Sorry, not sorry, another post of my trip to visit my Sister Ellen who works at Yellowstone National Park. One day we went to the Lamar Valley in the northeast section of the park. We saw lots of bison, a couple of antelope, and went on a couple of hikes.
It is a beautiful broad valley with mountains on both sides and it takes a while to get there. Forget about any bars on your cell phone because there are not any to be had. Great news!!
The Lamar Valley is known as a great place for watching wildlife including wolves. My sister Ellen tells me that you have to get up and be in place early to have a chance of seeing them.
Here is a video by the National Park Service about the wolves.
We went on a short hike but the sun was beating down on us and we wanted to get into the woods.
We saw a couple of fishermen wading in the Lamar River. It looked like they were having a great time.
Saturday, September 8 was a big day in Tulsa. A Gathering Place, our new $465 million privately financed public park opened up. Seven years in the making, over three years of construction, including shutting down a one mile stretch of one of Tulsa’s busiest streets, Riverside Drive, came to an end (kind of they still have a some final touches to do.) And they took down the barricades and told everybody to come on down and check out your new park and despite the sometimes misty weather people did.
The Architect who designed it is Michael Van Valkenburgh. He and his firm have designed other parks and he came well recommended. He spent a lot of time just listening to the people who were financing the park about what they wanted and he came to Tulsa and looked at the city and the surrounding region and tried to capture the soul of the city.
One article I read talked about his visit to Chandler Park and how struck he was with the “lost city section” with the stone making seeming streets and alleys and he incorporated that concept into the park.
The place is full of details. I think they spent a fortune on landscaping, including many wildflowers.
And stuff to do? My gosh their is a lot to do there. Especially if you have kids. I think this log course above might be something I could try.
They have a lot of areas for relaxing and will have several restaurants. This a nice area that is well shaded. I love the wood furniture.
This is view from the the previous area down to a bridge across a pond.
And this is from the bridge back up to the eating area. This is the ONEOK Boathouse. My employer paid for it. (I’m so proud, really, I am.) What a legacy. (And yes ONEOK is all caps, you pronounced it One Oak.)
The heart of the park is a huge playground for kids of all ages. Oh man, for the first time since I was a little kid, I wanted to be a little kid. This looks fun.
And so does this. I would settle for having an eight year old again. Son Logan was with me, but he is 20 years old and 6’3″ tall.
Kids were having a blast. Talk about a bunch of places to climb into, climb across, slide down. It is the ultimate “do touch” place. And yes, it is all free. There is no charge. In addition to the $400 million is money for security and maintenance. What a gift to the city.
The concept of A Gathering Place is that is a place for the whole city to come and reconnect from each other. I think we need it. A little known secret is that Tulsa is home of the worse race riot in US history, the Tulsa Race Riot, now increasingly known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Read about it here.
In my opinion, the city has never recovered from that and the wounds still exist. There are still survivors of the riot alive in Tulsa today. Anyway, the New York Times has a pretty good, if a little more than slightly condescending article on the park, and the riot. Read it here.
Read the comments also. I know us Okies get a bad rap and my favorite comment was from a New Yorker who said she would never visit the state because she hates us Okies because of the hate we have in our heart. (Huh).
https://flic.kr/p/2aNZswd
Be that as it may, the park is fun, and great. And I expect to spend a lot of time there especially when the hubub dies down a little bit. It is only a couple miles from downtown where I work. I figure during the day the kids will be at school, so I can come and try out the banana slide for myself.
Pooh!! I know it is probably not officially a Pooh bear, who could afford the licensing fees. It has a nook inside just right for several kids and an adult reading a story.
There was a steel drum band playing. I love steel drum bands.
My favorite place is probably the Williams Lodge. It is like a ski lodge in the Rockies. The woodwork is superb.
I loved the ceiling!!
The guy behind the park is a Tulsa Oilman billionaire philanthropist named George Kaiser, who over the years has been very generous to Tulsa through his George Kaiser Family Foundation. He is in the oil business and obviously has done very well. I know several people who have worked for and with him and they credit him as being a very good but tough boss and also thinks very out of the box. I get the impression that he is playing chess when everybody else is trying to figure out checkers. He has several hundred million dollars invested in the park and was able to convince lots of other companies to contribute as well.
