Category Archives: My Corner of the World

2024 Snake Run at Tulsa’s Lubell Park

I don’t run at all any longer and I enter very few races. Time was I ran two or three times a week and ran at least a race a month or even more in the Spring and Fall. Age and injuries are to blame. I’m injury free now and intend to stay that way but I am still pretty active I walk about 400 to 500 miles a year and bicycle about twice that, plus I have been doing yoga for several years now twice a week and about the same on weight training. I’ll say that yoga has been a lifesaver. I am getting my flexibility back slowly over the years and wish that I had started earlier. Oh well, I’m doing it now.

I have barely started the post and I’m way off point. I participated in the Tulsa Snake Run last Sunday. It is a trail race and it has a unique feature. Everybody “runs” the same time (three hours, or six hours, take your pick). The person who ran the longest wins!! You run in a loop. This year’s event was a two mile loop at Lubell Park. So you just run round and round until your time is up. Only full loops count. No partial credit.

I ran this race for years when I was still running and it was at Turkey Mountain. When I didn’t race I helped man the Aid Tent. Trail Races are special. Everybody is very chill.

The elite trail runners are amazing. They run very fast over all kinds of terrain, boulders, mud, up the sides of mountains. Doesn’t matter, they are blazingly fast. Me, I picked my way through the technical terrain and just trotted on the flat dirt spots. I think I have come in dead last in more than one such race. Doesn’t bother me.

So Sunday morning was cold and I had been staying up very late at the Tulsa Irish Festival listening to kick ass Irish bands from Scotland, France, and Kansas and drinking Irish beer. I kept it all under control alcohol wise but got to bed way too late. Plus Sunday was spring forward day for daylight savings time. I went to bed Saturday night (really Sunday morning) thinking if I make the race, great. If I don’t, too bad.

The race started at 9 am and I woke up at 8:15 am. So I got up, got dressed, and headed out to Lubell Park and got there at 8:45. Plenty of time to check in and get ready.

My plan was to do two loops and then quit. Not quite of the spirit of things but realistic. At the start of the race it was cold so I didn’t take any pics cuz I had my gloves on and I had not woke up yet. I was ~~running~~ walking in a totally non-caffeinated state. That was a major oversight on my part. It took me about 40 minutes to do the first loop and by then I had woke up and it was a lot warmer so I put the gloves away and got the phone out and took a few photos.

Here is a photo of me taking by somebody associated with the run. I look kind of like an ugly sasquatch who hasn’t had his coffee yet. So anyway the rest of the race was great. Beautiful day, great course, nice professionally designed and built sustainable trail. It was a joy. I thought maybe I could do one more two more loop but I had obligations and my legs were sore so I called it quits after two loops and four miles.

The aid station was great. Trail runs have more than just water and gatorade, they have snacks cuz the distance runners need carbos and salt. You will see lots of pickles and pickle juice at aid station along with cookies and such. They were going to cook food later on for the people who, unlike me, finished the race. And there might of been some adult malted beverages available as well.

Here were the awards. Custom made snake awards. And I have to give a plug to the organizers of the Race, Runners World Tulsa. Tulsa has a great running community and many outfits capable of putting on a fun, safe, competent race. Runners World put on the race. They put on lots of races and they do it competently and without a lot of drama. Something comes up, they handle it and move on. Very nice people as well. The courses are well marked, the aid stations fully stocked, the timing people get it right. Plus they are a great running store.

Another unique thing about the race is that they don’t have race tee shirts. I have lots and lots of race tee shirts but Sunday I got my first pair of race socks. I think they are ultra cool. And just so you know I did not finish my customary dead last in the race. I was pretty close to last but not quite.

So I had a wonderful experience! And just so you know, I paid my own fees on this race. They only thing I got extra was a couple of high fives!

I am linking with My Corner of the World.

Skies – Here, There, and Everywhere

I went walking a couple times at Tulsa’s Lafortune Park. Treated to the sunset one time.

