PADDe Running Windows 7

Back in October 2008 I purchased an ASUS Eee PC 1000H netbook as my new portable computer.  I dubbed it PADDe, and have been delighted with this little marvel, taking it with me on my Oregon summer vacation and using it around the house and at some of my meetings.  I bought PADDe with a hard drive configured for Windows XP and later upgraded its RAM to its maximum of 2 gigabytes.  I love how light and portable it is and have been satisified with its battery life of over three hours on a charge.

The only drawbacks have been its 1024×600 screen, which I wish were the more standard 1024×768, and its reliance on a touchpad.  The diminished vertical resolution forces me to scroll web pages more than I’d like, and I prefer Pointing Sticks to touchpads.  I often resort to scrolling pages with the arrow keys since that works more reliably for me.

Some months back I bought Presto, a commercial version of the Xandros Linux package, for PADDe.  It provides a Linux boot alternative to Windows XP, allowing me to quickly boot up and access the web.  But I almost never use Presto since it is so simple to have the netbook “Hibernate” in Windows XP rather than shut down.  Hibernation, unlike Stand By mode, doesn’t use any battery power.  And it only takes seconds for the machine to wake up from its deep slumber.

Windows Vista could never run on the little netbook, since it only has a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU (with a “Super” mode that overclocks it to 1.7 GHz).  But I’d read that Windows 7 ran just fine.  So I decided I would use one of the three licenses on my Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade Family Pack to put the latest operating system on PADDe.

See below if you want all of the details of this hours-long effort, but the end result is that PADDe is now happily running Windows 7.  I love this new operating system and am delighted to now have it on both my desktop and my netbook.  Both machines are now in the same “Homegroup”, which is a simplified Windows 7 network.

ASUS Helps Out, to a Point

ASUS very kindly posted some instructions and the needed drivers for upgrading their 1000H netbooks to Windows 7 on its support site.  I painstakingly downloaded each driver (I wish they had just ZIPped them all up into one archive, but no such luck) and printed out the terse instructions.  They just said what to download and gave a brief sequence of driver installations I should trigger with those downloaded files.  But they did not say how you get Windows 7 onto a netbook that lacks a DVD drive.

Microsoft Helps Out, to a Point

I’ve successfully installed Microsoft Office and the Corel WordPerfect Suite onto PADDe by popping their installation DVDs into the drive on my desktop computer and then accessing them on PADDe through the wireless network.  But surely that wouldn’t work for installing an operating system – the network connection would be lost during the install.  But I’m a regular listener of Paul Thurrott and Leo Laporte’s Windows Weekly podcast, so I knew Paul Thurrott already had the answer.  You need to put an image of the Windows 7 installation DVD (called an ISO) on a bootable USB thumbdrive.  Microsoft offers Windows 7 online as an “ISO” download, and for awhile included a little utility for copying that image file onto a bootable USB thumb drive.  But they goofed on their little utility, creating a licensing problem that led them to yank it off their website, at least for now.  Reportedly they will release the source code for the utility to resolve the licensing issues and then I presume they’ll put it back up.  But I didn’t want to wait for that nebulous opportunity.  Thankfully CNET’s good old download.com still had a copy of the utility.

But I lacked an ISO image for the thumbdrive.  I already bought the Family Pack of Windows 7 on DVD, and I certainly didn’t want to buy yet another copy online to get the needed ISO image.  So, per Paul’s instructions, I downloaded the free utility ImgBurn and used it on my desktop computer to make an ISO image of the 32-bit version of the Windows 7 installation DVD.  Then I wiped out one of my eight-gigabyte thumbdrives, using Microsoft’s utility to turn it into a bootable Windows 7 installation device.

Using Two Thumbs

On a second eight-gigabyte thumbdrive, the amazing Verbatim Tuff ‘n’ Tiny drive, I copied all of the drivers I had downloaded from ASUS.  I then stuck both thumbdrives into PADDe while it was running Windows XP and navigated to the \support\migwiz folder on the one with the Windows 7 image.  There I ran Windows Easy Transfer, saving PADDe’s existing files and settings to the other “normal” thumbdrive.  I don’t have very much loaded onto PADDe, so it fit okay, but if that hadn’t worked I could have sent those items over the wireless network to the desktop for storage.  Now it was time for the big plunge – wiping out PADDe’s installation of Windows XP and moving up to 7.

My BIOS Mistake

ASUS said to use the built-in ASUS Update utility to install the latest BIOS on PADDe.  That’s a delicate operation – if you lose power during a BIOS installation you can “brick” your computer so that it won’t boot up, period.  So I yanked out the thumbdrives, made sure PADDe had plenty of battery life, and also plugged him into the AC outlet.  Then I ran the BIOS upgrade utility and thought I upgraded to the latest BIOS.  Later problems would reveal that I had not actually installed the latest version of the BIOS intended for Windows 7 compatibility.  But I didn’t realize that at the time.

Why Won’t You Boot?

After the new BIOS was installed and PADDe was booted back up into Windows XP, I reinserted the Windows 7 image thumbdrive and rebooted.  But PADDe refused to boot off the USB drive – instead only displaying the usual screen to select either Presto or Windows XP.  I uninstalled Presto and tried again.  Nope – now it just booted into XP.  Rebooting again but hitting the F2 key to bring up the BIOS, I realized that a year ago I had disabled the power-on tests and other boot delays to speed things up.  So I set those back to normal and tried again.  It still wouldn’t boot off the thumbdrive.  Another visit to the BIOS revealed that, even though I had it set to boot first off removable media and then try booting off the hard drive, for whatever reason PADDe was reading that USB thumbdrive much like a hard drive.  It showed up over in the hard drive settings as the secondary hard drive.  So I set it to be the primary hard drive, shifting the real hard drive to the secondary position, and tried again.  This time it worked.  PADDe slowly booted up off the thumbdrive and finally the Windows 7 installation was underway.

Generic Windows 7

The installation itself went like a breeze, although it took long enough that I wandered away, coming back to find PADDe was rebooting and restarting the installation process.  I wondered if there had been an error and the installation had aborted or if instead I’d missed instructions to remove the thumbdrive before the computer rebooted.  Gambling that the installation had gone fine and a normal reboot had accidentally retriggered the thumbdrive’s installation sequence, I cancelled the installation, yanked out the thumbdrive, and rebooted.  I was in luck – Windows 7 booted right up and started updating itself.  But while it was clearly running okay, I had none of PADDe’s special netbook features.  There was no option to switch from normal speed to overclocking to powersaving and the like.  The little buttons that adjust the screen settings, switch the power mode, and start applications with one click were not working.  So it was time to start installing the updated drivers I had downloaded from ASUS.

Reboot…reboot…reboot…

I inserted the thumbdrive with the ASUS drivers and went down their list, triggering one driver update after another.  Most of them wanted to reboot the computer after installing.  I decided to be patient and play it safe, rebooting when prompted.  That meant almost a dozen installs and reboots, which got old fast.  One driver didn’t work – the SATA AHCI driver referenced a controller that didn’t show up in PADDe’s Device Manager – but I’ve seen no ill effect.  The Hotkey Service upgrade, however, triggered a recurrent ACPI error box that reappeared whenever I dismissed it.  Hoping a later driver installation might fix this problem, I plowed on down the list.  But the final upgrades for the overclocking and BIOS upgrade utilities also generated errors, saying I did not have the right BIOS installed.

