Wendy and I have returned from our big summer vacation, which was 11 days along the modern equivalents of historic Route 66 west from Tulsa as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico. Our focus was a long stay in Santa Fe, which also happened to be along the original route of old US 66. As my schedule permits over the coming weeks I’ll be posting about our adventure, narrating photos of our road trip out west.
Wendy and I wanted to get out of town for some summer sightseeing, but not hiking since the weather was hot and humid. We ended up circumnavigating Lake Oologah southeast of Bartlesville as we made tourist stops in Claremore and visited Totem Pole Park east of Foyil.
Hammett House
The biggest attraction in Claremore is the Will Rogers Museum, but we had seen it before, albeit separately. Next door is the Hammett House restaurant, which my friends Carrie and Trish introduced me to years ago. Wendy had the Chicken Fried Chicken Salad and I had the Sweddar Chicken Sandwich (swiss and cheddar cheese with bacon on top); both were tasty. For dessert she wisely chose a slice of Buttermilk Chess Custard pie while I unwisely chose the special, a slice of Key Lime Cake from a recipe by Trisha Yearwood. Ugh; I reckon she sings better than she bakes.
Belvidere Mansion
Our next stop was the Belvidere Mansion (yes, that is the spelling). John and Mary Bayless and their seven children moved from Cassville, Missouri to Indian Territory back in 1901. Mr. Bayless had been involved with the railroads in Missouri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory, and was attracted to Claremore over Tulsa because at the time Claremore was larger and also boasted two railroads. There is still a busy rail line running through the heart of town today, which causes traffic jams. The city has been working for years on plans to elevate the tracks, but for now thirty-four daily trains regularly divide the town in two.
Anyway, back to Bayless. He helped develop Sulphur, OK and its Artesian Hotel, which had some of the same tin and marble features found in the Belvidere Mansion in Claremore. Of all of the projects he was involved in, today only the Belvidere and his old home in Cassville remain. The exterior is interesting, with three different colors of brick and two round front corner turrets contrasting with two square towers at the rear corners. Wendy has sharp eyes and noticed how one of the turret ornaments had deteriorated over the past 107 years.
Construction of the mansion ran from 1902 until 1907, being finished shortly after John Bayless had died. Mary and the children lived in it until 1919, but in the 1930s it was converted into twelve apartments. It fell into disrepair by the 1980s and was saved from demolition in 1991 when the Rogers County Historical Society purchased it and began restoring the 9,000 square foot home, which originally had six bedrooms and three bathrooms. Here is a video they produced:
The first floor kitchen, dining room, and ladies’ parlor are used as an active tea room for lunch and was quite busy during our visit, while the gentlemen’s parlor is now a gift shop. The foyer has one-inch octagonal porcelain tile, hand-laid by an Italian craftsman. We had earlier noticed the tile on the entry porch. The foyer also has marble wainscoting, while the wood in the home was bought from a World’s Fair. The pressed tin ceilings flow down to pressed tin walls, an unusual feature we noticed.
The foyer has an open central atrium forming a shaft to the upper two floors, topped by a skylight. This worked with the room door transoms as a heat chimney so that three gas fireplaces on the main floor could warm the other rooms. Since the first floor was filled by the tea room and gift shop, we soon climbed the old stairs to the second floor. They leaned, reminding me of the much larger old stairs at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs.
Upstairs the atrium provided a nice visual connection between the floors and, as on the first floor, it was the centerpoint of two crossed corridors dividing the floor into quadrants. The floor was an intricate parquet, although rugs hid some damaged sections. I was glad to find that none of the turrets had been used as stairwells; each one formed an interesting addition to a bedroom.
The third floor was the most pleasant, being entirely devoted to a 3,000 square foot ballroom with towers and central skylight. This bright and cheerful space is rented out for parties and weddings.