The fireplace is a favorite.
The designer of the place had to contend with something. Most of the land was on one side of Riverside Drive and the Arkansas River was on the other side. He wanted to integrate the park with the river so he used “land bridges” to link the park with the river. There are two of them and they are genius.
I am just glad the running/biking trail is back in business. It is all new. For three years we have contended with the one mile gap, now we don’t any longer. And the trail integrates well with the park.
Sports is a big thing in America and Tulsa and the park has tons of sports courts of all kinds. Logan and I sat down and watched the ladies play 3 on 3 basketball. They were very very good. The park plans on having lots of sports programming.
Logan and I went up to Woolaroc Museum and Preserve today to check out a couple of geocaches installed on the grounds of the preserve.
“The Trail of Tears” by Robert Lindneaux. Andrew Jackson oversaw the ejection of thousands of Native Americans from the southeast USA to Oklahoma and elsewhere. Many died on the way over. To this day Andrew Jackson is not a popular guy among the tribes in Oklahoma.
While there we breezed through the museum. We have been there lots of times but it has been at least a year and a half for me and I was glad to see a few changes from the last time I was through.
I love this chuckwagon exhibit. I love chuckwagons. That is where the food is!!
I checked on some old favorites. This is a bust of Geronimo the baddest of the bad (or the baddest of the good). My late father was a student of western history had studied up on Geronimo. His favorite story was about the Tonto Apache Tribe who were scouts for General Crook who finally convinced Geronimo to surrender. When Geronimo’s braves were on the train to Florida to begin their imprisonment, Crook’s troops told the Tonto scouts to get on the train also. One reason why we have trust issues with Native American’s maybe?
They have machine guns on exhibit also. One time several years ago when I was there. A guy was inspecting it really closely and said, “You know, I don’t think that this actually works. I am not sure it is going to help come crunch time.” We are kind of hard core here in Oklahoma.
I always love the airplane hanging from the ceiling in the basement. I wonder if they would ever take it out and fly it again?
Enough of all that! Time to hit the trails. We found a couple of nice full size geocaches on the trails in the preserve on the beautiful 60 degree sunny day we had in Oklahoma.
I’ve made about a dozen and a half posts on Woolaroc. Use the search icon (the magnifying glass) on the upper right hand corner of this page to see if some of them might interest you.
I’ve always loved oil refineries. As a young kid, it seemed like big important things were going on with big towers and huge tanks and all sorts of pipes and lots of electric power lines. Ironically, I have a chemical engineering degree and have only spent a few hours inside a refinery. Oh well, I’ve done other things.
This is one of two refineries that HollyFrontier operates in Tulsa. I used Topaz Glow to add a little drama to the scene.
The refineries are located on the west side of Tulsa along with a power plant, a trash to energy steam plant, a bunch of trucking outfits, and oilfield manufacturing companies. All this industrial stuff is the original financing of the all the nice part of Tulsa. The art deco office towers, museums, and all the rest. I’ve always found the dichotomy fascinating.
As my knee is getting stronger I am back to walking around downtown like I used to only not quite as far. Tuesday I strolled to the east side and checked out the progress on a new building. I swear they have been building this thing for a long time.
I kind of like its modern design with steel beams, lots of glass, balconies, and geometric theme. It is some sort of technology company I think and it looks almost ready to move in. Sorry for the dull pics. It was very overcast.
I posted this photo on Instagram. It is the “Urban” filter on the Prisma app. I love prisma. Maybe I love it too much.
Miss Lizzie the kitten has taken my spot. Nothing like a sleeping kitten.
It’s Christmas Eve and things are kind of slowing down a little bit. The shopping is basically done for both the gifts and cooking. We are going to have time to enjoy each other’s company.
Abbie and her goofy grin.
My brother joined us yesterday. He had a grueling drive through some driving rain and he was exhausted when he got here.
Ginger is a little sweetie. She gets cold in the winter. I think she wants us to move to Scotsdale or maybe a warm beach somewhere. Heather bought her this bed for the living room and a fleece throw. She can roll herself up in the throw like a burrito.