I noticed this brush with beautiful coral flowers. Google lens tells me that it is Chinese Quince.

The redbud trees are starting to bud out. The Eastern Redbud is Oklahoma’s State Tree. I love them.

Fuzzy pic of people playing golf at one of the golf courses there.

Memorial High School has a baseball field that they were using.

I also went geocaching at Expo Square. I didn’t find the one here but I love this locomotive. It is retired now but pulled logging trains in southeast Oklahoma for years.

And checked out the Golden Driller there. It is dressed up in honor of City Year Tulsa’s tenth anniversary. They are the sponsor the people I tutor for. City Year is under attack for pushing a “woke ideology.” I’ve been tutoring grade school kids for five years now and the only ideology I have been trained to push on the kids is learning how to read.

Another geocaching stop. I didn’t find this one either but I loved the windmill in the stiff Oklahoma breeze.

Another time I went to Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center and walked the trails.

And enjoyed the views.

As you can I have been busy.

I’m linking with Skywatch Friday. and My Corner of the World

Turkey Mountain Work Day

A bunch of people got up early last Sunday morning and headed out to Tulsa Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness for a Work Day. I’m a member of the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition, the organizer of the event. Lots of people from the community joined in. Notice the camera lady interviewing the President of TUWC? Check this link on the coverage they provided of the event.

It was a perfect storm of great weather and great publicity. Also, there was a promised pancake breakfast. All told about 70 or so people showed up to work on a variety of project. Everything from picking up litter and lopping trees and brush on the trails to some heavy duty trail armoring involving moving heavy rocks (100 pounds or so) to help with erosion control. There were also fence building projects to separate hikers from the downhill bicycle trails, and other erosion control projects.

The various projects were described and people gathered around the designated project leads for what they wanted to do. All tools and equipment are provided. We ask participants to bring gloves, water, and appropriate clothing. I was the designated lead for those who wanted to pick up litter and clear limbs. I ended up with about ten or so people of all ages, including some Boy Scouts and their moms and a dad. So we got our garbage bags and loppers and off we went to clear out the Snake Trail.

It took us about two hours to work on the two miles of designated trails. Everybody stayed with it very well.

I had another event to go to so I didn’t get to participate in the pancake breakfast but from all reports it was a success. I think everyone involved enjoyed the event and they really did some good. Check out the TUWC facebook page for over a hundred other photographs and some more descriptions of the work that was done.

I am linking with My Corner of the World

Skywatch Friday – Geocaching Adventure at Lake Bixhoma

Lake Bixhoma is a water supply lake for the Tulsa suburb of Bixby. It is known for its clean water and protection from wind since it is surrounded on three sides by hills. It has a few hiking trails that are known for being kind of tough plus they have all sorts of venomous snakes there. I’ve been lucky and never seen one except for a water snake last year. The place also has a geocache that has not been found in four years. So I wanted to do two things. Find the cache and hike completely around the lake which I have never done before. I also wanted to lessen the chances of serpent encounter by doing the hike while the snakes were still in brumation (the snake form of hibernation.)

So I started off at the beginning. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of this map at the time. All I wanted to do was avoid the “snake farm” indicated on the upper part of the map. Off I went. You don’t really need a map. Just keep the lake in sight and you’ll be okay. That turned out not to be totally true.

The trail is a mix of old road, nice single track and some pretty technical rocky sections.

They used to have a road that went deeper into the park and had picnic pavilions, restrooms and such. These are now abandoned.

There is evidence of old farms and houses here. I’m told that this is a model T axle. How it got there, I don’t know.

There is a little creek flowing into the lake.

Last year I came looking for the cache and turned back at this creek crossing. I had my good camera with me and no walking stick. So I didn’t want to take a tumble into the water. This year I came upon a young woman who had two dogs on leash who was considering the crossing and went ahead and did it even though the dogs were pulling here pretty hard. I said, okay if she can do it I can so I got across with dry feet.

Soon after crossing I started deadheading to the cache. No trail so I was going around thorns and such. Found me this old turtle shell.