Fixing the Snafus

Scrounging around on the web, I found an upgrade to the ACPI that resolved that annoying error.  But I knew something was still amiss with the BIOS.  The quandary was that I could not load the ASUS Update utility, which is what you normally use to upgrade the BIOS.  Online I found a DOS mode utility for installing the BIOS, but it wouldn’t work under the Windows 7 DOS shell.  Other instructions spoke of making a bootable floppy disc with the BIOS update, the way we used to do things back in the dark ages, but that wasn’t an option – my only floppy disc drive is in the old desktop computer.  Finally I found instructions to download the latest BIOS version onto the computer and then copy the resulting .ROM file onto a USB drive, then rebooting while striking Shift-F2.  That almost worked – PADDe looked for the BIOS upgrade on the USB key, but then complained it couldn’t find ‘1000H.ROM’.  Okay – so it insists you give that name to the .ROM file?  I renamed the downloaded file on the USB key and that finally worked.  The BIOS was now compatible with Windows 7 and I could finally get the ASUS Update utility to install and so forth.

One More Thing…or Several

But even after all that, I still could not program the special buttons on PADDe.  The defaults are okay, except that one just wants to run Skype and I instead use it to start Firefox.  Yet another visit to the support forums yielded a copy of the missing utility and I finally had a fully functional netbook running Windows 7.  To top things off, I ran the Windows Easy Transfer and it downloaded files and settings off the thumbdrive back onto PADDe.  All that was left was to install some missing applications.  I stuck an Office 2007 DVD into my desktop computer and installed that onto PADDe over the wireless network.  Next will come Corel WordPerfect and a few other programs, and I’m all set.

Was It Worth It?

You betcha.  Windows 7 is a whopperload better than reliable old XP, and it was worth the struggle to get it working on my little netbook.  I haven’t noticed any speed issues and look forward to limiting my time on Windows XP to the machines at work.  Knowing how long it takes our district to upgrade our computers, I’ll still be an XP user for years to come, but not at home.

My Old Pentium 4

It had been five years since I purchased Duotronic, my seventh primary desktop computer.  It still ran fairly reliably, in part thanks to a couple of disk crashes over the years which forced me to reinstall Windows XP and reset the “Death by Registry” clock.  Windows is notorious for how its registry gradually clogs up over time as one adds and removes programs, eventually making the system sluggish and unreliable.  But even with those refreshes, five years is a long time for any machine to be your primary system.  Old Duotronic was taking a long time to boot up, couldn’t handle large video edits very well, and its operating system was first released almost a decade ago.  So, with the advent of Apple’s OS X Snow Leopard and Microsoft’s Windows 7, I decided it was time to upgrade.

Long-Term Desktop Strategy

I’ve always purchased mid-range and higher DOS/Windows desktop systems that are good performers and can last me about five years.  Replacing my home desktop computer more often than twice per decade is simply too painful to contemplate, what with the gigabytes of files to transfer and the oodles of applications to install.  But, although buying a system that must last many years, I still stay a few notches below the bleeding edge.  The highest-end microprocessors never offer enough extra bang for their many extra bucks.

My old system had a 32-bit Pentium 4 chip with a clock speed of 3.6 GHz, near the 3.8 GHz maximum Intel was able to achieve with that architecture.  Since then, unable to continue to boost clock speed without major heat problems, Intel started producing dual-core and now quad-core chips where you get several processors on a chip coupled to ever-larger on-chip memory caches.  Thus they can outperform the old single-core systems despite their slower clock speeds.

64-bit Multiple-Core Systems

So I knew I’d buy a multiple-core system and I also wanted to shift to a 64-bit architecture.  My first two personal computers were 8-bit machines, then I had a 16-bit machine, and the next four were 32-bit systems.  The more bits, the more data the processor can shovel through per cycle and the more memory it can use.  32-bit systems can’t make use of more than four gigabytes of RAM, and my most recent system already had two gigabytes.  I didn’t want to be limited to only three or four gigabytes in my new one, and now both Apple and Microsoft have operating systems that support 64-bit applications and a 64-bit machine can theoretically access up to 16 exabytes of RAM.  Exabytes? An exabyte is roughly a billion gigabytes. I’ll settle for eight gigabytes of RAM for now, which is 262,144 times as much memory as my first computer!

The Apple Tax

My New Vector Z35

Next I needed to decide between an Apple Macintosh or a Microsoft Windows PC.  Apple’s laptop computers and all-in-one iMacs are highly praised, but one hears far less about their big desktop system, the Mac Pro.  I already have a fun little netbook and an iPhone 3G for my portable computing needs, so I’d be looking at an iMac or a Mac Pro.  I already have a good LCD monitor and wanted more power than the iMac could offer, but a quad-core Mac Pro with the RAM and mirrored hard drives I wanted would cost over $4,000.  Whoa, Nelly!  I paid $3,500 for a PC back in 1993, but I’m not about to pay that kind of price nowadays.  Especially since I’d still need to buy a copy of Windows 7 to put on the Mac Pro for dual-booting and would be purchasing a number of Mac applications to take advantage of OS X.  I suppose a guy who prefers Toyotas to BMWs will also choose Windows PCs over Apple desktops.

I’m No Gamer, But…

With Apple no longer a prospect, I shifted my attention to Dell.  I’ve used many of their systems over the years at work and home, but I wasn’t impressed by their pricing on a higher-end system.  PC World, PCMag.com and CNET all thought highly of Velocity Micro’s Edge Z30 gaming system.  I’m no gamer, but I was impressed by the reviews, even though that gaming system didn’t have the latest microprocessor nor did it offer RAID 1 hard drive mirroring for data redundancy.  A visit to Velocity Micro’s website showed I really needed their Vector Z35 system.  I configured it with a quad-core 2.66 GHz Intel i7-920 microprocessor, 8 GB of RAM, a 512 MB ATI graphics card, two one-terabyte 7200 rpm hard drives in RAID 1 configuration, a 20x DVD burner with LightScribe labeling, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit edition.  I’m reusing my 20” Samsung LCD monitor and my Dell surround speakers, so the system cost me $1,580 plus another $150 for Office 2007.  That handily beats Apple’s boutique pricing on the Mac Pro, although I would have liked to try OS X.

Inside my Z35

I like to name my systems after fictional computer scientists and the like.  Vector seemed the obvious choice this time, since it is the maker’s name for this model and Professor Vector was Hermione Granger’s arithmancy professor at Hogwarts.  Vector arrived on Thursday and is one big beast, rivaling my 1993 Forbin system in size if not weight.  And I’ve now traded in Duotronic’s rounded plastic Dell case for a big black metal box with a huge window in the side which lets you peer in at hardware lit up by colorful LEDs.  Even the keyboard is backlit by blue LEDs.  This system is a looker!

Windows 7 Is a Winner

But the best thing by far about my new system is Windows 7.  I’ve used Windows 1.02, 2.03, /286, /386, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, and XP on my past desktop machines, plus Windows 2000 at work.  Notice that I’ve somehow managed to avoid the much-maligned Windows ME and Vista, although the six versions I used before Windows for Workgroups 3.11 were pretty awful, and in those early days I regularly used DOS to avoid “Windoze”.  Windows 7, however, is simply superb.

