In late September the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition, of which I am a member and a Board Member, had a trail workday at the Herman and Kate Kaiser YMCA on Turkey Mountain.
It was starting to sprinkle but it was too late to postpone the date as we had already done that once already for this event.
We got our canopy and tables set up and got waivers from everyone so we were ready to go. It was kind of a light turnout that day. But that’s okay.
Here is an action shot of me, that I have stolen from the TUWC. We were clearing the trails that day so I have my loppers. There was lots of poison ivy so I didn’t wear my usual tshirt and shorts for long sleeve shirt, pants, and gloves.
Here’s a shot of a cleared trail. We lopped the brush and poison ivy back. The YMCA has their own trails on Turkey Mountain that are extensively interconnected with the more well-known Tulsa RiverParks trail system.
Our little Pomeranian Kodi loves to go swimming but his enthusiasm and joy are greater than his skill so when we take him swimming Heather has to hold on to him. Our rescue Terrier, Sadie, is not into swimming at all.
On another bike ride on the Arkansas RiverParks Trails here in Tulsa I captured these two great blue herons flying low over the water below Zink Dam.
A great egret fishing
And a bunch of great egrets and great blue herons trying to catch their breakfast.
I stopped at a bench on the trail to rest up adjacent to this sculpture of geese.
A couple weeks ago I worked “Monarchs on the Mountain” representing the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition. TUWC was deeply embedded in the event. We are a co-sponsor. A couple of our board members were on the organizing committee, and another was the MC of the event. Another board member takes care of the online part of the event using our website. Monarchs on the mountain is festival celebrating Monarch Butterflies and all other pollinators and the monarch migration which is happening now.
My role (that’s not me in the photo) was to man the booth and tell people who TUWC is and what we do.
This is a diorama that another board member made a couple years ago where we illustrate Leave No Trace principles for kids. We have a little story about Hans and Hilda going on a hike with their dogs. So we talk about leashing animals, staying on the trails, don’t throw your apple cores and banana peels out into the woods in the mistaken belief that you are helping feed the animals. Those little brown round things at the bottom of the photo are dog poops, not cinnamon rolls, so we throw them out and ask, “What do you do when your dog poops in the woods?” Answer is of course that you bag it and dispose of properly.
Working the booth is a lot of fun. I’ll tell you one thing, we get lots of Girl Scouts come by and they have the life cycle of monarch butterflies and Leave No Trace principles down. I’m very impressed with them and their adult leadership.
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.
So last weekend I was part of a group of people that worked on the trails at the Keystone Ancient Forest in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. The organization that I volunteer with, the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition, sponsored the trail day and a big part of the community responded, especially a ton of students from the University of Tulsa. We split everyone up into three groups to do lopping of branches intruding on the trail, replacing trail flagging so people don’t get lost, and blowing leaves off the trail.
After getting organized we headed out to work. The weather was perfect. I led a lopping crew on one of the trails.
The students didn’t lollygog around, they got right to it.
We probably did a mile or so of trail lopping until we headed back. We wanted to get everyone back by 11:30 or so. You don’t want to wear out your volunteers.
The Keystone Ancient Forest is a preserve with ancient trees. Some of the cedars are 500 years old and there are 300 year old post oak trees on the property. It has an ancient and peaceful feeling to it.
The Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition got its start as an activist organization joining with other groups in a successful effort to fend off an outlet mall from being built on Turkey Mountain. Since then, the organization has pivoted to being an advocate for wild spaces in the Tulsa area and participates in and sponsors environmental education activities. We also do six or so trail cleanup days per year at various public wild areas in and around Tulsa.
It was a day well spent. The park staff seemed very happy with the work that was accomplished.
A sunrise this morning. We have a new dog, Sadie, and she gets up early, and that means we get up early with her. You dog owners know that when the dog gets up you better take it outside right away or face the consequences.
A neighborhood skyshot and reflection.
My volunteer gig with the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition is kicking in. It’s Earth Day season. Here is me and my friend Marci at the local electric utilities employee Earth Day event.
And at a community event a couple days later in downtown Tulsa.
And speaking of electric utility, here is there power plant on the Arkansas River.
And the boat shed at Tulsa’s Gathering Place.
Here is my wife Heather. We attended a fund raiser for the local botanic garden. It was called “Sip and Stroll” so that we sipped and strolled, noshed appetizers and talked to people. Our first grownup date in a while and it was fun.
It had been raining in the gardens so the iris’s had raindrops on them. I love raindrops on flowers.
On Earth Day, I manned a table at Tulsa’s Chandler Park giving out information about Earth Day, and Leave No Trace Principles and what our organization, the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition is about and what we are doing.
A couple of days later I was downtown at Tulsa’s Guthrie Green during a recycling event basically doing something similar.