Son Logan has been working the 3 pm to 8 pm shift for several nights at the grocery store. He was also tired. He went to bed early. He has a few days off over the holidays which is great. He needs the rest. In the midst of all this he finished his finals. The boy who hates math made a B in his pre-calculus class. He is done with his math requirement. He didn’t get my math genes but he got his singing genes from his mother’s side.
We spent some time with Heather’s mother yesterday and will be going back today. She has three trees up for Christmas. I love this in particular. It is a country theme and has a wood stove that has been in her family a long time. It is not connected and that is okay, it just sits there looking great.
We had a little bit of snow yesterday and it was cold enough and overcast enough it persisted all day. Something about snow is calming.
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan is quite a read. It is a novel set in the middle 1930’s through mid World War II about a girl Anna and her family who live in New York City. The book starts out a little quietly but builds to quite a story featuring Irish and Italian mobsters and associated treachery, learning how to be come a navy diver, U Boat attacks, double lives, hopelessness and redemption. The book is about how complex people are and we don’t really fully understand others. I loved it and recommend it highly.
I got to see the Eclipse in Totality in Idaho Falls, Idaho. My dad’s assisted living center had a viewing organized for the residents, staff, and guests. My sister had already bought me a pair of glasses.
They brought out a bunch of chairs and provided refreshments and snacks. They had a narrator also telling us what was going on.
So I got out there kind of late. The sun seemed as bright as ever but you would tell that the temperature was lowering and a breeze was picking up. Also, as the eclipse progressed, it didn’t seem to get that much darker until the very end but we could hear the crickets start chirping and the birds started singing. Right before totality it started getting notably darker.
It got pretty dark but there was light on the horizon for 360 degrees around us. The narrator told us that we could take our glasses off and look directly at the eclipse. I didn’t bring my good camera, just my cell phone.
When we took off our glasses off, everybody gasped. I have not seen any photographs yet that gives the experience justice.
It was like living, breathing physics and astronomy and was a little overwhelming. I can understand a little more why people spent such vast sums of money coming from all over to experience.
The next total eclipse coming to the USA is on April 8, 2024 and is nipping the very southeastern corner of Oklahoma. The above is a NASA map of the route of totality. I’m going to do my best to experience it again.
I heard somebody talking about a series of autobiographical novels by a Norwegian Author and was fascinated by the concept. I mean, what is an autobiographical novel anyway? I have a feeling that many autobiographies are somewhat novels but I don’t want to get side tracked down that rabbit hole. So anyway I read about the the books.
The books are six in number published in Norwegian from 2009 to 2011. The books are called “My Struggle” and numbered one through six and were written by Karl Ove Knausgaard and reveal his private life, thoughts, and dreams. He names family members and gets into all sorts of private matters. This has resulted in turmoil with his family members and amazingly he did not anticipate the response from the people close to him.
I just finished Book One and found it fascinating. There really is not plot or anything and the whole book is about the struggle he had dealing with his father. He describes in detail his actions, his thoughts and responses to what is going on around him and for some reason I find it gripping and read it very quickly. He turns his life inside out with all the contradictions, and self defeating thoughts and actions and inconsistencies. It is almost like reading about oneself. (Or at least myself). It has been said that reading the book is like opening up somebody else’s diary and finding your secrets in it.
So, I am looking forward to reading the other five. Only three so far have been translated into English but I am sure that it is just a matter of time.
One of my favorite sights in Idaho Falls is the LDS Idaho Falls Temple on the Snake River. It is a beautiful building situated on the river. It has clean, classic lines and is visible from a long ways up and down the river.
It is capped with a fiberglass, gold gilded sculpture of the Mormon Prophet Moroni blowing his trumpet.
The build was dedicated in 1945 and was just the eight temple dedicated by the church. They have been on quite a building program since. They are not open to non-Mormons in good standing but I was fortunate enough to tour the Oklahoma City Temple prior to its dedication in 2000. I was very impressed with the quality of construction and sumptuousness of materials used in the building and furnishings. Check out this web site for more information about the Idaho Falls Temple and Mormon temples in general. For information about why Mormon’s build temples and their importance to their religion, check this official LDS web site.
I personally am not a Mormon, I am a Christian, but I respect their right to exercise their religion in the way they choose and in these contentious times I really like the idea of a sacred space where the issues of the day are set aside for the spiritual and eternal things in life. No matter what religion one is.