Vista brought a cool new look to Windows, but the few times I used it on a friend’s systems it seemed quite sluggish, and its User Account Control was maddening with its incessant interruptions.  XP has its own stupidities such as the blithering balloon tips, which pop up and sit there until you close them, and the cancerous Notification Area with its metastasizing icons.  But User Account Control (UAC) was even worse, demanding your attention incessantly.  It reminded me of how the old ZoneAlarm firewall would not leave you alone.  I think UAC was designed by the same folks who created the maddening Clippy “assistant” in Microsoft Office, which did anything but help you keep working.  I’ve now installed a score of applications, and the UAC only briefly interrupted once each time to confirm I really wanted to let the program change the system.  This is a good security measure, what with all of the malware out there trying to infect your system.  Changes I myself initiate within Windows rarely trigger the revised UAC at its default setting.

The Windows 7 Taskbar

The most noticeable change in 7, beyond the improved appearance, is the new taskbar.  The Quick Launch area is replaced by pinning application icons into the taskbar.  By default the icons are big and unlabelled, and each instance of an application stacks under its icon.  This isn’t nearly as annoying as it was in XP, since now you can scroll your mouse over an icon and see pop-up live previews of the application’s windows, jumping to or closing one with a single click.  Windows highlights icons so you can see at a glance which applications are currently running and if they have multiple windows.  I loved the “Show Desktop” icon in XP, but it was missing from too many users’ Quick Launch areas.  Windows 7 has a permanent spot for this feature on the far right end of the taskbar.  It appears that Microsoft adapted the best ideas from Apple’s Dock to truly improve the taskbar’s functionality.

Libraries

Another nice addition is Libraries, where Windows can group all of your documents or pictures or whatever from a variety of directories into one view.  I’m an old-school DOS man, so I like knowing precisely where a file is in the disk structure.  This is still easy to figure out in Windows 7 once you realize “My Documents” has moved from “C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents” to “C:\Users\username\Documents” and that the Documents Library can see into that directory as well as any other you specify, all in one view.  I expect rookies will sometimes get confused by Libraries, but power users will welcome the functionality.

Windows 7 Gadgets

Another fun and useful addition is Gadgets – little applications that run on your desktop.  I’ve used Yahoo Widgets on my XP system for years, and Vista had similar Gadgets yet by default associated them with an annoying sidebar.  Windows 7 immediately lets you plant a Gadget anywhere you want on the desktop and gets rid of the pesky Dock that plagues Yahoo Widgets.  The calendar and weather gadgets are attractive, and I like the CPU meter even though it is no more useful than the tachometer on my automatic-transmission automobile.

Adobe Crumbles to Windows Live Movie Maker

Microsoft kept Windows 7 light and spry by deliberately omitting some applications that came standard with Vista or even XP.  But you can download the ones you want from the Microsoft Live site.  I’ve been using their handy Windows Live Sync tool to keep files in sync at work and at home, and today I downloaded and used their new Windows Live Movie Maker to create a video, Waters of Autumn, of various creeks and brooks I’ve shot during my day hikes this fall.  I only shoot short clips on my handheld digital camera, but in the past I crashed Duotronic repeatedly trying to create videos from them using Adobe’s Premiere Elements 5.  I have learned to hate Adobe’s software, which is slow, bloated, and buggy.  I still use Acrobat at work and like doing some lighting touchups in Photoshop Elements 4 (I know, they’re up to version 8 these days), but I really wanted to avoid purchasing Premiere Elements 8, especially since PCMag.com reported their beta review copy had bugs, even as they rewarded it their coveted Editor’s Choice.

I had good luck on a recent trip using XP’s Movie Maker on my little netbook, so I thought I would see if the new free Windows Live Movie Maker could serve my needs.  As Waters of Autumn shows, it works just fine, although I had to use my trusty ThumbsPlus to paste in the Creative Commons logo before importing a picture for the end credit slide.  The AutoMovie feature is especially nice for quickly adding transitions and the like.  And it has built-in YouTube export capability and a plug-in will let you quickly export to Facebook as well.  Now they need to add one for Flickr and I’m set.  This little program isn’t nearly as powerful, nor as cumbersome and frustrating, as Premiere Elements.  As the wonderful Jerry Pournelle would say, “Recommended.”

I’m also using the Windows Live Writer to compose this blog post.  It interfaces to WordPress and other blog services, and is a much better editor than the native WordPress one.

A Slow Wizard

The most annoying thing about my upgrade was that it took Microsoft’s File and Settings Transfer Wizard over twelve hours to bring my documents over from Duotronic to Vector via the wired router connection.  But that did bring over more than 400 gigabytes of data with few problems.  Why so much data?  Almost half is a friend’s backups which had overwhelmed the old external drives on hand.  Plus my extensive (and entirely legal, thank you very much) music and audiobook collection takes up another 100 gigabytes, there are over 40 gigabytes of photographs, and so on.

My new camera

I’ve been doing a lot of digital photography on my day hikes this year and I’ve been posting the best of them to Flickr.  That exposure (pun intended) has led to some of my photographs, which I put out under a Creative Commons license, being used for various websites and even music CD artwork.  Friends have been somewhat surprised to find out that my camera was a miniscule Canon Elph point-and-shoot with limited resolution and zoom.  A friend loaned me her Canon superzoom camera last weekend, and I greatly appreciated its 10x zoom with image stabilization.  So I decided I’d ask for the positively reviewed Panasonic DMC-ZS3 for Christmas, with its Leica lens, 12x zoom with stabilization, and compact, light body.  But then my credit card company sent me a flyer urging me to use some of my WorldPoints.  I’d forgotten about them entirely, as I’ve never used them in the many years I’ve had the card.  I was shocked to discover how many points I had, more than enough to buy the camera, with a friend buying some accessories as an early Christmas present.  One problem with the old Duotronic computer was that the external card reader I’d bought a few years ago couldn’t handle the large SDHC cards these new cameras use.  So I was glad to find today, when loading in my first photos from the new camera, that the new computer’s built-in multi-card reader rapidly imported pictures from a 16 GB SDHC card.

Tweaking the Transfer

I was careful to deauthorize my iTunes music on the old machine, since some of those files are still DRMed, and told iTunes to organize and consolidate its files before making the transfer.  It all came through okay, although iTunes did lose its database pointers to a couple dozen files, forcing me to relocate them for it manually.  They transferred over; iTunes just didn’t know where they were.  The transfer wizard got most of the application settings over okay, although when installing older applications I sometimes had to copy their files over from the hidden “C:\Documents and Settings\username” directory in Windows XP to the hidden “C:\Users\username\AppData\Local” or “C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming” directories in Windows 7.  Another hiccup came when trying to sync my iPhone to the new computer.  It complained that the Audible audiobooks were not authorized for that computer.  I’d forgotten they are separatedly DRMed.  iTunes claimed the computer was authorized with Audible, but that was an artifact of the imported settings.  I couldn’t get it to work until I deauthorized the old computer’s Audible account and then tried again to play an audiobook in iTunes on the new computer.  That let me re-enter my Audible account information and authorize the new machine.  As the folks at Buzz Out Loud are fond of saying, DRM only annoys law-abiding users, since pirates know how to defeat it and get their music and books DRM-free via BitTorrent sites.  Count me as annoyed, but not enough to become a pirate, arrrrr!