Your regular car people hate this thing and hold in disdain. I thought it was beautiful. Zero to 60 mph is 2.6 seconds gets my attention. Also 11,000 pounds of towing capacity. Range of 340 miles.
I could never get a feel for the truck just looking at photos. In real life it is a very tough looking vehicle.
And a huge bed. Big enough for 4’x8′ building materials. The bed is a composite material so you don’t need a bed liner.
The interior is very simple, clean and spacious.
You have a very small simple steering wheel with no stalks for turn signals and all that. Those controls are on the wheel. You got this huge screen with everything else you need. I was impressed with the vehicle. The electric vehicle haters especially hate this thing. If somebody gave me one, I’d take it.
I have already converted my lawnmower to electric battery type. My very reliable, heavy duty gas powered mower finally seized up this year after 20 years so I bought electric. I’m happy with it!! Less than half the weight, no oil, no gas, no spark plug, no changing filters. My new mower is very lightweight and makes mowing a breeze and I can mow the whole yard using less than half the charging capacity. I didn’t try to get the best, I intentionally looked for the lowest cost, with the least problems that could mow my 1/5th of an acre lot.
It’s not going to last near as long as my old gas mower. Plastic mower deck is not going to last very long I am afraid. Oh well.
I found this beautiful blue Toyota Landcruiser at my brother’s apartment parking lot. Back in the I really coveted these things. Tough looking, cool. You grow up though and look for something else. When I was a kid we lived in the White Mountains of Arizona. My dad was transferred there as part of his job with the Forest Service. One of his coworkers joined the Forest Service kind of late in life (Probably he was fifteen to twenty years younger than I am now!) He and his wife were very nice, generous, cool people. Earlier in his life he was an actor in Hollywood. He specialized in being one of a group of bad guys. He worked some on the Lone Ranger television shows. How cool is that to a kid!! Anyway he and his wife on weekends would load up their Toyota Landcruiser and drive all over the National Forest, adjacent BLM land, and other places. No instagram back in the day so they did it all for their own enjoyment. Whenever I see a Landcruiser, I think of them.
I found a truck at the gym that the Cybertruck haters would love. A massive Ford F-150 with a two tone paint job and a cool Black Widow logo. Sorry, I should have got a photo of the logo. This thing is beautiful.
I’ll stick with my humble Subaru though. For as long as it will last. It does everything I want it to do. Want to know something funny, half the vehicles at the enviro events I attend are Subarus. Here it is parked in a place I am not supposed to be in to look for a geocache. Sunday morning I went to Sapulpa, OK to look around.
This was the first cache I found. It was kind of a clever installation. What nearly got me though was the cache container was full of ants. Little buggers, just waiting for me! You can see one crawling out of the container in the video. His friends followed.
In addition to the geocaches I found I checked out old and new Route 66 landmarks. The Tee-Pee Drive in was an old drive-in that was abandoned and fell into disrepair. Somebody bought it, fixed it up really nice and put this new sign up. It is not a neon sign, it is an LED sign, Bigger, better, and uses less electricity.
This is the old Rock Creek Bridge. It is a major route 66 stop but it can no longer carry traffic. At least they haven’t torn it down yet. You can still walk across it. It is not blocking Route 66. The new Route 66 is just a hundred feet or so to the right going across a modern bridge. What you have to understand about Route 66 is that it is not just one road. It is a living road and has been modernized and rerouted continuously since it started. The different routes are called alignments. Exploring some of the old alignments can be fn
Those are some of the original pavers from the when bridge was put up in the early part of the last century.
So I puttered around a few hours and went on home!!
I have been busy. I love being busy. Especially being retired and doing the things I want to do.
I went out to Turkey Mountain and checked out the new board walk they installed over the western rock faces of the mountain. This is an area called Rock City and I love how they put the walk right in and over the boulders using cedar that was cut on the mountain.
It is a small network of new trails interconnecting with two trails, one on top of the rock faces and one below. I bet it would be fun on a bicycle. It looks like they put a mesh on top of the cedar to add a little traction for the bikes. You slip off the wood on a bike it would ruin your whole day. Me and gravity are not friends these days so I will never take my bike across this.
I ventured back to the parking lot on the Tiger Muffin trail. It’s the trail name for a friend of mine.
Last Saturday I put my cold weather gear on and joined a bunch of people from the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition and Bike Club to clean up a trail called Mooser Creek Greenway. It had a lot of tree falls from Tulsa’s Father’s Day windstorm last year. The trails were cleared back then but a lot of the downed were a little unsightly. Plus there is a never ending chore of repairing erosion and wet spots on trails.
So I helped clear the limbs and trunks that were being cut up by people with chain saws.
I love the trail work days. Tulsa really responds to stuff like that and all sorts of people show up to help. I got a promotion with the Wilderness Coalition. I am now the Vice President of Government Affairs. My trail job didn’t change much. Moving limbs and cut up trunks off the trail is what I do along with whatever else needs doing.
