The neighborhood adjoining us has a “swan pond” complete with a black swan that chases off all the other waterfowl.
This is from my front yard looking to the west at sunset one day.
A volunteer group that I am a member of had a meeting a local brewery just out of downtown. Leaving I took this photo looking west toward downtown Tulsa and the setting sun.
This is a painting I found at our recent trip to the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. It is “Home by the Lake” by Frederic Church. It’s a great skywatch painting.
Recently we went on a little jaunt to Bentonville, Arkansas. Home of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and a very nice urban scene going on. Bentonville is also the headquarters of Walmart and the town is growing quickly. They have lots of restaurants and other places to entertain oneself.
Redbud Tree on the city’s trails
My partner in crime, Heather.
There are tons of walking paths all over town. We stayed close to the town center so we could just park our car and walk where we needed to go.
They not only have trails they have art integrated into nature with the trails.
Very nicely maintained and landscaped.
Lots of wildflowers.
We found a very nice Italian restaurant. Great food and wonderful service. The staff probably knew we were from Oklahoma when we pulled out phones to take photos of our deserts.
And here was mine. Two scoops of ice cream and one of raspberry sorbet. Wow, it was great.
And then we walked around for a bit looking for a place to have a drink. We found a place overlooking the square.
Another shot of Heather.
I had a gimlet, I think Heather had a glass of wine. It was wonderful to find a place for a drink and then walk to our airbnb a short distance away instead of parking.
The next day we got up, had breakfast and headed to the Crystal Bridges Museum. We viewed hundreds of works of art. All of them great. Here are a few that really caught my attention.
This work of art is Robe named “Eldest Daughter” by Addie Roanhorse. It was made in 2025 using traditional Osage Ribbon Cutting techniques.
“The Good Shepherd” by Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1917. It caught my eye because we are close to Easter.
“Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn” by Thomas Moran, ca 1862. Talk about a great Skywatch Friday painting. I love Moran’s stuff.
“The Song” by William Merritt Chase, in 1907. I’ve noticed this painting on several previous visit and it really struck me this time. I always thought it was a lady with a headache. But no, she’s listening to a piano played by another woman obscured by the column. Back then you didn’t have XM Radio or iTunes so if you wanted to listen to music, somebody had to play it for you. So the woman is listening hard to the music and is really into it.
So we had a good time. We got to spend a lot of time together and see some great art.
I don’t know when we are going home. Could be a while.
Last week one day I started with a hike with a friend of mine on the Mooser Creek Greenway. A three mile double loop where we heard a ton of birds and saw no other people.
I went home, got cleaned up, and headed out to Tulsa County’s Chandler Park in far northwest Tulsa for a meeting with an environmental non-profit that I volunteer for. After the meeting I checked my phone for nearby geocaches and sure enough there was one about 60 feet away. It actually was not where the cache was but there is some information on the sculpture one needs to determine the coordinates. Which I did.
There was another cache nearby where there are a lot of cliffs. I’ve looked for it off and on over the years because I don’t want to be climbing rocks or trees. But I decided to take a different tack on finding it and so I went down to the Lost City Trail.
The lost city trail winds in and out of the cliffs and is just plain beautiful. A scene or two in the movie “Flowers of the Killer Moon” were shot in areas of the trail.
There are steep cliffs and overhangs and all sorts of interesting stuff.
I find doing the shots over my shoulder seem to show the height of the cliffs better than straight on shots. Maybe its the sense of scale works better.
The clue for the cache is that it is in a hole. You know how many holes are in that cliff face? A bunch!! None of which I want to stick my hand into without knowing that is there. I took photos of various holes, none of which yielded anything. So I continue in not finding this cache.
I also tried my hand a few caches along Route 66 as it goes through Tulsa. One of which was associated with this sculpture.
And another one associated with this sculpture right across the street from the Eagle sculpture. Route 66 for some reason has all sorts of various
And further east along US 66 there is another geocache associated with this plaque commemorating the first oil well drilled in Tulsa County. Tulsa used to be center of the oil industry in the United States and called themselves, “The Oil Capital of the World.”
So I had a pretty good time on a great day in some bright sunshine under clear skies.
And a reverse sunset (looking east) from the backyad.
https://flic.kr/p/2s2xUJF
A reflection of the sky at Tulsa’s Lafortune Park. I think I used the Becasso filter on this.
And a pond at the Turkey Mountain Wilderness Area. Another Becasso filter.
And a jigsaw puzzle I recently completed. It took me a while to figure it out.
https://flic.kr/p/FCutPQ
And from ten years ago. I saw this threatening sky on an after work run on Turkey Mountain. Luckily this was to the east so I wasn’t threatened. I would hate to be on the other side of those clouds.
Spring in Oklahoma is not for the faint of heart. In the Tulsa area we had eight tornadoes recently. Lots of damage but no fatalities at least.
The skies of spring are often twisting and turning and giving off that strange green glow that signifies that nothing good is in store.
It makes for interesting photo opportunities though.
Plus the wind blows harder. The wind always blows in Oklahoma but the spring winds are fearsome. Makes for hard bicycle riding when you are going against them. I’ve learned not to fight going into wind. I just gear down and go slower. It’s not a contest. When I turn around and go with the wind I fly with the wind.
A couple weeks ago I felt like moving around so I ventured off to Tulsa’s Oxley Nature Center on an overcast day to wander around and see what I could see.
Oxley during the week is great. Nobody is there!! I didn’t see too many critters though. Oh well.
They have great flat trails there. Hardly a rock to trip over anywhere. Don’t worry I trip over roots, stubs, branches, and my own feet.