Mozilla Thunderbird

I flirted with the idea of abandoning Mozilla Thunderbird and just using the online Gmail interface for email, but I like having my own local copy of my emails and dislike the inherent slight delays for web-based email access, so I stuck with Thunderbird, which I interface to Gmail via IMAP.  An annoyance under Windows XP was that my employer’s Outlook WebAccess client was incompatible with the new Internet Explorer 8, and its Firefox interface was limited.  So I had downgraded XP to Internet Explorer 7 to get the full functionality out of Outlook WebAccess.  Thankfully the Windows 7 iteration of Internet Explorer 8 works better, albeit still with some bugs, with the WebAccess client. It is a shame Microsoft can’t get their act together on this core functionality – more power to Gmail, I suppose!  I still use Firefox for all other web browsing, invoking the IE Tab plug-in when I need to view an online PowerPoint, such as my own Failure By Design presentation.

Driving the Printer Crazy

On the hardware front, Windows 7 can make use of Vista drivers.  I searched online for Windows 7 drivers for my Hewlett Packard Photosmart 7960 inkjet printer and ScanJet G4010 scanner, but they said to use the installation defaults, and Windows 7 installed them without a hitch.  The scanner interface is much more attractive than the XP version, and has the same design as the improved Camera wizard, letting you automatically name imported pictures and scans with the date and a tag.  Some vendors will take advantage of the new Device Stage feature, but I’m quite pleased with how even my older hardware works with Windows 7.

That’s not to say I didn’t encounter one hardware problem.  While the inkjet installed just fine, things did not go as smoothly for my Brother HL-5150D laser printer.  When I plugged it in, Windows 7 did not recognize it, and all I could find at Brother’s website was a 64-bit Vista driver.  Installing it with that driver left Windows 7 confused about the printer’s connection, and in desperation I picked one of the USB ports from a list.  That left Windows 7 utterly confused about whether that port was for the HP inkjet or the Brother laser printer – obviously I made a poor choice.  Printing became unreliable on both units and the Troubleshooter in Devices and Printers did its best but could only get one printer working at a given time.  After some reboots and continuing trouble, I finally yanked both printers out, removed them from Devices and Printers, and reinstalled them both, being careful to pick a different USB port when dealing with the Brother.  That finally set things right.

Happy Computing

It was worth the weekend to set up the new system.  I thought the initial transfer would only take overnight on Friday, but its glacial pace left me time to go on a long walk on the Pathfinder Parkway on Saturday morning, and a rainy Sunday gave me time to create this absurdly long blog post about my experience.  I’m so delighted with Windows 7 that I’ve bought a Family Pack to install on good old Duotronic as well as my netbook.  Windows 7 runs like a charm on this hot new system, and I’m interested to see the hit it takes when running on a five-year-old desktop and a tiny netbook.

Leafy Streams (click image for a slideshow)

Have you ever had a 2000-acre state park all to yourself?  I did on a warm Saturday afternoon in early November, visiting a place where some of my ancestors had bitter experiences in the Civil War.

Earlier in the week I was perusing my new Hiking Missouri book, looking for something not too far from Bartlesville.  I came across the Ozark Chinquapin Trail at Big Sugar Creek State Park in McDonald County, just west of Barry County where I’ve spent countless vacations since childhood.  I’d never heard of this park, so I looked it up in Google Maps and was shocked to see that it’s adjacent to Cyclone, Missouri.  That place brings forth tales of death and hardship in my family, but not from the tornado that gave the place its name in the late 1800s.

My Ancestors at Big Sugar Creek

Cyclone is nothing more than a low-water crossing and a couple of houses these days, and did not even exist when my great-great-grandfather bought an 80-acre farm just northeast of there in 1851 on a bend of Big Sugar Creek.  He and his wife and children built a milldam and grist mill, using the open range to graze their cattle.  My great-grandfather was born there in 1856, and his mother died in childbirth the following year.  She and her infant are buried there on the farm, which today is the eastern part of the largely undeveloped Big Sugar Creek State Park.  My father located their graves, marked only by fieldstones, in the years before the land was acquired for the park.

After losing his wife, my great-great-grandfather remarried and had another daughter.  But the Civil War would bring a tragic end to their life on Big Sugar Creek.  My great-grandfather recalled how Confederate troops who were stationed in the county in the winter of 1860 through the spring of 1861 drove up in their provision wagons, shot the family’s cattle, hogs, and sheep, loaded them up, and drove away.  Limestone bluffs across the creek from the family farm allowed soldiers to establish a picket line and hold prisoners in that bend of the creek, so it became known as Penitentiary Bottom.

My great-great-grandfather and his two eldest sons joined the Union army in 1862, but someone stole his overcoat and he died of pneumonia in Cassville in late May after only two months of service.  His second wife left for Kansas with their young daughter and the two eldest sons were still in the Union army, so that left six orphans alone at the farm on Big Sugar Creek.  They ranged in age from a 17-year-old daughter to my great-grandfather, who was the youngest at age six.

The six orphans had only two scrubby work steers left, so they made a box bed to mount on the front axle of a wagon, loaded what few belongings they had left, and traveled fifty miles to Lawrence County, where they lived in a cabin that had formerly been used for farm slaves.  My great-grandfather remembered how they had little more than corn bread to eat and he would cry from hunger after going to bed.  There was a small lake nearby where soldiers would come to wash their clothes, and the only shoes my great-grandfather and his siblings had were old shoes the soldiers had thrown away at that lake.

With all of that family history swirling through my head, it was clear that my next day hike would be at Big Sugar Creek.  So Saturday morning I dashed back out along US 60 and I-44 to Joplin.  I could have turned off at Afton for lunch at Neosho, but my last lunch there was unimpressive and I had a hankering for the wood-fire pizza Yelp recommended in Joplin.  I’ve never explored that ugly town very much, so it was interesting to head downtown to old highway 66, where I would turn east for the pizza paradise.  I’d left Bartlesville at 9 am since it was supposedly two hours to Joplin.  But I got to town early, which was just as well, since I got stuck in traffic downtown for 20 minutes waiting for the Joplin Veterans Day’s Parade to pass by.

When I finally reached my goal, I found a tiny restaurant with no cars in a blighted area.  No thanks, Yelp!  So I reluctantly drove back east to pizza choice number two, knowing it was situated, like so many other restaurants, along Joplin’s hideous Range Line Road.  I had the buffet, which helps explain why my lunch consisted of salad, pizza, and, er, a cinnamon roll.  Pizza parlor desserts tend to be a bit strange, don’t they?

Then I rocketed down the new US 71, which has been rebuilt to interstate standards.  At 70 mph it wasn’t long until I reached Pineville, where I turned off onto the narrow asphalt of Big Sugar Creek Road and meandered twelve miles east to lonely Cyclone.  The water was up over the low-water bridge, so I asked a couple at the nearby house what my other options might be.  They assured me I could drive across safely.  “Drive ‘er slow and down the middle, and you’ll make it just fine.”

So I reluctantly drove across it eastward, with water gurgling beneath the floorboards.  The road on the other side was gravel and it was a short drive uphill to the north to reach the entrance to the old Meador farm.  The state bought this area in the 1990s but has not developed much in the park.  There is just the hiking trail over in the western portion, and this eastern portion has an abandoned 1950s homestead.  As was the case years ago when my parents last visited Cyclone, the gate was padlocked.  This time it had a notice that this is a closed portion of the state park.  I considered jumping the fence, but decided it was best to follow the rules and forgo finding the grave of my great-great-grandmother.  This park is administered over at Roaring River, so maybe I’ll ask there sometime for permission.