Later that day Heather and I went out to the Tulsa Botanic Garden to check out the flowers and new projects.
They have added an event space in the middle of the pond. They are also converting some wild land they had into an arboretum. They have done a good job adding onto the gardens and it is getting more and more settled as time goes on.
The tulips put on a quite a show. Last year when we went some deer had gone into the gardens ate a bunch of the tulips and other plants.
They also had Lego animals scattered around the garden. I love this woodpecker.
And I always love redbuds. The Eastern Redbud is the State Tree of Oklahoma.
The Daffodils were putting on a show even though their time is short.
This was my favorite tulip. It looked black in the sun but is actually a deep purple. This one is the only one I spotted.
And to end up, we had an almost full moon the other day. I captured the image in the late afternoon so it was almost a daytime moon. I love the moon in all its presentations but I especially love a good daytime moon.
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.
Early in May this year I was invited to a small ceremony where Turkey Mountain Urban Wilderness in Tulsa was going to join the Old-Growth Forest Network. Hmmm, never heard of them but sounds interesting. Besides, there was a hike included in the event. Sign me up!!
Jeff Edwards of RiverParks.
The Old-Growth Forest Network is an organization founded by biologist, turned author, turned activist, Joan Maloof who became alarmed at the loss of old-growth forests in the eastern USA. Very little old-growth forests remain in the east, less than 1% of the orginal forests and maybe about 5% in the west.
Sarah Adloo of Old-Growth Forest Network
Old-growth forests are those that have been undisturbed and old trees are allowed to grow old and die. I found out that old dead snags can provide habitat for up to 300 different species. The Old-Growth Forest Network is trying to find and designate at least one publicly owned tract of land in counties, that can contain such forests. They estimate that is about 2370 counties. Turkey Mountain is the 199th such forest to be designated and only the second in Oklahoma.
So the dignitaries made their speeches and a plaque was handed out.
I borrowed it for a closeup. And then we went on a hike. It was about a mile and we got to the location of the oldest tree on Turkey Mountain. I forget what kind of tree it is but the dendrologists say it got started in 1774. They only tested thirty some trees based on their experience of where the oldest trees would be. They said, rocky land on steep slope where logging is difficult is the best bet. So it is likely that there are older trees on Turkey Mountain.
True confessions, my original photo wasn’t very good so I went back recently and got this video. The tree is kind of old and bent and I couldn’t capture it in a still so I got this video. It’s not the prettiest or the biggest tree in the world but it is kind of special.
So it was a nice outing. I got to learn something and go on a hike. I’m always up for that.
This link is for the report on the event by one of Tulsa’s television station.
I bought one of Joan Maloof’s books. I got the kindle version because it is half the price of the paperback. I’ll let you know what I found out.
Check out Old-Growth Forest Network’s web site. Lots of information on Old-growth forests. Here is the organization’s page for Turkey Mountain.
I’m on the Advisory Board of the Tulsa Urban Wilderness Coalition, (“TUWC”). I am also retired so although I am pretty busy I have a lot of flexibility with my time so lately I have been working some informational type functions for the TUWC.
Back in mid April we had a work day on Turkey Mountain. The manly men and strong women do the heavy duty lifting, digging, shoveling and such on the trails. I worked a table with another guy doing user surveys for the River Parks Authority tallying information and asking people about their outing.
On April 19, again a day event hard for working people to man, I worked a table with others at Tulsa’s Guthrie Green during the Enviro Expo. There were all sorts of environmental organizations present. It was kind of cool.
Double cool because my former employer was a sponsor of the event and they had a bunch of people I knew there. I stole this photo off their instagram feed so I hope they don’t get too mad with me. It was fun catching up.
And then that Friday I worked a table with fellow board member Marci at an Earth Day event for school children at Tulsa’s Chandler Park. Marci knows all sorts of things about the natural world including butterflies, plants, critters, all sorts of stuff. She is also a long time educator and she knows how to talk with school kids and their teachers and parents. She was amazing to watch in action. She has a way of leading people to come up with answers on their own. It was a fun event. The kids were all excited about the topic. I love it when kids are enthusiastic about learning.
I have worked with TUWC the past several years and love it. If you want to get involved or volunteer check out their website at TulsaUrbanWildernessCoalition.org. We have a work day coming up in June and in May we raise money for the group by volunteering at the Tulsa IronMan competition. Check the TUWC web site above for the details.
And this week ended my school year work as a Reading Partners volunteer tutor at a local school. So I said goodbye to a student I have been working with for the school year. The kid was a hard worker and very enthusiastic all year and showed tremendous improvement in their reading ability this year.
This is my fourth year of volunteering for the group and the most satisfying. The previous two years were virtual and that was tough. It is very difficult to form bonds with students over a computer. I felt bad for the kids because they spent a big part of their day online. If you want to learn more check out their website.
