Remember that great old song?? Well I sure do and let me tell you it’s all true! From the time we entered the panhandle of Oklahoma, all the way east for nearly two-thirds of the state, it was windy! I could smell Canada in the air because I truly believe that’s where it starts and it doesn’t stop until it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, sometimes it turns around and blows back south to north for a while just to make sure it has covered every square inch of Oklahoma!! Good thing this state is into windmills because they have a real resource here.
This is dust blowing!
This state is also surprisingly GREEN. The prairie is blooming and everywhere it is green. Last year’s unusually wet winter all through this part of the Midwest had ended their drought and kissed the countryside with green. There were more rolling hills and shallow valleys than we expected so the terrain was interesting and did I mention GREEN? Now all that green means miles and miles of grass, thick, tall, waving grass but everywhere you looked it had been mowed. All the highways had big mowed swaths on either side; the farms were mowed around all of the buildings, all of the equipment and, of course, the hay fields were mowed and the wheat harvest had started so those fields were either waving or they were MOWED! This state could change its’ named to Oklaho…mow! (Oops, sounds like that “H” word! Sorry!)
Our first stop was a place called Fort Supply in the mid-panhandle region. Unfortunately it was closed due to high-water; a large portion of the campground was actually under water! We drove a little further and stopped in Woodward just for the night at Boiling Springs Campground.
Next day we pressed eastward, trying to outrun storms and wind, to Ponce City and a nice state park at Coon Creek Cove on Kaw Lake.
We didn’t get pictures of a really strange electrical storm one night that lasted about three hours. It was way strange because there was no sound, no thunder, just hours of lightning illuminating a mass of clouds on the horizon. It sorta scared me at first, but as soon as I got used to the silence, I could roll over and go right back to sleep. They call this “heat lightning”. Weird! Lots of fisherman here but the weather was a little rough for boat fishing so it was real quiet too. I got in a couple of good swims, roll-outs and brush-outs which really made my day, plus I am sooooo handsome afterwards!
Being handsome doesn’t always last, however, when you are THE guard of the family. One night, because it was so humid and hot, the Ladies left the Pod door open down by my bed. They thoughtfully put up the screen door and two little bars across the front so I could still see out, but remember not to go out. It was great, no bugs and scenery too. Unfortunately, skunks always want in where there might be food and the later at night the better. There I was snoozing and comfortable, when this nut case skunk tried to come in (obviously he didn’t see the screen or me). It took me one, one hundredth of a second to take out that screen, the bars and the skunk. I gotta say he was a fast bugger though because I could barely catch up with him and luckily I was too far back to get the full frontal spray job. Sometimes age related slowness pays off! I don’t understand why my Ladies kept pouring lemon juice and water on me though!
There was sort of a break in the weather so we scooted across to Pawhuska and the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve on the Osage Indian Reservation. While we were in Pawhuska we stopped at the Osage Tribal Museum which serves as a repository for an extensive collection of tribal artifacts and photographs. As though the 6,000 items in the collection were not enough, the museum building itself is a wonder. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. The building was originally constructed in 1872, finished with native limestone and served as a chapel, schoolhouse and dormitory. In 1937 it was extensively renovated into the museum and at the time of its opening in 1938, it was the only museum in the world owned and operated by an American Indian tribe. All of the exhibits were interesting but the most informative was the “Osage Timeline” which tells of the tribes’ existence through artifacts, paintings, photos and illustrations from at least 650 A.D. to the present. One of the fascinating things about this tribe is how savvy they have been down through the years in terms of property and money. First they ‘bought’ their Oklahoma lands from the Cherokee before the white man arrived, then they sold a right of way for the Santa Fe Trail to the Federal Government in 1825 for $800 and when it was discovered that they were sitting on top of one of the richest oil reserves in the nation, they auctioned off oil drilling permits to major oil companies and to this day still retain residuals from those permits. Kae wonders if perhaps they weren’t the first real, real estate brokers in the nation. 
By the time we finished at the museum and drove a gravel road some 17 miles out to the Headquarters of The Nature Conservancy at the old Barnard Ranch for a look at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, it was late afternoon and they had just closed. We just poked around on our own for a bit before heading out to Wah Sha She State Park. The Tallgrass Prairie is such a fascinating ecosystem and such an integral piece of our American heritage. Originally spanning portions of 14 states and covering 142 million acres, the prairie was a complex landscape harboring a rich diversity of plants and animals all shaped by the natural forces of climate, fire and grazing. Today, less than 10% of the Tallgrass prairie remains. Large, unbroken tracts only exist now in the Flint Hills region of Oklahoma and Kansas. Due to the underlying strata of limestone, sandstone and flint, these hills were never plowed, thus the natural varieties of grasses and wildflowers are still intact. The Nature Conservancy’s goal is to recreate a functioning tallgrass prairie ecosystem using fire and bison. Fire has been reintroduced in controlled burns, mimicking the original seasonality of the presettlement fires. Grazing by bison was also one of the primary natural forces that shaped and sustained the prairie. Native plants and animals have adapted to the influence of fire and grazing and are dependent upon them to maintain their vigor and reproduction.
We stayed one night at Wah Sha She State Park near the border and then turned north on Highway 177 to Kansas.
It had certainly been a fast and furious trip across the top of Oklahoma and we were surprised by the beauty of it all. I think we all had packed some prejudice with us about the presumed flat uninteresting terrain we were going to encounter. Well, duh! We'll stop by Oklahoma again when we head south for the winter. We will write our next blog about Kansas and see how many different ways we can photograph wheat and corn fields. See ya soon we hope!!
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