Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge

The salt here is the residue of seas that covered this region hundreds of millions of years ago. As those seas evaporated they left thick beds of salt underground, and today groundwater dissolves that salt and carries it to the surface, where the water evaporates in the sun and leaves a white crust across the flats. The process is ongoing, so the salt is continually renewed.

The plain is nearly lifeless in its center, too salty for most plants, which is exactly what makes it so striking, a white void under an enormous sky. Around its edges, salt-tolerant grasses and shrubs give way to mixed-grass prairie, and the shallow, briny Great Salt Plains Lake sits alongside, all of it a rare inland salt ecosystem in the middle of the continent.

In a designated part of the flats, visitors can dig for selenite, a crystalline form of gypsum. What makes the Salt Plains selenite unique in all the world is its hourglass shape, a tan hourglass of iron-stained clay trapped inside the clear crystal as it grows in the wet salt mud. No other place on earth produces this exact hourglass formation, which is why it was named Oklahoma's state crystal.

Digging is simple. You scrape down into the wet flat, let the hole fill with water, and gently work the mud until crystals appear, single blades, clusters, and complex shapes. The crystal-digging season runs only part of the year, closing during the bird nesting months to protect the wildlife, so it is essential to check the dates before making the trip.

The refuge sits squarely on the central migratory flyway, and the shallow lake and mudflats draw birds by the hundreds of thousands. In spring and fall, sandpipers, plovers, avocets, and other shorebirds crowd the flats, and great flocks of geese, ducks, and American white pelicans use the water. Bald eagles winter here, and whooping cranes, among the rarest birds in North America, sometimes pass through.

The refuge is also an important nesting ground. The threatened snowy plover and the interior least tern nest on the bare salt flats, which is why large areas close to visitors during the breeding season. This dual role, as both a migration stop and a nursery, makes Salt Plains one of the most significant bird refuges in the southern plains.

Spring and fall are the peak seasons for the refuge, when the great waves of migrating birds pass through and the weather is mild for walking the flats. These shoulder seasons offer the best birdwatching and comfortable conditions on the exposed, shadeless plain.

Summer is hot and bright, when the crystal-digging draws families to the flats, though the sun is intense and there is no shade. Winter is cold and windswept on the open plains, but it brings wintering waterfowl and bald eagles to the lake, and the empty white flats under a low sun have a stark beauty all their own.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.