We enjoyed our visit to the mansion and walked a half block northwest to the former Will Rogers Library, hoping to see the surrey with the fringe on top from the Broadway musical Oklahoma!, but it was closed. I later learned this museum is a work in progress and is open by appointment only. We had to satisfy ourselves with the Lynn Riggs Memorial statue out front.
Lynn Riggs Memorial Statue
Lynn Riggs was born near Claremore and wrote Green Grow the Lilacs, the play upon which Oklahoma! was based. I’m amused to find he wrote the play while living in France on a Guggenheim Fellowship; maybe he was homesick. The statue of him is showing its age; the pages of his book are torn and I think he has skin cancer on his forehead. Not to mention how the poor fellow is growing up out of, um, lilacs? Lynn didn’t explain what was going on, he just sat and stared. It was time for us to venture over to a place I haven’t visited in decades, home of the world’s largest privately owned gun collection.
J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum
John Monroe Davis had run a sawmill in Arkansas before he moved to Claremore in 1917 and bought the Mason Hotel, which he and his wife steadily filled with guns, beer steins, and other items. He gave his collection of 11,000 guns and his wife Genevieve donated her collection of 1,200 beer steins and much more to the state in the 1960s, which built a 40,000 square foot museum to house and organize the stuff. J.M. wanted to be buried with his guns, so oddly enough both he and Genevieve are entombed in one of the rooms.
The collection has built up to 13,000 guns housed in displays which would stretch over a mile if laid end-to-end. I’m not very interested in guns, but I liked Ms. Davis’s old music boxes and John Rogers plaster statuettes; Rogers sold perhaps 80,000 of his plaster scenes back in the late 1800s. The museum is filled with tens of thousands of objects of interest, but you can watch a brief video tour of some highlights:
On our way through town we admired a couple of nice exterior wall murals by Steve Stephens. His flowers were pretty, but I really liked his train busting through a wall. We soon were headed northeast on old Route 66 towards Foyil, where we’d turn east and head a few miles over to tour Ed Galloway’s park of folk art.
Totem Pole Park
Ed Galloway wanted to keep busy after he retired in 1937 to some land east of Foyil after teaching woodworking and building in wood and stone at a Sand Springs orphanage for over twenty years. For 11 years he built an enormous concrete totem: a sandstone cone perhaps sixty feet tall or more and of similar circumference, supported by a steel armature and covered with a concrete skin which he decorated with 200 bas-relief images of brightly colored Indian portraits, symbols, and animal figures. It sits on a sculpted turtle as its base and includes some more painting and reliefs on the first level of its interior.
Ed also carved about 300 fiddles, each in a different type of wood, housing them in a nearby house which reflected his folk art. He passed away in 1962 and his Totem Pole Park fell into disrepair. In 1970 many of the items in his Fiddle House were stolen and never recovered, and eventually his house became a ruin. In the 1990s the Rogers County Historical Society acquired the property. The home was rebuilt and the Kansas Grassroots Art Association restored the various sculptures as well as his Fiddle House, which is now a gift shop to help maintain the property. The concrete sculptures require occasional repainting, and in 2010 Virginia Krugloff, a local artist and member of the historical society, repainted the totems. She was in her mid-70s and they only allowed her to climb up two levels of scaffolding on the main totem, so the upper part still needs repainting. What a gal!
Wendy and I had fun looking at the imagery on the totem, and she was highly amused by the cigarette the face with the big nose was smoking, and the silly faces beside it. Another face was eating a lizard, but not all of the imagery is silly and some is well-executed for an untrained artist.
Unlike on my previous visits, the door into the totem pole was open, so Wendy posed in the doorway for me, with us noticing that her top matched the color of the supporting turtle pretty well. I took a shot up through the interior levels and posed in one of the windows. She took a nice shot of an arrowhead sculpture from the doorway.
The park has a much older cat which Ed carved from stone, various pillars, picnic tables, and more along with the Fiddle House, which we toured and where we chatted with a lady who lives on the grounds. There are about 15 of his original fiddles on display along with historical photos.