And a skull of some unlucky critter.

I got to ground zero which was almost on the lake. It looks like one could take a kayak almost all the way there. In fact almost all the previous finders used a kayak but had to beach it in marshy areas and get all muddy coming in.

I looked for the cache for an hour. I was envisioning something big like an ammo box. I was convinced that the cache had gone missing. “Muggled” they say in the geocaching world. I looked for it for an hour or so and couldn’t find it. I had marked ground zero with my blue water bottle and when I gave up looking for the cache well then I couldn’t find my bottle. So I had to hunt for the water bottle and when I found it, I saw the cache. Which is why I marked the zero point with my bottle. I could have saved an hour, oh well.

The thing is that the cache container’s top had been chewed by some critter and the container was level full of water. So I obviously could not sign the log. I’m still claiming it! I logged the find online and cache owner got back with me and said that they would replace the container.

So then I hiked out. Since I wanted to circumnavigate the lake I had to take the long way out. It was a mile and a half to the cache site and I hike almost two and a half miles to get back out. A good time was had by all is my motto.

I am linking with Skywatch Friday and My Corner of the World.

My Corner of the World – Making the World Smaller

Sometimes I think I do too much social media type stuff. One of the things I do is PostCrossing. It’s a site where people from all over the world exchange post cards. If you send a card to somebody, then somebody else sends you card. I have exchanged 321 cards over the years with people from 49 countries. Most exchangers are perfunctory but I always check and see what their interests are and if they are on social media. So far I’ve added a few people that way on instagram and found a few geocachers.

You can request what kind of cards you want and I say I like art so I get quite a few cards showing photographs of art works from all over the world. I got a card from somebody from the Ukraine with the above image on it. The back of the card said “I want to introduce you to the Belarusian artist Leonid Afremov… He lived in in Mexico and the USA for many years.” My interest was piqued because here is a guy from Belarus painting a bull fighting scene. I googled Leonid Afremov and sure enough he was an artist who lived in the USA for several years and then moved to Play Carmen, Mexico and then died there.

His family still runs his studio and offers his art up for sale on the internet. I love his style to extravagant and colorful and the prices are reasonable. Go check it out.

The bad part of social media is the creeps you end up running into. The good part is how you can learn things about people from one to one interactions. I have online friends all over the world and I value them tremendously. I hardly ever get the opportunity to meet one in real life.

I’m linking up with My Corner of the World.

A Rainy Afternoon at the 2024 Tulsa Boat Show

I went to the Tulsa Boat Show on a rainy day last weekend and here he is what I saw.

Lots of personal watercraft on display. I’ve never been on one of these and I think it would be a blast. I know people who cannot afford boats buy these things now. They are the size of a small boat.

I loved the color of this boat.

Our sheriff’s department brought one of their boats. I think riding in one of these would also be fun.

There were a couple of vintage wooden boats on display, not for sale. This is a 1959 Riva Ariston built in Italy. It is named Bella Vita which means “Beautiful Life.”

I cannot imagine putting it in the water. It is number 219 of 1021 built.

This is a 1955 Chris Craft Cobra 21′. It’s also gorgeous. Number 18 of only 56 built.

And back to boats for sale. They had a bunch of pontoon boats. My in-laws had one and it was fun.

And bass boats. I saw one for $91,000. I bought a used bass boat when I lived near a lake in Texas back in the day. It was used and I think I paid like $400 and sold it back to the guy I bought it from for $400. The two happiest days of my life were the day I bought and the day I sold it.

Lots of little light weight travel trailers. I love the retro design of this one. It had the door at the back.

This was probably the most popular trailer. I had to stand in place for a while before traffic cleared out so I could take a photo. A trailer with a back deck and loft sleeping areas. It also is a rear entry.

The interior is cool.

Here’s another two story trailer but not near as nice. So I guess the kids sleep up top to give mom and dad a little privacy?

And some RV’s. Here is a truck conversion.

And here is a deluxe version.

