Category Archives: Skywatch Friday

Skywatch Friday – Yule Edition

We had a full moon just before Christmas. Usually known as the Cold Moon. I found a new name that I like, “Moon Before Yule.” It was bright, silvery, and beautiful here in Oklahoma.

Also just before Christmas we had dinner with some friends and then went to Tulsa’s superb Gathering Place to check out the Christmas lights. We missed the lights but just walking through the place is great. Aboveis the Williams Lodge.

I’m continuing my geocaching trying to get to 2000 before year end 2019. I am finding myself in very out of the way places like the remote cemetery above where my only company was a few deer. We had a standoff for literally a minute or two with them and standing motionless until, I was like, okay you win and waved my arms and off they ran.

My brother drove over from Tennessee for Christmas and we are having a good visit and sharing Christmas with him. Its always nice to have family and consider ourselves blessed that we can be together.

I hope you had a Merry Christmas and I wish you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!!

Linking with Skywatch Friday

Skywatch Friday – Autumn Skies

I love Autumn, what can I say. I took this photo at Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. I love this kind of stuff.

I was at Gilcrease to see their latest exhibition “Albert Bierstadt – Witness to a Changing West.” If you are a fan of western art then you need to come see this show. The above painting is my favorite of the show, “The Buffalo Trail.”

And this was a backdrop showing the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska. So a rare selfie for you. Not that I did you a favor did I.

I feel bad so this is a photograph of the Tallgrass Prairie that I took myself years ago.

And with the resumption of standard time, I am starting to take photos of the sky from the office building where I work. I’ve taken lots and lots of pics from here looking off to the northwest. That is the Arkansas River in the distance. Sorry for all the reflections.

I am linking with Skywach Friday

Autumn Skywatch

20181023-162001-1 — Oklahoma City Starbucks Sky

The family loaded up earlier this week and traveled to western Oklahoma.

We went to Clinton, Oklahoma. I went over and took this photo early in the morning of their Route 66 Museum.

Later, I took this photo of this tree in our hotel parking lot. I love Fall Color.

We were in Clinton for the funeral of a family member. He was one of those great guys in life. Not flashy or one to call attention to himself but very nice, very smart, and a great guy. He was married almost sixty years and raised a great family. He was also a John Deere mechanic for about the same amount of time. They said he bled green.

His employer, the local John Deere dealer parked these two huge tractors in front of the church in his honor. I had never seen anything like that before!!

Back in Tulsa, I found this giant cottonwood tree in a tiny little park in East Tulsa.

Fall can even make parking lots look better.

Close by I came across this church called “God’s Church.” I love the confidence in the name. I checked out their web site and they seem to be a vital and active part of the community ministering to their members and the community. What more can you ask of a church?

I think this is my blog post 3001 more or less. I’ve been doing this blogging thing for over ten years now and I really do appreciate the support I’ve got for my humble little slice of the interwebs.

That’s about it for this week. I’m linking with Skywatch Friday.

Skywatch Friday – A Walk in the Park

This past weekend son Logan and I decided to take a walk around Tulsa’s Lafortune Park. Lafortune Park has a big playground, picnic areas, tennis courts, a high school, baseball parks, and two golf courses with a walking path about 3 miles long winding around it all.

I didn’t bring my camera, just my cell phone. Luckily there were some pretty decent skies.

Part of the trail was a little muddy. In the 26 years we have lived in Tulsa I bet that I have either walked or run around Lafortune hundreds of times.

I love pedestrian bridges. Logan is now 20, when he was about 3 he liked to go hide under this bridge and pretend he was a troll. The kid used to drive me crazy!! Perfectly good playground 100 feet away. Oh well.

There he is. He lags a little behind but it works out because I take pictures and study on things and eventually he catches up to me.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday.

Skywatch Friday – Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Church

In a city of Art Deco masterpieces, the Boston Avenue Church is among the best. It was built in the 1920’s and is still just beautiful. It is even more beautiful on the inside and the church is very accommodating to those who want to tour the building.

And of course since it is a 15 story building that stands tall by itself it almost always makes for a decent Skywatch Friday photo.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday.

Skywatch Friday – Closing out September

This month we had the Harvest Moon. I love full moons. I take photos of all I can and apply all sorts of filters and editing to them. I hope that doesn’t bother you.

I went for a walk last week and caught a sunset and as a bonus I got lots of long narrow tree trunk shadows.

This is the Powerline Trail on Turkey Mountain, here in Tulsa. It’s the fast route from the north end of the wilderness park to the parking lots on the south end. It’s not the easiest though, you go straight up and down a couple of big hills. But is hard to get lost on it.

Various sights around Tulsa this week.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday

Skywatch Friday – Life on the River

20180917-192401-3 — From the end of my bike ride earlier this week. I love a little color in the sky.

The Arkansas River runs through the middle of Tulsa from North to South. We are lucky because a huge part of the River is a public park of one sort or another for miles and miles. So we have lots of bike trails, many on both sides of the river. I have either run or rode my bike or walked every inch of them. I have never got tired of them.

The 21st street bridge from far away.

And up close.

20180913-114951-13 — The ONEOK Boathouse in the background with Peggy’s Pond.

Tulsa’s brand new park A Gathering Place for Tulsa is right on the river. Check the link. The home page is basically a flyover of everything and you can see how intimately the park is integrated with the River.