One story is how Ed’s wife Survilia “Villa” Hooton (Ed is on the far left in this photo, and his wife is next to him) once taunted him with her own variation of Joyce Kilmer’s poem Trees: “Totem poles are made by fools like thee, but only God can make a tree.” Galloway promptly crafted a 12-ft. concrete tree trunk, with holes for birds to live in; it is in the background of this shot. I found that one less than photogenic, but we did like his shorter tree and its grinning face matched Wendy’s as we headed back home through Chelsea, New Alluwe, and Nowata to complete our Rogers County roundabout.
Wendy and I plan to hike during our trip to Santa Fe, NM in a few weeks. As it had been a month since we’d been out on a real hike, we decided to rectify the situation with a loop on Turkey Mountain down in Tulsa. The forecast called for sun and temperatures in the mid-80s with strong winds, so Wendy wisely called for a hike mostly in shade. I selected Turkey Mountain since most of its trails, except for the Powerline one, are under tree cover. We fortified ourselves at El Chico and then headed over to the mountain to hit the trails.
There are several long trails paralleling the north-south ridge of the mountain. About a year ago Wendy and I hiked the yellow loop and a bit of the pink one; the yellow loop uses the Ho Chi and Ridge trails, and I’ve been on it multiple times. I’d also hiked the Hi Chi trail with some colleagues back in September 2012. I wanted something different on this foray into the urban wilderness, so I studied the very nice River Parks map of the venue, which was made possible by the GPS trail mapping of Ron Haveman, who is listed as #55 on the Tatur running club site.
I opted to take the Lo Chi trail which runs along the shore of the Arkansas River down below the Ho Chi trail but above the paved River Parks trail. When the Lo Chi petered out, we could then climb up to the Ho Chi trail, turn around at the Spider area, and take another trail I’d not ventured down, the Millennium (presumably misspelled as Millenium on the map). I hoped to also follow the Enchanted Forest trail, but made a wrong turn today and instead we negotiated the final leg of our hike on the well-travelled blue trail.
Before setting out, we slathered on some sunscreen and sprayed ourselves with insect repellent. We headed due east on the paved River Parks West trail until I spied the turnoff for the Lo Chi trail, leading off northeast through the tall grass and weeds of a powerline cut. Thankfully it soon entered the forested slopes of the mountain. Two mountain bikers soon passed us and were the only other people we saw on the Lo Chi trail, besides a family who were exiting the trail as we left the paved trail. The trail runs below the tall bluff on which the more popular Ho Chi trail runs; we caught occasional glimpses of the bluff through this urban jungle. We saw a couple of ramps on the trail constructed for thrill-seeking bikers, and made use of one bridge.
As usual, my gaze was directed ahead and above while Wendy more wisely watched where she stepped. That meant she spotted the berries and mushrooms along our trek to which I was mostly oblivious. We passed one large spray of blooms on the trail as it threaded through the close overgrowth. I was excited when the old Midland Valley tracks became visible to our right, later finding a short connector which allowed us to venture out on the rails. The Midland Valley line was built in 1904, part of a 277 mile-long railway along the Arkansas River from Hoye, Arkansas to Wichita, Kansas. Built to transport Arkansas coal, it instead flourished via the oil boom, serving the Glenpool, Burbank, and Bigheart oil fields. Today most of the old railroad is abandoned, and a 3.3 mile section of the line is now a trail linking Tulsa’s downtown with the River Parks.
An eye-level group of tree fungi caught my eye as we reached the end of the Lo Chi trail and faced the steep climb up the bluff to the main yellow trail on the Ho Chi. We paused for a breather alongside the main bluff face before tackling the next climb. The higher trail gave a better view of the nearby Arkansas River. For decades Tulsa has dreamed of constructing more low-water dams to turn the river from a wide swatch of sandbars into something more scenic, but that would be very expensive and require much planning and coordination.