They had four wheelers for sale.

And two wheelers.

Anyway, it was a nice day to spend a rainy couple of hours. I don’t buy anything, I just like looking.

I am linking with My Corner of the World. Go check it out!!

My Corner of the World – The Flycatcher Trail

I was at an event recently that had a bunch of people with associated with environmental and conservation groups. I got to talking with somebody was with the Tulsa Audubon Society and she mentioned they partner with Jenks School District, close to Tulsa, on an outdoor classroom located right next to one of the schools. That perked my interest up and she said it was just a fraction of an acre but was packed with all sorts of stuff. She said it had an attractive water feature that local photographers use and was open to the public.

It has been cold, wet, and rainy here and so my outdoor time has been limited but one day we got a little break in the rain so I went to find it. Iphone maps was no help but I knew what school it was by and found it that way. It’s called the Flycatcher Trail. Check out their web page and their facebook page. They are very active with work days and other events. You will also find a better physical address than Apple Maps has for it.

So I went looking for it and found it and it is as advertised. Lots of and lots of things in a very small space, and very well done.

They have habitat with birds, insects, and small critters.

A very nice water feature with a space for photography.

They have small winding trails going this way..

and thay way

leading to purple moutain houses

and two chimney swift towers

They are also a demonstration garden so they have things like this rain barrel. We get lots of rain in Oklahoma so a rain barrel can come in handy.

Anyways, this was a fun find. I love how they get the kids involved in it. Anything we can do to get kids off devices and checking into nature is a good thing.

I’m linking with My Corner of the World.

Armchair Skywatching

For whatever reasons I haven’t been out much since the first part of this month. Too cold, too rainy, blah blah blah. I’ve got lots of excuses.

The above is a tree in my backyard. We are still waiting on a new fence. I’ve paid the guy a deposit now we just need it to stop raining.

This photo and the two following are of Tulsa’s Own Park just northwest of downtown Tulsa. I think it may be Tulsa’s oldest park. It has fallen by the wayside. The city keeps the grass mowed, picks up litter, and chases off vagrants and such but it has been abandoned to the neighborhood and they seem to love it.

It is such an old place and feels settled in. And over the years their have been lots of geocaches planted there so I was there in December hunting down a couple of new ones.

And I love the pond. It is home to quite a menagerie of waterfowl. I think many of them are escaped or released pets.

This is a re-edit (all the photos in the post are re-edits) of a shot I took during out trip in December to Colorado Springs. We drove through the Oklahoma panhandle. You can see forever out there. I found the big sky and lonely highway exhilarating.

This is a tree on a hilltop at Tulsa’s Bales Park from a hike I took a year ago. (Another re-edit.) It was a dark, cold day and I had the place to myself. You cannot really tell from the photo but the hill in the background is the Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness Area. Between Bales Park and Turkey Mountain is a four lane limited access highway, US 75.

Speaking of Turkey Mountain this is re-edited photo of some sort of bicycle obstacle built there by volunteers. Back in the day, Turkey Mountain was pretty wild. The powers that be lightly administered it. They certainly didn’t build and maintain sustainable trails like they do now. So people, especially the bicyclists, would haul in lumber and build their own features. All over the place. Most of it was pretty rickety. It was wonder nobody died. At least I don’t think anybody died. If they did, I think the other bikers might have just dug a shallow hole, dragged the pour soul into it, covered them up, toasted him or her with a beer and kept on keeping on. Snitches get stitches is their motto.

I’m linking to My Corner of the World and Skywatch Friday. Check them out!!

Skywatch Friday – Cold Snowy Spell

It has been a week! We have had some wicked cold weather and a little bit of snow.

Last Friday, my brother got sick and we spent hours in the emergency room. Turns out he had covid. So they bundled him up and sent back to his residence where he is being isolated for a while. I went home and tested negative but have been self isolating for five days. So stay at home, no gym nor anything else where people are. Low single digits inhibited me from doing anything outside so I’ve been a couch potato.

