You would have to imagine that I’ve driven all over eastern Oklahoma County at one time or another, but only on the main routes to get somewhere. Wandering the back roads on my bicycle reveals sights I never knew were there. Today I chose Wilshire Boulevard between Hiwasee and the North Canadian River as the initial exploration.
(Click on the thumbnails for an enlarged view.)
This meant riding north from the house up Hiwasee Road and simply turning left on Wilshire. Immediately I saw a temporary sign warning the road was out. Hoping I wouldn’t actually have to backtrack much, I pushed on to see this scene on the right. But it was no disaster, just unfinished work.
This image on the left is looking back after I crossed the work area.
The rest of the way along Wilshire was just a collection of mostly older structures.
This ancient oil well storage site was already starting to look like it simply belonged there. It fit right in with all the older homes, along with this old church house, on which the sign read “St. Paul Baptist Church.”
Once I crossed Spencer-Jones Road and the railroad tracks, I was suddenly among very high-priced homes. Most of them were hidden behind trees. Beyond those I was back out in pasture lands, and this place had an entirely different feel to it.
The road took me past a substantial hill and then dropped quickly into the river bottom. There was an odd presence of signs warning folks not to park on the roadway, but I saw nothing that would draw a crowd. Where Wilshire ends against the river bank, it turns south onto Douglas Boulevard.
The years of life hit me hard at that moment, because this ancient road running through a tunnel of arched tree limbs felt just like I entered a parallel universe where time stood stood more than 50 years ago. Then I saw why the parking signs stood along the road fronting on that ranch, because there was another ranch that was a public business: Honey Lee Ranch (they have a Facebook page, too). At the moment I passed there were large dogs lying all along the fence and, without knowing what kind of place it was, I was loath to stop and take a picture lest I wake them and get their attention.
Still, the whole mile-long stretch down to NE 63rd felt just like my world did when I was about 6 years old. There were several old places like this one (left). Down on NE 63rd I turned right and crossed the river to find another. This one was clearly no longer occupied, but the land is still actively farmed (right).
This brought me back to that huge open space along the North Canadian where NE 63rd crosses Midwest Boulevard. Today I skipped the construction site near the bridge on Midwest Boulevard and kept going west along NE 63rd. I wanted to find that old school house.
Faulty memories had me thinking it was stone, but it’s brick. On the left is what you are likely to glimpse driving by on the road.
My wife tells me that back in the 1960s she had a friend who lived near there. The house is gone, but the school still stands, abandoned in the 1970s. If you get close enough to see through the foliage, you can spot the old concrete plaque informing you this is Sunnyside School built in 1928. (Note: This paragraph was edited to correct factual errors.)
Up and over the hill, I headed toward an orphaned section of Air Depot Boulevard, running south along the river bank. I’d never seen that area before, and it was frankly unremarkable — just some hidden rural land hosting a single newer home with a gate saying Moon Land Ranch. The road was quite rough, and where it ended, turning west as NE 50th, it was very rough. In fact, it was simply a stretch of cratered asphalt, more holes than road. Up on the hill to the right stands a pair of expensive buildings. One is a psychiatric clinic and the other is a residential care place. The first is relatively new, but the other was being used as a safe residence for kids from unstable homes. Back in the late 1990s when I was still substitute teaching for Mid-Del Schools, this was one of their lesser well-known assignments. They still provide the in-house education for those kids, but things have changed a lot since I came and went a few times. The staff was oddly remote and generally unsupportive of substitute teachers, though the classroom aides were decent enough. Foliage kept me from taking pictures.
Once I got back to Sooner Road, I turned south. There is a big disjuncture in Sooner Road at NE 36th where the latter crosses the river. Sooner ends on the west bank and resumes on the east. 
The view here (left) is southward showing how the local governments are trying to make much of the river a recreation area. I note the view on the other side of the bridge is totally natural and covered in trees, but this is what it looks like all the way upriver to the Oklahoma River boating area. This area has seen both sand and gravel mining and has been the single largest landfill in the county for quite some years. 
On the right (slightly above) is the entrance East Oak Landfill — AKA “Mount Trashmore” — sitting on the northern half of the entire square-mile section bounded by Sooner on the west, NE 36th on the north, NE 23rd on the south and Air Depot (in theory) on the east. I went back down to Sooner and rode down to the corner of NE 23rd where I turned back to take this shot (left) across the inactive sand extraction lagoon.
It’s a great swimming hole but don’t get caught. Just for clarity’s sake I stole this aerial shot from Google Earth showing how there are several lagoons from sand and gravel mining, all now closed or used for other purposes. The massive mound is in the upper right corner of the image.
North of this still-active landfill, across NE 36th is the site of the older landfill. This was back in the days when a “clean landfill” meant long parallel trenches filled with solid waste, the covered with dirt from between the rows. Over the past decade the trees and underbrush have gotten so dense you can no longer see the long humps running parallel to the road.
From there I headed on south along Sooner Road and turned east along Reno and began zig-zagging through the neighborhood streets back home.