We reached the north end of the yellow trail loop and turned about, finding the Millennium trail as the planned alternate to the typical Ridge trail. I was very pleased with this change, as the Millennium trail was narrower, less travelled, and sometimes quite photogenic. A brief foray down an unmapped connector revealed a huge toadstool, while on the main path there was a white mushroom growing out from under a rock and other fungi shaped like a star and a heart.
We missed the intended Enchanted Forest trail to the south, instead following the sandy Blue Trail back to the parking area, where we cleaned up a bit before heading back north to Bartlesville.
That night we attended the Grand Finale Concert at OK Mozart. We’d enjoyed excerpts from The Magic Flute on Wednesday, attended the Sarah Jarosz concert on Thursday, and this night would feature a rousing performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in d minor by the festival’s Amici New York orchestra, joined in the spectacular final movement, featuring the Ode to Joy, by the Bartlesville Choral Society, additional choral groups from Stillwater and Tulsa, and four gifted vocal soloists who had sung semi-staged parts in The Magic Flute two days earlier. It was indeed a Grand Finale, with the Community Center thundering with the exuberant sounds of this miracle, which is beloved worldwide and was completed when Beethoven was completely deaf from tinnitus.
What a splendid day it was for us, sharing lunch at our favorite restaurant, followed by a nature hike, and capped off with the Beethoven’s most exciting symphony. Egad!
Before we checked out of our cabin at Sugar Ridge late Sunday morning, Wendy saw a red-headed woodpecker from out on the deck and we watched the antics of squirrels. Wendy got a great shot of a Colona moth with her iPhone, and a large Luna moth on the side of the cabin was as relaxed as we were.
Before heading home, we contemplated a walk at nearby Lake Leatherwood, but the XTERRA race event was underway. So we headed west through light rain, meandering a bit to see the town of Pea Ridge, to arrive at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. We’d been there in mid-April, so only two small exhibits were new: some architectural models from the firm of Moshe Safdie, who designed the museum, and a collection of ceramic works from area museums. Unfortunately the ceramics were behind glass displays cases in a corridor where the opposite wall of glass looking out onto the pond created harsh glare. So they were quite difficult to photograph.
Wendy and I both liked Jennifer McCurdy‘s intricately formed Butterfly Vessel and she liked pottery works by Bill Glass, including Star Faces and Booger Snakes. The Pair of Sea Urchins by Maggie Barnes was particularly fine slipware which looked quite organic with its irregularly shaped holes and beautiful patterns.
We dawdled at the museum so that we could enjoy a late lunch at the nearby Abuelo’s, sitting down in an alcove by a rack of children’s art books. I was very amused by When Pigasso Met Mootisse by Nina Laden; you can enjoy it online. It was very bold and colorful, with a fun play on Matisse’s reclining nudes, such as Blue Nude, and a hilarious depiction of Picasso’s actual response in Young Ladies of Avignon. There is even some splattering à la Jackson Pollack when the two rivals meet in this well-executed book.
Before we left for our late lunch and journey home, we purchased some treats at the Eleven restaurant in the museum, but regretted they did not have the wonderful chocolate-mocha cupcakes we’d enjoyed previously. The rain prevented us from exploring the grounds much, although we did walk the Orchard Trail under our umbrellas and noticed a beautiful tapering metal pole with an interesting crown out among the trees. It didn’t seem to be a flagpole, and we wondered if it was an art installation or something more functional, such as a sensor or antenna. It isn’t listed as an art piece on their website, so perhaps it is the latter.
Our long weekend visit to northwest Arkansas was a great way to celebrate the beginning of summer break. No doubt we’ll have more excursions, albeit restricted by summer weather, and we’ve already planned out a trip westward in late June and early July to New Mexico, with a focus on the beautiful and relaxing Santa Fe.
Beaver Lake View
We awoke on Sugar Ridge to light rain and wind moving in from the south across the lake. After the shower ended, we watched a sailboat out on the lake below and saw the Belle of the Ozarks out on its morning tour. We saw cardinals out back and I ventured out front of our cabin to photograph the demon dogs guarding the left and right sides of an entry gate to an adjacent building under construction.