I had this bright idea of taking the drone out to various places around town and launching it. First though the batteries were all low and it took hours to charge them up. I went on a little test run in the back yard and I got just a little ways up in the air and the drone went crazy and one of the motors started barking. The screen on the controller said “Too Cold” so I nixed that but I got a few photos showing the snow in the neighborhood.

Normally with as sunny as it is our one inch would be gone but it is sticking around because it is so cold.

It took me about 20 minutes to push the snow off the driveway and walkways. If I didn’t it would turn to ice. Now that is really fun to deal with, especially when you are 68 years old!

So tomorrow I’ll self test and I’ll be free again!! (If I test negative) Plus it will be warmer outside. Probably going to be too muddy to go hiking ethically but I’ll find something else to do. Don’t you worry!! And my brother is doing okay as well. He is apartment is kind of small and he is going stir crazy. They will be testing him and if negative, he’ll be free as well! Being free is good in my book.

The other thing that happened last week is that I got notified by the internet company that hosts my blog that I had way too much traffic on it and it wasn’t coming from my friendly global blogging friends. It was coming under attack by evildoers! Traffic was up by a factor of 47,000!! They said fix it or we are going to shut you off. They were nice about it though. They sent a bunch of data on what was happening and gave me seven tasks I could do that would probably work.

Hey, couldn’t go anywhere, so the next day I went through the seven things with a sense of dread. Computerspeak is like a foreign language but with the links they provided I was able to tighten up security and upgrade things and it only took a few hours so I asked them to evaluate again and they said I fixed it and complemented me on how quickly I got-er done. Whew, big sigh of relief. My motto on the blog is if it is not broke don’t fix it. Turns out that is not too smart.

So that is about it for this week! I am linking with Skywatch Friday and My Corner of the World.

Oklahoma’s Thomas Smith Cemetery

I have a hobby called geocaching which involves finding objects hidden in various places by other people. Sometimes searching for the geocaches takes me to very interesting places and that happened recently when I was looking for a geocache in rural Oklahoma just east of the town of Broken Arrow. It was a cemetery.

It was a small place called the Thomas Smith Cemetery. The sign also said that it was started in 1902 by Mr. Smith from his allotment of 160 acres and that he was a Creek Freedman and also a Muskogee Creek Nation Citizen. The sign also said Muskogee Creek Indian Freedman Band. So I had a lot of questions like what is a Creek Freedman? What does it mean to be a Muskogee Creek Nation Citizen and who is the Muskogee Creek Indian Freedman Band.

So I turned to my friend, the internet and found out that a Creek Freedman was a black person, who was probably also a slave owned by a Creek Nation Citizen. These slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and according to a treaty with the United States soon thereafter, the Creek Nation agreed that the freedmen were to be members of the nation.

Later when the United States took away communal tribal land in Oklahoma, they allocated it to tribal members via the Dawes Commission. Things were rocked along until 1979 when the Muskogee Nation adopted a new constitution that among other things ejected the Freedman from the Muscogee Nation. Thus the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band was formed in order to advance the interests of the Creek Freedmen and regain citizenship with the Creek Nation. I got all this information from their excellent website. I hope I didn’t make too much of a hash of the information. Further I read that in September 2023 a Creek Nation Judge ruled that Freedman must be admitted as citizens of the Nation. I find the whole matter fascinating. The Nation is appealing the ruling.

I also found a 2021 press release from the Muscogee Creek Indian Freedmen Band announcing their acquisition of the Thomas Smith Cemetery. It provides a lot of historical information and discusses some of the people interred there.

The one I was most intrigued with was William Lacy, a one time slave who fought for the Union during the Civil War with the USCI which I found out was the “United States Colored Infantry.” There were also grave stones for people who fought in both world wars and the Vietnam War. Also interred there are people who who were affected by the Tulsa Race Massacre.

Who’d of thought that a very small country cemetery out in the middle of nowhere would have so much history packed into it including issues that are ongoing today?

Linking with My Corner of the World