Sunday evening I attended a stakeholder meeting on Turkey Mountain with the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition and others to get a tour of the new trail they are building and get our feedback. Previously I had paralleled the trail this time we actually got to walk on it.

It’s going to be a bi-directional multi-use trail for bikers, runners and walkers. It is nice and wide and after seeing it I think it will work well.

For bicyclists they have a “Choose your adventure” options where you can take jumps if you want to or bypass them.

A huge difference from the existing trails is the extensive work they are doing to cut down on water erosion. They are following the land contours and the trail is side sloped one to two degrees to encourage water running perpendicular to the trail than down it. They are also taking the rocks they find and putting them downhill from the trail to help contain the dirt.

They have some great banked turns.

Here is an action shot of me (on the right) stolen from a friend’s facebook post. Hopefully he won’t sue me.

We came to end of the construction. They only have about a half mile or less to finish this segment. This is the first mile out of 13 or 14 miles in phase one of five phases.

They hope to open this in the next few weeks. I think it will be epic. They asked each one of us what we liked and what our concerns are. Everybody loves the trail, the main concern is minimizing conflicts between bicyclists and walker/runners. This trail will be the fastest bicycling trail on the mountain when it is completed and will be popular with the jumps and steep banks. The Riverparks Authority is planning on a lot of mitigation measures such as making sure that the turns have clear sight lines and education measures so everybody understands who has the right of way (people on foot do) and encourage mutual courtesy.

So we are pretty excited about our new trails. There are other changes coming as well. They might be having the first prescribed burn. That will help a lot getting rid of non-native species and clearing out the understory.

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