Returning to the low water crossing, I saw the walls and gears from the old grist and sawmill that was built there in the late 1800s.  Gurgling my way back across, I drove to the Ozark Chinquapin Trail.  A couple finishing their hike were just leaving as I arrived at the trailhead, which has two vault toilets.  Nearby is an old stone outbuilding for the former Shady Grove School.  I had the trail, and thus the entire park, to myself for the rest of my stay.

The three-mile loop trail’s eastern leg meanders north back and forth along a limestone streambed with one section of lumpy limestone bedrock reminiscent of Roaring River’s Dry Hollow.  Much of this portion was dry on this 77-degree November day, but there was one little active stream with pleasant rippling water.  Some of the ridges along there were so eroded they resembled giant gravel piles.  (Reminds one of Joplin’s sinkholes and tailings from years of lead and zinc mining.)  My scuffling along the leafy trail spooked a white-tail deer away from the stream and up the slope.  As the trail looped around on the north, it ran along the side of a wooded hill.  There I saw an interesting hollow tree and meandered off trail to reach a truly strange tree.

Then it was back down the streambed of the western leg.  Here the water had carved out a small natural amphitheater and flooded it, with lovely ripples and shadows and floating autumn leaves.  This stream had carved deeper through the limestone layers.  With no one about, I set up my Gorillapod for a self-portrait.  Near the end of the hike, I spied something odd in the streambed.  It looked like a piece of sidewalk embedded in a tree.  A closer look showed that a chunk of limestone had crashed downstream or out of the side of the streambed in a flood, embedding in a tree that valiantly grew around it.

Arriving back at the trailhead, I stripped off my shirt and washed up.  I never expected to be this warm in November!  Freshened up, I drove back to US 71 and rocketed down to Bella Vista, Arkansas.  This golfers’ paradise has now incorporated, although one’s impression is still a series of golf courses surrounded by retirement homes and interspersed with box stores and strip malls.  But it beats Joplin’s Range Line!

I drove into the heart of “town”, which looks like a dendritic forest on the map.  There behind the dam at Lake Windsor is the Tanyard Creek Nature Trail.  Volunteers constructed this trail, which wraps around the namesake creek with nice bluffs and drip walls, a small cave with an ugly tin cover over its entrance (that part was simply too ugly for a snapshot), and some impressive rocks.  The trails are dotted with innumerable signposts identifying trees and natural formations.  True to form, I ignored almost all of them.  Walking by so many such posts reminds one of driving by mile markers on the Turner Turnpike.  But the creek below the Lake Windsor spillway is quite pretty, although malodorous.

I would have liked to photograph the small waterfall there as well, but a family was hogging the cramped viewing area, blithely ignoring the rules about walking past the fence so they could take snapshots by the falls with their cell phones.  What a contrast to my own refusal to break the rules and enter a closed section of an absolutely empty state park to go see my ancestor’s grave.  It takes all types!

Trudging back to the car, I took one last snapshot of the rushing water as dusk closed in.  After the Yelp failure at lunch, I wondered how dinner would go.  But Urbanspoon’s recommendation of Las Fajitas was accurate.  The place was packed, the food was tasty, and I liked their brightly painted tabletops and booth backs.  It was a quick roll back to Bartlesville.  In fact, I spent far more time downloading photos from a friend’s borrowed camera, editing and posting them, and writing this post than I did driving back to Bartlesville from another successful day hike.

Click for a photo slideshow from this day trip

The other day I had to choke back the tears in class again, for I always break down when I mention Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot.

Carl was a great popularizer of science and astronomy, perhaps best known for his inimitable way of saying “billions” where he always emphasized the b.  His PBS television series Cosmos influenced me greatly with its spectacular scope and vision.  [At this writing, you can view Cosmos on hulu.com!]

I loved his books, especially Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, and the “baloney detection kit” from his The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.  He was a great agnostic skeptic of tremendous eloquence and sincerity.  I love how he convinced NASA to put messages on the Pioneer and Voyager probes that would be leaving our solar system.  Messages that could, in some distant future, possibly be found by aliens and be a remembrance of our civilization.

But the Pale Blue Dot always makes me cry.  Sagan convinced NASA to have Voyager 1, as it exited the solar system in 1990, turn its view back toward the sun and snap one last photo of our planet.  Earth showed up as a pale blue dot – a single pixel in the grainy image.  Sagan capitalized on the power of that symbol in a commencement address he gave in 1996 a few months before his death:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Thanks, Carl, for the Pale Blue Dot, even though it always make me cry.

Atop White Rock Mountain (click image for a slideshow)

A sunny Saturday in late October was ideal for a day trip to the Ozarks for some fall foliage.  I recently purchased several hiking guides for Missouri and Arkansas and they agreed that some of the most spectacular vistas in the Ozarks are to be found on the rim of White Rock Mountain northeast of Fort Smith and Van Buren, Arkansas.  So I was off!

After a yummy Eggbert’s Bartlesville breakfast I stopped by a gas station to air up the tires.  They are worn out and I knew I’d be on remote gravel roads today, so I made sure to air up the spare tire as well.  Then I shot down US 75 and the Muskogee Turnpike, then east on Interstate 40 to Van Buren, Arkansas.  Just across the Arkansas River from Fort Smith, Van Buren is about 2/3 the size of Bartlesville.  I drove to its historic downtown and ordered a salad and “Ultimate” grilled cheese sandwich at the Sisters Gourmet Bistro.  By the time I was finished, my mouth was burning.  Alas, too late did I realize that the Ultimate grilled cheese is served on jalapeno bread.

The big tourist attraction in downtown Van Buren is the excursion train of the Arkansas & Missouri Railroad which runs from Ft. Smith up to Springdale through the Boston Mountains, an extension of the Ozarks.  After lunch I noticed one had pulled in, attracting a crowd waiting to board.  The best train ride I’ve ever had was with my dad years ago aboard the narrow-gauge steam train between Durango and Silverton, Colorado with its spectacular scenery that reminds one of many an old western movie.  While I doubt the Boston Mountains can compete, I’m certain that ride is far more scenic than what I saw the time I suffered on an excursion train from Bartlesville to Ocheleta.

20 miles farther east on Interstate 40 brings one to Arkansas 215, which winds north to Shores Lake.  The reflections of the fall foliage in the water were quite nice, although that single snapshot cost me $3 since I dutifully paid the day use fee for the privilege of parking there for less than half an hour.  I didn’t notice any day use fee signs farther up on White Rock Mountain – perhaps they take pity on you for having driven 10 miles on gravel and dirt roads to reach the rim.

The Forest Service reports White Rock Mountain is “2,260 feet above sea level and received its name from the appearance of the lichen on the sheer bluffs that look white from a distance.”  The only worrisome spot on the road was toward the top where recent rains had made it a bit muddy, but even the worn-out tires on my Camry managed it easily.  After 10 miles of rough roads I must say I was glad to see the sign saying I’d made it and I was even more glad to see the foliage looked promising.

The CCC built a two-mile long trail around the rim along with a lodge, three cabins, and four shelters.  The most obvious is Sunset Shelter on the southwest corner of the rim, although I wasn’t going to stick around to enjoy the sunset from it.  The shelter has a 270-degree view of the countryside below and a low wall featuring chiseled mileage markers to nearby towns.  The autumn leaves accentuated the rolling hills and rocky outcroppings.  You can walk right out onto the high prominent ledges and one shelter had a sign banning rappelling since six people have died trying it up there.

