The wind is blowing, once again. And once again it is blowing hard. We are, after all, in the Great Plains, in Oklahoma. So what else should we expect?
We are at Foss Lake State park, one of the parks of the Oklahoma State Park System. As seems to be the case in every state we have visited, this state park is built around a lake, a man-made one. Boating/fishing/to-a-lesser-extent swimming seems to be most people's idea about getting out and camping. It is not ours, of course, but everyone can enjoy different aspects of nature.
This is a very nice park. Fairly large by state park standards, with a larger-than-average lake, and acres and acres of natural woods surrounding it. It is quiet, clean, and well maintained. Consistent with what we have found in all of the state parks we have stayed at so far in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, there is no recycling. There are showers here, plenty of camping spaces (we were told that it is never full, except for their "Christmas in July" pageant), clean restrooms, and friendly staff. As has been the case so often on this leg of our road trip, we are alone in the campground. Wonderful.
This was not our first choice of a campground. We had wanted to stay in the Black Kettle National Grasslands. But, alas, the campground was closed. We thought it probably would be, but were told by people who were trying to be helpful that it certainly would be open. They, along with several other people we have run into, just couldn't believe the federal government would really shut down. We drove there, in case they were right, but our fears were well founded:
We could have stopped and taken a picture of the "battle" site, but decided not to. That seemed disrespectful to the men, women, and children who died there believing they were under the protection of the United States when Custer charged into the sleeping village and slaughtered innocent people. There will be another time when we can visit there in a respectful way.
At Foss Lake we got a hiking map which showed the trail around the lake, called the Warrior Trail. We were told that it is a "mowed" trail, but unfortunately since it rained hard in August, it hadn't been mowed in a long time. We found that to be true.
We couldn't even find where it began, so just hiked across country toward the lake, through very tall grass:
We were in knee-high (not NEHI like Radar O'Reilly and I drank) in this grass for much of the time.
Then we reached the lake, and walked around it to a place where we saw on the map that we might be able to find the trail.
The coast of the lake was littered with trash. And, to our surprise, shells. In Oklahoma?
"Hey, how come the boat isn't moving?"
How in the world does somebody lose a propeller?
We saw turtles popping their heads out of the water:
After we reached a boat dock we found, finally, the trail. It hadn't been mowed in a long time, but there were stakes planted along the way that we could follow.
But then we ran out of trail. The trail seemed to stop, and there were no more stakes to be found.We searched in all directions, but it seemed to just "end."
So we cut across somebody's private property until we reached a highway. We knew where we were because we had a map, our GPS, and our compass. The road, interestingly, was marked as one of the cattle drive trails of the 1800s. Now it is a highway with only a single signpost indicating its history. We would not have seen this sign unless we had taken off across country on our hike.
When we returned, we washed clothes, which dried quickly in the hot Oklahoma sun and wind:
We enjoyed this hike. It is too bad that hiking is not more popular here, or the trails would be marked better. What we saw today was beautiful--Oklahoma terrain, prairie grass, and woods. People in Oklahoma should be proud of it, and walk out and see it. The trails and lakeside need some serious cleaning and maintenance. The beauty here compares with anywhere in the U.S., so be proud of it Oklahoma. Take care of it and show it off. Today I experienced some of my childhood--same kinds of fields, woods, and small streams. It was wonderful.
Postscript
On our way here we went through Sayers, Oklahoma. For some reason I remembered that in a scene from what I believe to be the greatest American movie, The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family is shown in their old jalopy driving by this courthouse. So we went a bit out of our way to see it.
Another postscript, a sad one.
A few weeks ago we read about a lake somewhere where two cars with bodies were discovered by accident. The story was that two car loads of people probably just accidentally drove into a lake, with all occupants drowning. Not until today did we put two and two together. It was Foss Lake. After all of these years the families can hopefully find some peace in knowing what happened. They disappeared in 1969 and 1970. All of those years, not knowing, wondering. That would be almost impossibly hard.
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So, you were there: one thing I thought of when I read that news story was, weren't there tire tracks into the lake? Did you see some reason there wouldn't be? Then again, how do you just drive into a lake and not notice? There was no mention of it being off a pier or anything...
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to know how it appeared then, but from what we could tell the road went directly to the boat ramp, and may have been made from the same type of surface. If you weren't paying attention, or if the weather was bad, you could just keep driving until you were in the lake. What was surprising to us is that the cove is very small. In all of those years one would think the lake levels would have gone down far enough to expose the vehicles, or a boat might have caught an anchor on one of them. Just an incredible, and sad, set of circumstances.
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