We’ve had big Thanksgivings and smaller ones, especially with this pandemic we have been having. This year is a smaller one. A big treat is that we are having Thanksgiving on Wednesday with my brother at his Assisted Living Center. I’m looking forward to that.
It will just be a few of us on Thanksgiving Day. As our waistlines have expanded, we have downsized the meal. We don’t have the appetites we used to have anyway. We use disposable plates for the meal so nobody gets stuck with the dishes.
We’ll be counting our blessings as well. We have lots to be thankful for.
My wife and I made a weekend trip to Bentonville, Arkansas for a short getaway. On our last day we ventured up to nearby Bella Vista and checked out the “Mildred B. Cooper Memorial Chapel.” A non-denominational wedding chapel. Hit the link above for more information. Check here for historical information on who Mildred B. Cooper was.
It was designed by E. Fay Jones along with his partner Maurice Jennings. Jones also designed the Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs and the Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel near Kansas City, Missouri. I’ve been fortunate enough to see both chapels. Hit the links for my blog posts on those structures. Jones was an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright and the architecture school at the University of Arkansas bears his name, the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.
The Cooper Chapel is like the others. It is light, airy, and appears to float in the air. There are fifteen main arches, each 50 feet tall. In all 31 tons of steel were used and support 4640 square feet of glass.
It is open to the public every day unless it is booked for an event.
My wife inside the main entrance
It sits on a wooded knoll high above a lake. It is an incredible structure.
Tuesday was a very warm day here in Tulsa. After my yoga class I headed up close to downtown to Woodward Park. Lots and lots of trees here and tons of fall color. So I just wandered around.
Maria Tallchief
I stopped by the Five Moons, Oklahoma’s Native American ballerinas. In the last century these five women, Maria Tallchief, Marjorie Tallchief, Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower, and Moscylene Larkin were at the top of the ballet world. Hit the link above to find out more. The sculptures are actually on the grounds of the Tulsa History Museum which is adjacent to Woodward Park.
I also stopped by “Appeal to the Great Spirit” to check him out. I love this sculpture. It used to be in a local high school until they tore the school down and the statue was moved to Woodward Park.
Lots of brilliant fall color on disply.
I love this blast of yellow as seen from the shadows.
A similar effect here.
And here is shrub bursting with sunlight.
Stopped by my favorite sculpture of all time. “Poems and Promises” by Rosalind Cook. I used the Hipstamatic and Snapseed App on this.
By now I was getting hungry and I was close to downtown so I headed off to the Arts District.
I got some coneys from James Coney Island. It’s been in Tulsa for over a hundred years. I get them with cheese, chili, and onions and add a healthy splash of hot sauce and pepper them chili powder. Don’t knock it until you try it.
They sky was clear Tuesday night so I took this shot. It’s the Beaver Moon at 93% waxing gibbous so not quite full.
I hope everybody is having a great week!! I”ll be linking with Skywatch Friday, come check it out!!
MacGyver was a television show back in the 1980’s and1990’s that featured a private eye who improvised all sorts of tools to get him and his friends out of bad situations.
Friday I started down this trail in south Tulsa. I was looking for a geocache with multiple steps that promised that one would have to use some MacGyver skills to find. I was sorely prepared. All I had with me was a pen. I even left my swiss army knife home. In other words you have to find intermediate steps before you get the cache. These are called multi-caches. I started on this one in August of 2020 but couldn’t find the first step. The cache owner (“CO”) gave me a clue. I held off until Friday. With the clue I found the first step. It had a device that if properly worked would give me the second stage.
Taking the results I walked another half mile and the coordinates I had would put the second stage in the middle of a gated apartment community. Oops!! So I walked the half mile back to the first step and checked my manipulations and yep, I messed up.
So off I went bushwhacking through the woods. November is a great time for bushwhacking. August, no so much. I ended up finding the second stage. I could see the container but I could not get to it so I had to improvise using what was available at hand. I’m not showing the details out of courtesy to the cache owner and other people who go look for it. Anyway, my improvisation worked and I had to go bushwhacking a long ways to go not very far.
This isn’t the cache but I thought it was. It is a very heavy battery abandoned out in the woods. It’s too heavy to carry out so I am trying to figure out how to get it out to a recycling center. It still has lead in it which is awful for the environment. So I am pondering what to do about this.
I did find the container but I needed a code to open it. The CO sent me the code because I was too much of a simpleton to figure it out on my own. Then even with the code I had too look up on youtube how to open the thing. I am not showing the container, again out of courtesy to the owners of the cache. The video shows everything in the area of the cache, except for the cache.
I opened it up and looked at the log and I was surprised to see that I was the first person since 2017 to find the thing. In fact there have been only three finders since 2014. I love caches like this.
I was at Tulsa Philbrook Museum Gardens checking out the fall foliage when I noticed some crystal balls hanging in one of the trees. So I went to check them out.l
They had hung all these balls in the lower branches. I loved them. I think they are for the Christmas holidays.
I had my lensball with me so I made a crystal photo of a crystal. I love garden decorations.
Last week was the busiest I have been in a while. I helped out at the Leave No Trace event here in Tulsa so I was there for most of it. Not that big a deal really, about four or five hours a day so don’t feel sorry for me but it was a lot to me.
Wild Turkeys hanging out on Turkey Mountain at the YMCA where the Leave No Trace Account was held. They Turkeys were there every day.