Blue Spring
We then drove over to the peninsula on the White River/Table Rock Lake to walk at Blue Spring; I had toured this attraction on my own a month earlier. We watched the entire historical video and then made our way down the hill to the gazebo and over to the spring. We walked about the grounds, admiring the poppies and other flowers and noting busy bees and ladybugs. We crossed the dam, looking back at the gazebo and also down at the spill. My Canon SX260 HS camera, which has survived some rough use, would no longer fully open its lens cover, so I either had to manually press it all of the way open or accept a masked shot, such as one I took of the dam.
Eureka Springs
We wound our way around the grounds and then returned to Wendy’s Xanadu, which needed gasoline. So we drove over to Eureka Springs to fill up the car and then ourselves, seeking lunch at the Local Flavors Cafe. We parked in one of the public lots downtown, noticing some nice paintings and photographs on the art wall in front of us. We parked directly in front of a print of Edward Robison’s gigapan of Inspiration Point, and also liked Wild Wings by Randy Rust and Ozark Creek Downtown by Janet Goodyear.
We enjoyed sandwiches at the Local Flavor Cafe, which I have eaten at several times over the years. Then we walked through town, climbing the stairs at the Basin Park Hotel to see the ballroom up top. We made our way up Spring Street to Harding Park (aka Sweet Swing Park) but Wendy was very thirsty and there were no watering holes in the area. So we circled about until we found Chelsea’s Bar for a free cup of water, both feeling rather out of place in that dark and boozy place on a sunny afternoon.
We circled back around to the small park, where as a small child I would climb the stairways by Sweet Spring and walk up on top of the hill and down the other side to Harding Spring. We could not get a photo at the stairs, since a group of hipsters were busily taking photos there, but we did make the climb. Up top we passed a tree with long exposed roots and were surprised to see a deer up top at the far end of the unpaved Kansas Street. Wendy spotted a red mushroom on the short trail down to Harding Spring.
We browsed the storefronts along the various streets, stopping for treats at the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory (no, we were nowhere near the Rockies). We enjoyed them at Basin Spring Park, where a group of drummers gathers on the first Saturday of each month. I made a video of the event from ground level and also from above when Wendy and I climbed the stairs to the ridge above the basin. During our climb we giggled at the, er, vitality of the statue of Aza (which stands for Adora Zerlina Astra, or “Beloved One Created of the Stars”) which was created by Bruce Anderson.
We wrapped up our afternoon in Eureka Springs with a walk up Center Street and then down one of the long stairways to Main Street. While returning to our car, we noticed Humpty Dumpty doing his thing. Like Aza, he was commissioned by Dan and Belinda Harriman. Their additions to downtown Eureka Springs certainly brought this pair of visitors some smiles.
Beaver Town
We left town driving north on Arkansas 23, the route my parents and I used to take back when they had a cabin 14 highway miles to the north on Table Rock Lake. We diverted onto highway 187 so that I could drive us over the one-lane wood-deck suspension bridge at Beaver, Arkansas, which locals term “The Little Golden Gate” and “The Bridge to Nostalgia”. It was fun to see her reaction to this anachronistic structure, which seems older but was actually built in 1949. We stopped to take photos and Wendy quickly spotted one of her favorite things: rose bushes, which a rather obvious sign distinguished from wildflowers.
Poor Dinosaur World
Making our way back to Sugar Ridge, we passed the Farwell’s still-operating Spider Creek Resort and their less successful Dinosaur World. The appalling statues there were created by the same guy who did the Christ of the Ozarks, which explains a lot. We didn’t trespass, but we did get a shot of the old spider out front and some of the decaying creatures. It remains a weird sight to drive along 187 and see very odd-looking anatomically-incorrect dinosaurs looming about the hillside.
We ended our day with hot dogs at the cabin on Sugar Ridge, relaxing on the deck as we contemplated what we might do on the next and final day of this extended weekend.
Meador Manor 