20180913-115248-1 — I love the ripples in the pond. See the tall grass across the way. Most of the park is planted in native prairie grasses so no mowing, a lot less water, and fertilizer, so less money spent on maintenance, less chemicals on the land and the river, better habitat for bugs and birds. Win-win-win. Sustainability to most Okies is how to maintain high flows from older fracked wells.

It has been open about 10 days and I have been there five days. That’s ratio that I would like to keep up. Looking at the video I mentioned above I saw about four or five things that I hadn’t seen yet.

20180913-114451-11 — One of these days, maybe when it gets cold, and it isn’t so crowded I am going to come over here and climb the towers and do some exploring. I may forego the slide though. I think my outside diameter is greater than its inside diameter. That would be a problem.

It’s a great place to take photographs. There are all sorts of things, and angles, and reflections, and interesting structures to make photographs. So I hope you don’t get tired of it. You see I’m still pretty excited about the Gathering Place.

I am linking to Skywatch Friday this week.

Skywatch Friday – A Hike to Taggert Lake

Still another outing with my sister, Ellen, a seasonal Park Ranger at Yellowstone National Park. This time we went to Grand Tetons National Park south of Yellowstone Park. This is the same day that we hiked Trout Lake, a hike at Colter Bay and went to Mormon Row that I have posted about previously.

Taggert Lake is in the foothills of the Tetons and is a very scenic trek and not that long, about 3.5 miles round trip, and not that steep.

We passed Taggert Creek, the outlet of the Lake.

There were several people at the lake when we arrived including some teenagers who were swimming in the ice cold water. More power to them. What would the world be like without teenagers to remind everybody else how old we are. The air was still hazy from the forest fires way to the west but the mountains are still majestic.

Nothing nicer than an aspen grove in my book. I would like to come back when the leaves turn. Which should be relatively soon.

I love these kind of log fences they have in the mountain west. I don’t know what they call them but they are great. Also, to the right, that is my sister. She is a fast hiker and I had to hustle to keep up with her.

I still have a few more posts of my time with Ellen. I only spent three days with her but we saw lot!!

I am linking with Skywatch Friday.

Skywatch Friday – Hike to Trout Lake at Yellowstone Park

During my trip to Yellowstone Park earlier in August to see my sister, we took a hike up to Trout Lake. It was a hike that kicked my butt but was only 200 feet in elevation change. But it was worth the climb. The lake is absolutely gorgeous as are the the views from the lake.

There were a couple guys fishing from floats for cutthroat trout. One of them told us that he had caught (and released) eleven and they were gorgeous with deep rich colors. He was a little older guy and mentioned that the hard part was hauling all the gear up the trail from the road. I had a feeling that he lived not far from the Park. I am wondering if he stashes his gear nearby.

My fellow bloggers over the years have taught me the beauty of imperfection and change in plants. So I took lots of pics of plants in the midst of transition. Nature is beautiful in all its cycles.

Here is my sister Ellen, the Park Ranger. I felt guilty as we were out from 8 am to about 9 pm every day. She loves showing off Yellowstone Park. Check out her blog. She saw wolves today on a hike.

Here is my Garmin connect view of our outing. It doesn’t lie, like I might. It says 200 feet of elevation change, I’d of sworn 2000 feet. And 1. 4 miles long. Why, it was easily six miles, if not longer.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday today. Come join us! You don’t have a blog? You can link an Instagram photo!

I’m a little late with my post. I was going to write it Wednesday night along with setting up the Skywatch Friday meme and my brand spanking new Dell laptop with super duper quad core processor and solid state hard drive decided to not work, at all!!! As I thought about it though I remembered that Staples, where I bought it from, had given me a thumb drive which they said to keep track of because it was a recovery drive. So a few hours ago, I stuck it into my Dell and fired it up and it came up normally and asked if I wanted to restore my settings to factory, and I said yes and everything now works fine. What’s up? Can anybody tell me?

Skywatch Friday – The Teton Mountains from Mormon Row

As I mentioned in my previous post, last week I spent a few days with my sister, Ellen who is a Park Ranger at Yellowstone Park. One day we ventured from Yellowstone down to the Grand Teton National Park and looked at a few of the sights. One of my favorite places is an area called Mormon Row in the valley below the Tetons.

Long before the area became a National Park the area was settled by Mormon settlers in the 1890’s at the direction of their church. Rather than being spread out from each other they put their homesteads close to each other for community and shared labor. They built their farms and an extensive irrigation system to water their farms.

They stayed on their homesteads until the 1950’s when they were bought out when the land for the national park was being acquired. Many of their buildings are preserved, especially the barns and photographers (and picture takers like me) flock from all over the world come to capture images of the buildings with the mountains in the background.

_DSC0793 — I love the color of this stucco.

This trip though,, the smokey hazy skies along with the shadowy afternoon light defeated me. Still, I love the area. I had an aunt and uncle who had a mountain ranch tucked deep into a valley in southeastern Idaho and their buildings were similar in design and construction to those in Mormon Row.

mormon row 3 loo_DSC0791-Edit — A Loo with a View
(Sorry I couldn’t resist”

I sense that although a settler’s life is hard that it must have been a pleasant place to live in the summer with the cool breezes and the astounding view of the mountains. The Tetons are the most awe inspiring mountains that I have ever seen and I couldn’t get enough of looking at them. I am just sorry that I couldn’t capture that.

I really love our national parks, I love that they are a precious resource and are defended by all against exploitation. We need more areas like this, not less.

How about you, have you ever been to Mormon Row?

I am linking with Skywatch Friday

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