Radix Fidem Blog

Today’s ride took me past Eagle Lake in Del City. The trail I’m on at the time of this photo connects with OKC’s Eagle Lake Trail, heading to the First Americans Museum (FAM). The crews are still doing a lot of dirt work at the FAM, so there’s still no proper bikeway there, nor is there a valid detour. Notice how the skies have only some thin stratus clouds in the background. That will change.

The Canada geese around here seldom do anything alone, but this one goose was waddling along the South River Trail. Just so you’ll know: The rest of the gaggle was behind me where I stood on a rise to capture this scene. There’s a boat ramp to the right and storms forming far to the south of OKC in the background. From the low angle of the sun, you can tell it’s quite early in the morning. If storms are forming around dawn, the air over the state is unsettled. There will be more.

None of this is really new scenery, just the same old stuff I see every week, but from a different perspective. This is the middle dam on the Oklahoma River Recreation Area. There is a slight flow, in part because we’ve had some rain in the state off and on for the past week or so. This is the North Canadian River and it sources way out west in New Mexico, running through the western part of Oklahoma before it gets to OKC. Later today it got some more rain, with storms that blew down power poles northwest of OKC.

This is that same line of storms in the second image, now bigger and closer to OKC. They didn’t cause problems for the capital, but dumped a little rain in places like Tuttle and Mustang, from what I hear. Because of how the atmosphere is unstable, and we have no mountains high enough to interfere for a very long way in all directions, storms in this area can rise while you watch. These developed rather quickly.

This line of clouds northeast of OKC mark the boundary of an unstable air mass. We could call it a storm front, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not moving much. Later in the day from this picture it was part of what provoked some pop-up storms about a hundred miles northwest of OKC that collapsed and pushed out some fierce wind gusts with damage to power lines. But there was rainfall all around the state.

After I got home, this storm cloud rose up very quickly later in the day. Within minutes it expanded in all directions and thundered a bit. I didn’t see any lightning strike the ground, nor did I see any rainfall by the time I posted this. Still, our weather today is rather dramatic statewide.

I didn’t ride too far today. I was exploring routes in my area, in part because storms were too close again, and I didn’t want to get too far from home. This image shows us under the edge of a storm cell at dawn.

Later, when I had made my way to the Regional Parks system, I caught the last wisps of morning mist above Soldier Creek (below). This is Pecan Grove Park. It had rained a little overnight, just enough to recharge the run-off in the creek a little, but not enough to cool the stream much. It was a sweaty morning.

Midwest City has been replacing a lot of sidewalks along Reno Avenue. The sidewalks turn into a bikeway (“multi-use path”) in the park (below), so it’s just the same work the crews have been doing for months, just a wider and more curvy path. It’s not a wholesale replacement; this section had a lot of tree-root humps that were breaking up the pavement.

As it turned out, the storms missed us. This is looking across Barnes Park to the west. The winds at surface level are from the south (our left) but the winds aloft are from the north. It’s because of a massive heat dome over the southwestern states and those spin clockwise. Thus, the storms moved from north to south, exiting to the left, and missing us by just a dozen miles or so. I could have easily ridden into the storms this morning.

At one point my route brought me within just a few miles of the storm cell (right). There was a wide spot that projected very close to us as it passed (right to left in this image). The darker the clouds, the higher the storm tops, and the more intense that action.

But when you see this sort of fleecy stuff overhead (below), you are safe. The storms aren’t even thinking about coming for hours, if at all. This is just across the street from where I live.

I’m trying to learn how to capture clouds. With our storms out here in the flatlands, the views can be dramatic at times. The problem is that, if there’s anything where the camera viewscreen deceives you, it’s surely with cloud formations. I can never tell how it’s going to turn out. Also, keep in mind that the sun was behind this particular cloud formation in almost every image, so the light balance was pretty tough.

So a major issue is dodging utility lines and capturing something in the foreground that helps to convey perspective. This image shows a storm forming out northeast of the OKC Metro. That means it’s not coming our way, since winds aloft from the east are exceedingly rare in this state. However, the unstable air mass can be large enough for the storm to grow outward and reach back to us.

Meanwhile, from the northwest we have these broken clouds moving slowly to join the storm cell. As it turns out, the storm did grow quite a bit. My ride took me up very close to the rain curtains as the storm kept growing back my way. I lost one image of them on the far corner of my ride due to camera malfunction. Had I stayed there, I would have gotten wet.

This is the bridge at the apex of my loop, but facing back to the west, whence the clouds were moving into the storm cell. The wind picked up and the smell of rain was quite strong, so I mounted up and got out of there after this shot.

As it turned out, the prevailing winds aloft pushed the storm on eastward just about the time it stopped expanding. Radar shows that the bridge got some rain after I left, but not much. The smell of rain followed me most of the way home.