dry. The drawback is that it was sandy, instead. And before Dolese closed their extraction operations out here, they cut away a chunk of a berm that made it hard to find the original trail. So this steep sandy climb (above left) replaced something that had been a lot easier the last time.

Atop this berm I faced back into the sun across the extraction pond (above right). I also had a good look toward the south where my son spends part of his days as the maintenance deputy for the county Sheriff’s Department (image left). Those buildings across the pond are part of their training facility: a gun range, pursuit driving course, and some other stuff. And way back on the far horizon is “Mount Trashmore.”

The ride was quiet, peaceful and occasionally bogged down in loose sand. That’s a lot better than muck up to my knees. At the point where the path ran close to the river, I took a couple of shots to indicate just how dry it is right now. I really owe a lot to the guys who come out and ride their off-road four-wheelers. They keep the path open and usable for guys like me. While I saw discarded objects to indicate markers used by clandestine campers, there was no sign of recent human presence, nor any other bicycles. There were deer prints, but no shoe prints, so I had the place to myself. At one point the ATV riders had cut a path down to this massive sandbar on the river. It was too steep and rough to ride down, but I simply parked my bike and walked.

I’m very happy with how these shots turned out. Approaching this ride, I really had no idea what to expect, so I didn’t want to risk bringing my good camera. These were all taken with my iPhone. It turned out to be very peaceful and dry. I came out of the woods and into the narrow open band alongside NE 36th street. It was tricky crossing under this bridge because a lot of illegal dumping had occurred since my last visit. Once past that mess, I turned back and took a shot of the bridge. There’s been quite a lot of work this summer around that bridge. At another point riding the trail, I was able to catch a better view of the massive rip-rap wall on the far bank. This project was just getting started when I was last out here, but now it covers several hundred meters along the bank. In the image it’s just visible in background, stretching around the bend.

I was impressed with the depth of the scalloping on the river bottom. It was pretty easy riding southwestward along the east bank of the North Canadian. It has been mowed in the last month but almost no evidence of other traffic for quite some while. It was almost like riding across a very short-grass prairie. However, I guess I’m still not quite there yet along the path of recovery and fitness conditioning, because at the next bridge down (NE 23rd Street) I was tired enough to feel like getting back up on the road. But not before I got this picture (right) showing how the rubble from the previous bridge was simply shattered and left on the river bed. You can almost pick your way across on the concrete chunks and the sandbars that formed around them. All the more so right now when the water is shallow.

Alongside each bridge on either bank is at least one wallowed out trail resulting from motor vehicles. It’s now technically illegal, but that doesn’t stop very many folks who’ve been doing it for years. So at this bridge the trail was fenced off, and I had to take a shortcut through the brush. You would expect a few sand burs, but this stuff has been mowed periodically, which makes the sand burs more fruitful. So what you see in this last image is just the front side of one shoe, covered in burs. The other shoe was just as bad, and the backside was only slightly less covered, but I picked off a couple up on the bare skin of my leg and even on my shorts. Oh, and both bike tires were loaded with them. Now, the purple ones are still very much alive and firm, so they are especially hard to pick off. Once they turn yellow, they are dessicated and it’s easier to fold up the spikes against the core with just your bare fingers. Once I got home, I removed my shoes at the door, then came back out with a pair of needle-nose pliers to pick out a mass of them from the deeply treaded soles.

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Photography: West Elm Creek Again

Posted on October 27, 2016 by ehurst

As always, click on any image to see it full-sized. CTRL-click will open the image in a separate browser tab.

It was a foggy morning, tough on landscape photography. This first image is two shots taken from roughly the same spot; right is about 10 AM and the left is about noon. This is just west of Draper Lake, which would be one of the last places to clear up. We’ll come back to this scene.

Back before the collision in April, I felt compelled to survey West Elm Creek because I sensed that the long-planned process of damming it and creating a twin reservoir west of Draper (East Elm Creek Reservoir) was rather near at hand. The long ride that day didn’t show me much of the West Elm, so I have been looking at different mapping services. Recently I was researching the Parks and Recreation regulations about riding off road out around the lake and discovered that I could get a couple more shots of West Elm Creek without the permit. After installing Google Earth for Linux (works well on Mint 18), I got a good look at the terrain and saw that Midwest Boulevard extends all the way down to SE 119th, because people were still living out there and the City hadn’t bought them out yet.

At this point, just a couple of miles from the source, the creek was a deep gouge. It’s hard to see through the grass at the roadside (2nd image above), but down where both Midwest Boulevard and SE 119th end, there remains the frame of an old bridge where SE 119th once went through (3rd image). From the end of the bridge I got a couple of nice shots indicating that the creek is very deep and runs even during this near drought season. Above right is upstream, and left is downstream.

This area along Interestate 240 west of Draper Lake is a peak watershed between the Little River Basin to the south and the North Canadian River Basin to the north. Mapping the peak would run at an angle through Tinker AFB and then turns west across the countryside toward Moore, where it flattens and widens into the core of Tornado Alley, as noted in a previous post. Moore is actually on the southern slope heading down to the Little River, but it’s a very shallow descent for a long way south, and across a very wide swath of countryside. This whole area is mostly open with a medium grass prairie. I shot through the fence because the other side has never been mowed since I’ve been coming out here; that’s what it looks like naturally. That’s in contrast to the close cropped Draper Soccer Fields (above left). It was almost like riding on a road. Only the trees were left standing in a draw that drains into the West Elm Creek.

Finally, I need to correct something from the previous survey: The source of West Elm Creek is farther west than I had thought. It’s a part of that long high watershed peak. It starts just west of Air Depot (and the OKC Police gun range) and just south off the service road along I-240. In this last photo I’m looking south, which is downslope to a small pond ringed with trees. The camera didn’t pick up on the faint lowering between left and right, but it’s obvious to the naked eye. Directly behind me a sloped hollow runs north to create a tributary for Crutcho Creek.

Not a bad workout, but to access the source I had to spend more time on a busy roadway than I really like.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cycling, Draper Lake, photography, weather | 2 Comments