It started Wednesday and ended Saturday. Lots and lots of good stuff happened and I was glad to be a small part of it.
Oxley Nature Center
The way I recover from stress is to head back to nature. Sunday night I went to Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center. They close the gate at 5 pm so I parked outside the gate and climbed over the fence. (Totally legal folks!!) One of the people I met at the event told me where to find the river otters at Oxley. That got my attention!! I have never seen one in the wild. (Spoiler alert, I still haven’t seen one.)
It was beautiful, the sun was getting low and the leaves were glowing.
There is nothing like a lonely trail through the woods.
I didn’t find the otters but I found a few deer including this one who posed for me.
The next evening I went back to Turkey Mountain. Not too many people in what is called the back country when the sun starts going down.
I found this deer and a few of his siblings and mom. I just had my point and shoot with me and this is the only photo I got. I have gotten pretty good at figuring out where the deer are in the evening on the mountain and how they move.
The sun was going down and the trees were putting on a show.
Sunset near what is called Rock City.
At some point the color is going to get a little better and then we’ll get a big wind and all those trees will be on the ground.
And again, give me a trail through the woods anytime.
So how do you recharge the batteries?
Come join party at Skywatch Friday. Lots of talented people there.
It’s been a busy and productive past week. A team from the “Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics” based out of Boulder Colorado has been on Turkey Mountain conducting “Leave No Trace Hot Spot” training. A Hot Spot, is an area that is being loved to death and Turkey Mountain fills the bill. What they are trying to do is to teach people how to enjoy the outdoors responsibly to help these areas bounce back.
The Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition applied for, and received approval, for the Hot Spot. The River Parks Authority and the Herman and Kate Kaiser YMCA also sponsored the training. The Y provided their beautiful new revamped facility as the site for the training.
The trainers surveyed the mountain and held workshops geared towards local teachers and property managers on how to educate students and park users to be better stewards of the land. It is all data and science driven. Check out their web site. They have a lot of resources available.
I learned a huge amount about how to use a property softly. No more will I throw an apple core into the woods after eating it. Nor will I cut across switchbacks when I am in a hurry. I learned that plastic bottles never decompose, ever. They just break into smaller and smaller pieces and now the average american eats about 44 pounds of microplastics during their lifetime. I also received a great deal of information about peeing and pooping outdoors.
It was also amazing that the Hot Spot training happened the week that the River Parks Authority announced the start of Phase One of the Turkey Mountain Master Plan.
This link has some great ideas to keep in mind when you want to outdoors.
They have a ton of stuff on their Youtube Channel. They have a whole series on “Don’t Be That Guy” Here is the first one.
Friday afternoon the Tulsa Riverparks Authority held a ground breaking on the lower parking lot at the Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness. They announced that phase one of the Master Plan to protect and preserve Turkey Mountain was going to start on November 15. It is incredible to many of us to have this day. A few years ago Simon Properties announced a project to develop an Outlet Mall on a private tract of land on Turkey Mountain. A small group of people said No!! It took a while and several times it looked like all was lost but the people prevailed. How many times have you heard of ordinary people forcing a multibillion dollar conglomerate to stop a project on private land. That core group of people were what became the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition.
https://flic.kr/p/2mGy6WU
After Simon moved on to another site (where the project languishes to this day), the River Parks Authority held a series of public meetings and asked the citizens what they wanted out of Turkey Mountain. There were thousands of comments but they kind of boiled down to, first: Leave Turkey Mountain Alone, and second, Make it Better. The result was the Master Plan providing a framework of the work needed on Turkey Mountain.
Master Plans are fun, a big wish list. But it was not funded. So although we were excited about it we knew that it could be a while before anything happened. Well the RiverParks Authority started reaching out and making public/private partnerships and got a few grants, and a few dollars allocated from the City, the County, and the State and now they have enough money to fund much of the plan and work is starting this month on a new gateway trail from the lower parking lot to the top of Turkey Mountain and beyond.
Photo from River Parks Authority facebook page
So Friday we all gathered at Turkey Mountain and after some blessedly short speeches from the various VIPs, the symbolic dirt was turned. It was great. A couple minutes later, members of the Coalition were invited to grab a shovel and turn some dirt.
Photo from TUWC facebook page
That’s s me at the far left. I was not part of the original group of people but I have been on the Advisory Board for a few years now and have a big sense of ownership of the organization.
So we celebrated a little bit but this morning we were back at it with a cleanup on Turkey Mountain sponsored by the Coalition and Leave No Trace. About 30 to 40 of us gathered up bags of garbage, cleared out downed trees, removed non-native species, repaired some trail, and rebuilt other trails. If you want to join in the fun hit the link to learn more and maybe even join the Coalition.
In my next post I’ll be discussing Leave No Trace. They have been at the Mountain for a week looking at things and leading workshops for various stakeholders. They are an amazing organization and I can’t to talk about them and what they do a little bit.
We’ve had some dreary weather here recently, cold and rainy. Which I really don’t mind except I like a little blue sky for my skywatch posts.
We lucked out this morning. A front blew through and we got some great blue skies with big ole fluffy clouds. So I took a few shots at Tulsa’s Lafortune Park during my short walk there.
I like this one because of the two weeping will trees across the pond from each other.
So far, not much fall color quite yet except in spots.
A closeup!
I hope everybody is having a great start to November. Come join the party at Skywatch Friday.
