February 22, 2014
Another Lakeside Hike (click image for slideshow)
Last weekend Wendy and I took advantage of warmer weather to escape for another lakeside hike, this time at Okmulgee Lake. Although she grew up mostly in her home state of Texas, she graduated from Okmulgee High and once taught elementary and high school students there, so she was familiar with the lake, although she did more swimming than hiking there. I had a more photogenic hike there back in the autumn of 2011, but Wendy and I enjoyed the chance to escape the pressures of our jobs on another day hike.
We stopped for some delicious Chatsworth boxty at Kilkenny’s in Tulsa, then drove on south to Okmulgee for a 3.5 mile hike. I like how the Oak Leaf Trail has distinct sections, beginning with the shoreline trail with its lichen-covered slabs, followed by a hillside with scattered picnic tables, and then a hill with a paved lower trail leading over to a shelter in a camping area with a parallel and more primitive trail higher up which passes by a slab of rock providing a nice overlook of the lake.
Okmulgee Lake Overlook
Wendy enjoyed examining the graffiti at the overlook, ranging from romance to comedy. At the pretty rock shelter we were ungrammatically commanded to visit the bathroom, but nothing much was going down there. 🙂
Lake Shelter
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