After exhausting the views from Sunset Shelter I took the trail north up the west side of the rim past the smaller West Shelter and then on around to the North Shelter’s views to the east.  The trail on the north rim was quite brushy due to a past fire but the southeast rim had impressive bluffs and a spring improved by the CCC.  The south rim has short side trails leading up to the cabins and lodge while its South Shelter is quite picturesque up on its promontory.

At the southeast corner of the rim is a trail down the mountainside to reach the Ozark Highlands Trail, which runs 165 miles across northeast Arkansas.  Part of that big trail is used to create a 13-mile loop trail between Shores Lake and the White Rock Mountain Rim Trail.  I took that side trail down the side of the mountain a short ways and the climb back up was a hot one, even in late October.  What a challenge that hike would be in mid-summer!

Four-wheelers zipped by me during my drive back down the mountain to Shores Lake.  Choking on their dust and fumes, I decided day hiking is friendlier.  By late afternoon I’d reached the Fort Smith Historic Site along the Arkansas River.  I was too late to tour the visitor center, but I enjoyed a short walk along the Arkansas River and did get a snapshot of one old cannon aimed out across the river and saw a reconstruction of the gallows where Judge Parker’s sentences were carried out.  During his tenure from 1875 to 1896, 79 men were hung there after being convicted in jury trials for committing rape or murder in western Arkansas and the Indian Territory.

My trip ended with dinner at the El Chico in Fort Smith and then a dash back to Bartlesville for some late-night photo editing and blogging.

Click for a photo slideshow from this day trip

I enjoyed my fall break of 2009, although I spent more time driving than hiking.

Drive One – Working at BHS

Thursday was my shortest driving day of the break by far, all of it in town!  I simply drove to Eggbert’s for breakfast and then spent the day wiring and rewiring classrooms at the high school, taking my lunch break at good old Pies and Such.  We are steadily working toward the goal of equipping each and every classroom with a ceiling projector hooked up to both a computer and a VCR/DVD player by 2011.  I was fixing wiring snafus left behind by various contractors.  ‘Tis a pity it is taking so long to get all of the classrooms up to snuff, but better late than never.

Coleman Theater (click image for slideshow)

Drive Two – Miami and Grove (slideshow available)

Day two was a day trip to Miami and Grove to some locations I found in my 7th edition of Off the Beaten Path: Oklahoma.  The first stop was the splendid Coleman Theater in Miami along historic route 66, a vaudeville theater and movie palace that has operated steadily since its opening in 1929.  George L. Coleman, Sr., a local mining magnate, built this structure with its Spanish Colonial Revival exterior and Louis XV interior.  He lavished about $600,000 on the theater.

Performers like Will Rogers, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Cary Grant graced its stage, but the theater had hit hard times by the time the Coleman family donated it to the City of Miami in 1989.  Since then the community has worked steadily to restore and renovate the structure, using only private donations and no corporate sponsors.  They’ve fixed the beautiful statue in the mahogany paneled lobby, regilded some moldings with gold leaf, repainted elsewhere, and installed reproduction seats, although to accommodate today’s larger bottoms the seating capacity dropped from 1600 to about 1100!  They’ve restored the two-ton brass and crystal chandelier which can be lit in a wide variety of patterns and colors.  The Wurlitzer pipe organ, which had been sold to an evangelist for use in revivals, was repurchased from an organ collector and restored.  One of the stained glass ceiling lights was recovered from a Tulsa bar after the owner agreed to accept a reproduction in its stead. Even the ropes for the stage’s fly system were donated when a tourist whose family owned a rope company back east came through and recognized the need.

Tours are provided by volunteer docents from 10 am to 4 pm Tuesday-Friday and from 10 am to noon on Saturdays.  They’ve equipped the Wurlitzer with a recorder and player and the guide ran it through a thunderous rendition of Phantom of the Opera and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.  It was magnificent!  I also enjoyed how the rear of the theater has a “crying room” for upset children.  The theater is still in operation – I’m sorely tempted to drive over some day to take in a silent movie with pipe organ accompaniment.

After leaving the theater I had a dipped cone at Miami’s Ku Ku Drive-In.  This sole survivor of a chain that peaked at over 200 drive-ins across the midwest in the 1960s is owned and operated by Eugene Waylan, who has cooked at the place for over 40 years and owned it since the early 1970s.

I then drove over to Grove, crossed the Sailboat Bridge, and toured Lendonwood Gardens.  I’d noticed it before when driving to Har-Ber Village and decided to see what it looked like even though it could hardly be a showplace in mid-October.  A tame rabbit was chewing his way through the place while I took snapshots of flowers, roses, a caterpillar, the koi pond, and the Angel of Hope statue.  Then I drove back to Bartlesville for dinner.

Arcadia Round Barn (click image for slideshow)

Drive Three – Arcadia (slideshow available)

Day three started with a drive down to Oklahoma City to see my parents.  We stuck with my Route 66 theme from the day before by driving out north to Edmond for yummy burgers and fries at Johnnie’s and then drove east on historic route 66 to visit Arcadia’s Pops 66 store and the famous Round Barn.  Pops opened a couple of years ago and is always busy.  Out front is a 66-foot high pop bottle sculpture that glows with neon colors at night.  The store has a popular restaurant, but I’ve never been willing to endure the wait.  I scanned the wall of coolers full of unusual sodas, but this time could not find my favorite Cherry Moxie.  So I settled for some Coca-Colas and Dr. Peppers made with real sugar instead of the usual corn syrup.  I took us out back to the grassy seating area where we snapped shots of me enjoying The Real Thing and Mom’s Dr. Pepper vs. Dad’s Coke.

Then we drove into Arcadia and toured the Round Barn, which dates back to 1898.  It was neglected for years and the 60′ diameter roof finally collapsed back in 1988.  But a retired building contractor and the Over the Hill Gang, a group of retirees, restored it over the next four years.  Today the first floor is a gift shop with oddball hand-lettered displays around the sides, while the second floor is a big open space where you can admire the basket-style roof design.

The Walk

That afternoon, after dropping my folks off back in Oklahoma City, I decided I had to get some sort of long walk in.  Back in high school a quarter-century ago I would sometimes go “parking” along the canal linking Lake Hefner and Lake Holdhercloser, er, I mean Overholser.  Back then I had stumbled across the beginnings of the Stinchcomb Wildlife Refuge, which is an undeveloped parcel along the North Canadian River.  The web claimed it had some trails, so I was off.

I parked on the east side near 50th street at a parking area that is still under development.  An old unpaved road runs north there along the river all the way over to the new Kilpatrick Turnpike.  I ambled along it, listening to another Hercule Poirot mystery, and took a few unmarked side trails to get a better glimpse of the river.  But recent rains had left much of the floodplain too muddy for my taste, so I mainly stuck to the river road.  I was hoping it would have a pedestrian bridge across the North Canadian so I could return along the west edge of the refuge, but no such luck.  Instead I had to simply reverse course back to the parking area.

I then followed a bike trail past the Bethany athletic fields down to, you guessed it, old route 66 once again.  I snapped some shots of the old bridge across the North Canadian, which runs along the north edge of Lake Overholser.  Its rusting superstructure now only bears the added weight of passing pedestrians.

