NE in BK: Oh, the Irony!

So, right off 106th and Blondo there is a park.

The park is lovely, green, impeccably manicured, with trees poking out of little mounds of fresh mulch. There are two small trails you can follow through the couple acres of nature – one is 0.9 miles and one is 0.4. I wish I would’ve gone there every day to eat my lunch during my break at work, since it’s approximately 4 minutes away. But sadly, I only discovered this on Wednesday.

The park is called OPPD Park.

It is located right next to the OPPD Power Plant. The plant hums with electricity, but you can barely hear it in the park where there are singing birds!

And the whole time, all 25 minutes of walking, passing by beautiful trees and flowers and slapping my sweaty face free of bugs, all I could think of was how delightfully ironic this whole setup is. Everything—the lush greenery, the waterfall, peacefully-winding trail, daffodils – I mean obviously OPPD spends a lot of money keeping this park looking nice. Is it all a cover-up so people don’t notice the giant plant of concrete and metal that’s right next door, *almost* hidden by a few trees? Is it their karma payment, to put back into the landscape what they've taken out of it next door?

Whatever. I ate my lunch on a little bench, listening to the birds and looking at the waterfall and the trees with their little placard posts nearby, and then took the long trail. I discovered many things!

Part of the trail winds behind the power plant, where the trail is no longer concrete but old cedar chips. The land does look wild, and it was easy to imagine I wasn’t right next to Blondo or, for that matter, the Interstate.

Even the trees made it look like a lovely hike through the Sedona wilderness. (Would you guess the interstate is just beyond that thatch of trees? It is. You can kinda see it, actually, right corner.)

You might not be able to tell, but trust me, there were birds taking a bath in the creek.