Memory loss

I am having a little difficulty recalling the last time I rode my bicycle in pleasant weather.

But any day when you can spend a couple of hours outdoors getting some decent exercise is a pretty good day. That makes today a pretty good day.

Today I was intending to ride over to the Confluence. At a key spot in the route I was blocked from the way I wanted to go by road construction. Then the detour that I chose ended up having a moment of unpleasant traffic which caused me to just keep going straight ahead instead of trying to turn.

Minneapolis.

But Minneapolis, particularly in my experience south Minneapolis, has lots of pleasantly calm places to ride.

No, I am going to amend that, I have also had some (quite a large number smaller but still a few) very pleasant rides in residential north Minneapolis and residential northeast Minneapolis although that last bit is pretty hilly.

Anyway, now that the whole leaf thing is over it is impossible to not notice that there is an extremely large number of oak trees along the river road heading south from Lake Street (after crossing the Marshall Avenue Bridge). They don't have enough leaves anymore to block off views down into the river gorge and I stopped when I found a broken oak tree and took this photo.

I ended up out at Minnehaha Park again, this time stopping at a different vantage point then the one where I usually pause. It seems clear to me from this photo that any water going over the Falls is subsurface seepage. That creek bed looks completely dry.

I took a short loop through the zoo as I neared home. Minnesota this year has its first ever wolf hunting season. The morning newspaper reported that 50 wolves were "taken" on the first weekend of the season. Since wolves are now clearly a game animal, it seems a little odd to me that they are also a zoo animal. One or another of those has to be wrong. I mean I can remember deer farms and bears in cages along the highways of my mostly pretty car sick youth. Those displays seem tawdry and sad from the modern perspective. Maybe these wolves in the zoo will soon enough be seen as the same.

Or maybe people will decide that hunting big dogs, even if they are quite distinctly wild dogs, is the tawdry and sad spectacle.

Did I just take a position on a conservation issue there?