A couple was enjoying the lake, setting up for a picnic at dusk.  I drove on down south past my old high school to the Lake Overholser dam.  The 1919 dam building looked almost grand in the light from the setting sun, and I was glad to note they tried to spruce up the aging dam back in 2004 with some spray-on concrete, although some of it is already spalling.

Drive Four – Lakes of Disappointment

Day four meant fall break was almost over, and I needed to drive back to Bartlesville.  Thinking I would get some more hiking in, I asked the web for trails along the route back home and opted for the Sand Plum trail, which stretches about 15 miles along the north shore of Keystone Lake near Prue.  Exiting the Turner Turnpike at Bristow, I drove up through Mannford south of the lake along some nice highways.  The highway 151 crossing over the Arkansas River towards Prue was closed, however, so I had to divert several miles east and cross on highway 97 in Sand Springs.  The Prue Road north of highway 64/412 rapidly deteriorated into a narrow patchy mess that reminded of how horrible highway 75 north of Bartlesville used to be in my youth.  This did not bode well.

Pulling into Walnut Creek State Park, I was struck by how empty it was.  All of the campsites had their restrooms closed for the winter and I only spotted two campers in the entire place.  I finally located the Sand Plum Trail, which only had an equestrian marker.  The trail was not too badly churned by horses and there weren’t too many “contributions” from those animals, but the trail itself was somewhat neglected and overgrown.  The west part of the trail petered out into a brambly mess.  Daunted but still willing, I then tried following the trail to the east, but again it was in poor shape and the lake views were anything but spectacular.  One prick too many from the brambles convinced me I’d be better off elsewhere.

So I decamped and followed my iPhone’s Google map northeast along county roads over to Skiatook Lake.  I’d only been out here once before.  A trip to a boat ramp revealed a short nature trail created by a local Boy Scout troop – the trail was short and easy and really only featured some signage which I didn’t want to read.  That makes three Oklahoma lakes I’ve visited this fall hoping for a good day hike only to be disappointed by shoddy maintenance.  Don’t bother hiking at Oologah, the north side of Keystone, or the parts I saw of Skiatook.  (I later found there is some sort of nature trail at Skiatook’s Tall Chief Cove, but details are sparse.)  Almost all of the trails I’ve found are poorly maintained and only fit for a rider on horseback.  Makes me appreciate the trails at Osage Hills, even though they too are allowed to become overgrown in the summer.  The trails at Roaring River are so much better!

Deciding that I’d just have to settle for a drive rather than a hike, I took my trusty Camry over the Skiatook dam.  That big earthen structure wasn’t at all photogenic, but I did like the view from the heights south of the dam.  It was then a short drive south into Tulsa, along roads recently improved by the Osage Nation, which has been working on a Cross Timbers development on the lake.  My fall break concluded with dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse and then a quick zip back up to Bartlesville.

On the Trail at Roaring River (click for slideshow)

A cool fall weekend was perfect for a day hike in Roaring River State Park in southwest Missouri.  I’ve been exploring its trails for almost four decades and was surprised to find some new trails on this outing.

I headed east along Highway 60 from Bartlesville around 9 am so that I would arrive in Neosho, Missouri in time for lunch.  I decided to revisit the El Charro restaurant at the big highway junction, and then followed good old Highway 86 to Cassville and then took 112 down into Roaring River.

I parked near the Sayman monument in front of the great old CCC Lodge.  But I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the park store, which has occupied its second floor for decades, has relocated.  They’ve built a big new store out at the junction of Highways F and 112, on the site of the old park hotel and restaurant (which was demolished some years ago when the grand new Emory Melton Inn was constructed).  I’m sure this decision makes economic sense, but the new building has none of the character and history of the old lodge.  However, I also miss the sound of the pinball machines that used to be out on the lodge balcony in the 1970s, so my judgment is questionable.

I trotted over to the spring and climbed Deer Leap Trail so I could hop onto the Firetower trail, the longest trail in the park.  Deer Leap is a steep climb of rock stairs and the Firetower trail is quite steep at first as well.  I discovered a passel of urban youths strewn along the way.  Their adult leader, staying below, asked me if they would be coming back down the same way they went up.  It was apparent to me that they had no plan to hike several miles to the other trailheads, so I assured him he could wait them out.  Sure enough, I quickly zipped past the group on my ascent and they chose not to follow my lead.

Up top I followed the ridge to the pathetic old firetower.  It is a puny structure that is now dwarfed by the trees that have grown up around it.  I knew I could drive a few miles south to the impressive real firetower on the Sugar Camp Scenic Byway, but today my focus was to make a big day hike loop around Roaring River.  So I followed the trail on towards its trailhead near the old stables on Highway F, a part of the trail I had not taken in years.  Along the way I saw some flowers and two amorous walkingsticks, and then came upon a change.

I remember some years back when the park cleared off one hillside of invasive red cedars and other species so that other plants could thrive.  They still maintain the area with selective cutting and controlled fires.  The Firetower trail runs through the upper part of that glade and then terminates at the Highway F trailhead near the old stable.  For decades you then had the choice of either reversing course back to the spring or hoofing it down narrow Highway F to campground 3, which was built in the 1970s at the former site of Bass Lake.  Here the park has made a great improvement: a “Loop Trail” that neatly solves the problem.  You now can cross to the south side of Highway F and take this new trail back to the campground.  Strangely, this Loop Trail is not mentioned on their website and lacks good signage for folks headed east out of the campground.

The Loop Trail runs several feet south and below Highway F for a bit and then ducks down a bluff to run alongside the north bank of Roaring River.  This is a quite pretty stretch of the trail system, especially where there is a side channel of the river which makes a nice turn alongside the trail.  Further west there is a trailhead east of the Nature Center (former CCC kitchen), right at the sharp curve where Highway F used to turn to climb steeply northward before it was rerouted near Camp Smokey higher up.  I was then out in the grassy area east of campground 3 and wondered if I would have to trudge through the campground itself.

But no – I found another stretch of trail (not named, so I’ll call it the Loop Trail Extension) which followed a new bridge across Roaring River to its south bank and then intersected the Eagle’s Nest Trail.  Perfect!  So I climbed the upper loop of Eagle’s Nest towards Highway 112.  Near the old homestead site of the Mountain Maid I encountered a huge spider web across the trail (as opposed to the numerous tiny webs I had broken elsewhere).  An enormous spider with a bright yellow body and orange striped legs stood still for a flash photo before scurrying away.

This time there was no new trail to help me descend Highway 112 (the Seligman Road hill), but at least it has big wide shoulders.  Arriving at the Emory Melton Inn, I took the short loop of its new Spring House trail (and wandered up to the water tanks on the hill) and then descended to the new park store.  I refused to enter, since I dislike their abandonment of the old lodge.  Relying on the G2 bottles and trail mix in my small backpack to sustain me, I decided not to take the short roadway back to the lodge, since the fishermen lining the bridges over the river are known to sometimes hook unwary pedestrians.