A repurposed major highway cuts through Oxley as a big wide, sustainable trail. I’ve seen lots of critters from this over the years when the trails are really too muddy to walk on.
I found me a big mess of fungi. Google lens tells me that this could be turkey tail. They gave several other possibilities and I picked Turkey Tail cuz I liked the name.
I come across a bridge with its own poem. It’s called “This Drop” by Sasha A. Martin. She was the “Artist in Residence” at Oxley a few years ago. I never met her but I would like to do so.
When she left they posted her poems all over Oxley. I always love seeing them. She is on instagram and her handle is @thatsashamartin. She is super talented.
The birds were out chirping away but I couldn’t get more than a glimpse of any of them except for the cardinals. They are hard to miss but they don’t wait long enough for me to focus and get a photo. Still it was nice having the Merlin App so I could figure out what they are.
Another nice surprise was the lakes, creeks, and marshes being full of water. I couldn’t quite figure it out until I said something on social media about it and then several people piped up and said that the low water dam holding water on the park had failed in the last year or two and they finally got it repaired and working again a few months ago. I was like, ohh. I pride myself on knowing what is going with stuff like that and everyone but me knew.
My pride will recover, in the meantime I am happy with the water being restored to Oxley.
I love boardwalks across marshes.
Here is the Nature Center at the Nature Center. Very well informed volunteers hang out there. I usually bypass it because I know where I am going. If I had stopped and asked why the low water, I am sure they would have told me.
Here is my wibble wobbling route on my hike. About 2.7 miles or so I think.
Earlier in February on a nice day a group of volunteers from the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition joined staff members from the Nature Conservancy to do some trail work the Conservancy’s newest preserve in Oklahoma, the Pearl Jackson Crosstimbers Preserve in Creek County, Oklahoma, just 20 or so miles from Tulsa. The Preserve, which is not yet open to the public, is 12,000 acres of hickory and oak intermixed with tallgrass prairie. The previous landowners had used fire to control invasive species and the land is in really good shape. The man who donated, what had been a ranch, to the Conservancy gave up fortune in development. Such generosity blows my mind.
So we all met in the Conservancy’s office on the property and got a briefing on the work to be done. The staff had started a rough trail from a proposed trailhead to a sporadic waterfall. So we were going to take loppers, saws, axes, pick axes, and other tools to remove limbs blocking the way and rocks that were on the trail. The trailhead was about a mile from the office so we shuttled people down there in four wheel drives.
My Subaru, with 77,000 miles, finally got a little mud on it as I took people down to the trailhead.
So we took off down the proposed trail doing our thing. I am guessing the trail was about a mile.
The land is gorgeous. Very rocky and extremely old hickory and oak trees.
Down at the waterfall. No water over it today as it hadn’t rained recently.
And here is the intermittent waterway that bring water to the waterfall.
Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition Photo
And a good time was had by all. The staff said that they plan to open portions of the preserve to the public but they have a lot of issues to work out beforehand. I’m guessing that it is going to be a least a year or two.
The weather is warming up fast these days. Just ten days ago we had snow everywhere, now it is almost all gone and we have balmy temps. These pics are from a hike about a week ago around Tulsa’s Lafortune Park on their 3 mile path.
My favorite tree at Lafortune Park. It makes for a great photo all four season. I love the reflections as well. We have a little ice in this photo.
And a little bit more ice near the playgrounds.
And at the duck pond.
And a decent sunrise from our backyard. Our little terrier Sadie gets me up every morning for the sunrise.
Me and a friend continue to hike on Turkey Mountain and other places. This is a moon gate leading into The Sanctuary section of Turkey Mountain. I go right through it, my friend goes around it. I don’t know why.
Turkey mountain has maybe nine lakes on it, plus two or three more in The Sanctuary. Anywhere else they would be called ponds. Three interesting things about the lakes (at least they are interesting to me) is, first, that the Wildlife Department stocks the lakes for fishing. Second there is a big colony of beavers on the mountain and they move as a group from lake to lake cleaning out all the fish in each pond. I think that is hilarious. Third, the beavers move up and down the Arkansas River and migrate to and from Turkey Mountain via Mooser Creek which is the northern border of Turkey Mountain. They know this because the wildlife has tagged a bunch of beavers so they can track their movements. I have a feeling that beavers are going to outlive humans.
This is a pipeline for one of my former employers running through Turkey Mountain. Last year another former employer of mine laid a pipeline adjacent to this one but they drilled the little swale you see instead of putting in a span like the one above. Drilling pipelines across tough spots has been all the rage for years. Contractors can now drill across the Mississippi River for large pipelines and hit the other side a mile away within a few feet of their target. They also do it in culturally sensitive areas like ruins and such. They can stand off a few hundred yards and drill way underneath the ruins instead of having to go around. The problem with going around is that you often run into more ruins.
The tree house in The Sanctuary. If you look close you can see a couple of swinging porch benches underneath. A nice place to wait out a rainstorm.
Anyway on this hike, it was almost exactly five miles. That’s my sweetspot.
Switching gears to the backyard. Sunrise!
Mid-day from my front yard looking east.
And a late sunset, looking west.
Later that night, the Full Snow Moon. I love full moons on a clear night.
And a shot from the neighborhood green belt.
I’ve continued working on jigsaw puzzles on my ipad. I love beach scenes.
And a windmill jigsaw puzzle. The windmill is cool and I love the house. except not many windows upstairs. I like the lightning rods though. Random thought, I am sure that windmills get hit with lightning. Do they burn down?