So I strode back south through the pretty picnic shelter area on the west side of the river.  All of the shelters were in use by big groups and one group was serving hot food at 4 pm that smelled mighty good.  But I resolutely strode onward over the Highway F bridge, noticing several wading fishermen and a crew weedeating the guard rail struts on either side of the bridge.  Wow!  I’ve never seen that in Oklahoma.  Then I took the good old CCC River Trail back north along the river’s east bank.  I remember walking this 0.7 mile trail again and again as child, enjoying the view of the river and the bluff they blasted out for the trail back in the 1930s.  Back then the trail seemed very long, and I used to rest on the bluff even though I was frightened of the daddy-long-legs that populated it.  I didn’t spot any of them today, so my dignity is intact.

Arriving back at the CCC Lodge, I stripped off my damp shirt, cleaned up, and put on a fresh shirt for dinner.  Planning to eat in Eureka Springs, Arkansas I drove down there and discovered that the motorcyclists who had the run of the place on my last trip had been replaced by Corvette owners.  There were beautiful sleek cars prowling the crazy old town and one was kind enough to pull out and leave 55 minutes on its parking meter for my use.  I dashed into the Two Dumb Dames Fudge Factory to stock up on essentials and then drove up “topside” onto Highway 62 to find the Yelp-recommended Cafe Soleil.  But it had changed to Sparky’s Ultra Lounge and was already busy when I drove past.

So I decided to drive five miles west out of town along Highway 62 to Inspiration Point, which offers a great view of the White River valley.  Years ago I toured “The Castle” there, and it is still the site of Opera in the Ozarks.  There was no spectacular sunlight today, but the view was still quite beautiful.  Spotting a traditional couple who were struggling to snap of photo of themselves at arm’s length, I intervened and took the shot for them.  After I took my own snapshot of the view, two ladies in their twenties drove up.  Eureka Springs is very gay friendly, so I wondered if they were just friends or a couple.  I couldn’t tell.  Then two young guys drove up – I thought they might be meeting the girls, but no, the guys were definitely a couple.  I was going to offer to snap their picture as well, but the gals came to their rescue.  Feeling very much like a fifth wheel and with my stomach rumbling, I pondered my options.

I didn’t relish driving five miles back to Eureka Springs to compete with the Corvettes for a table at a good restaurant.  So I opted to just head on west and south to the good old AQ Chicken house in Springdale.  Arkansas Quality Chicken has been pan fried there since 1947, although they long ago moved out of the old house I recall from my youth into a more spacious restaurant.  Their food these days is a bit better than Kentucky Fried, but not nearly as good as the wonderful Stroud’s of Wichita and Kansas City.  A rapid four-lane haul back to Bartlesville brought an end to a satisfying day trip.

Photo slideshow of this day trip

Daytrip Photos (click for slideshow)

Earlier this week I decided I had to go for some long walks this weekend to enjoy the beautiful weather we’re having.  I debated various choices until my Tulsa friend Carrie suggested I explore the shores of Lake Oologah, where I could meet her and her roommate Trish to see their sailboat and then have lunch in Claremore.

I first tried to walk the Skull Hollow nature trail in the Hawthorn Bluff area of the lake, but it was too overgrown.  And the noise from the nearby power plant, which is featured in the electricity slideshow Lynne Shaw and I made back in 1995, was irksome.  I wondered at how the area could be full of campers with all of that noise pollution – perhaps they boat out onto the lake to escape it?  I fled the scene and drove to the south end of the lake to attempt the Will Rogers Centennial Trail to Kite Hill.  But equestrians had turned the trailhead into a churned morass of mud, so that was out too.

A bit discouraged, I took the county roads over to the Blue Creek Park on the lake’s eastern shore.  There was no trail, but I did enjoy walking down the southern end’s quiet picnic area, where I snapped a shot of the high water inundating the trees and enjoyed watching large birds wheeling by and landing on the lake, although they were too far away for a good snapshot.  Then I walked back to the car to contemplate my options, since my lunch rendezvous was still a couple of hours away.

I spotted the nearby town of Foyil on the iPhone’s map and recalled that it is the site of a highway tourist attraction, the crazy Totem Pole park built by Ed Galloway between 1937 and 1962.  The strange “totem pole” is being restored by the Indian Territory Questers, who are reviving its lively colors.  A Boy Scout troop had built a small nature trail in the park six years ago, and I enjoyed wandering through it although there was very little to catch the eye or the camera lens.

I zipped back to the south end of Lake Oologah to join my friends, see the sailboat, and indulge in a classic Oklahoma meal at the Hammett House in Claremore – chicken-fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy and a big slab of chocolate cream pie for dessert.  Urp!

Bidding my friends farewell, I decided to see what I could find in Claremore.  I drove by their lake, but the sunny concrete exercise trail there was not my cup of tea.  So I crossed 66 and drove onto the campus of Rogers State University to see if I could find some snapshot subjects.  I discovered their Conservation Education Reserve, a 120 acre outdoor classroom that is open to the public and features a number of paved trails reminiscent of Bartlesville’s Pathfinder Parkway.  That’s the ticket!

I followed the path over to their wetlands area, where I saw a deer across the water, and trekked through the grassland and on through the forest until I finally arrived at their butterfly garden.  I saw few butterflies, but other insects liked the prettiest flowers, and I took snapshots of red, orange and yellow, and white and yellow blooms.  Yes, my mastery of plant taxonomy is quite amazing, I must agree!

It was now mid-afternoon and I was determined not to head back to Bartlesville too soon.  So I meandered over to Owasso, finally happening upon the tiny “downtown” of this sprawling bedroom community where so many Bartians like to shop.  I drove over to look at its Elm Creek Park, later discovering that Owasso’s original name was Elm Creek, but the park was small with little to offer.  Owasso has almost doubled in population since 2000 and is now larger than Bartlesville, but it has little of interest for me.

With the afternoon fading away I decided another long walk was in order and drove to Turkey Mountain in south Tulsa.  They’ve built a nice big new parking area there and will be adding a much-needed restroom facility.  The mountain runs north-south with a large number of bike and hiking trails.  I started out on the long yellow loop trail, walking along the low eastern edge of the mountain.  My walk sped into a jog since it was getting late in the day and I wanted to get to the north end in time to shoot the view of downtown Tulsa in the evening sunlight.

I “changed lanes” a couple of times, shifting westward to higher trails, until I reached the crest and made it to the north end.  The view there is okay, but marred by power lines and you really need a powerful zoom lens for a good shot.  So I did the best I could with my limited pocket shooter and later cropped and “melted” the image a bit in Photoshop Elements to get a shot I could live with.  I took the blue trail back south toward the parking area, coming across a few brightly colored mushrooms at one point and also snapping a nice flash image of a plant.

I made it to the car with the sun still up in the sky (and no unwanted advances from the cruisers who purportedly haunt that mountain) and happily drove downtown for a dose of the Spaghetti Warehouse.  ‘Twas a nice day for early autumn, perhaps my favorite season in Oklahoma.

Click for a slideshow of today’s daytrip

Regular readers know I love my Kindles, but here’s a possible improvement from lunchbreath: The Trapper Kindle.

Trapper Kindle

Remembering Mary Travers

If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles,
A hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles,
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.

Lord I’m one, lord I’m two, lord I’m three, lord I’m four,
Lord I’m 500 miles from my home.
500 miles, 500 miles, 500 miles, 500 miles
Lord I’m five hundred miles from my home.

Not a shirt on my back, not a penny to my name
Lord I can’t go a-home this a-way
This a-way, this a-way, this a-way, this a-way,
Lord I can’t go a-home this a-way.

If you miss the train I’m on you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles.