Day 97. September 23

Click the link for a map

See The Map

The Talleys wake up in Dalhart Texas. Not good!

We say goodbye to the curry coated Eastern Indian woman motel owner and head northeast on route 54, straight as an arrow all the way to Guymon, OK.

We pass through Stratford, Tx (population 1,525) and Texhoma, TX (population 324) and Texhoma, OK (population 924), respectively sitting on opposite sides of the Texas Oklahoma border.

And finally, we sail into Guymon, the ‘Queen City of the Panhandle’, where one can visit the city’s largest employer, Seaboard Pork, a processing plant that double shifts it way through the slaughter of 18,000 hogs a day. Keep that white meat coming. Yum! Yum! Barbecue on the table.

These little towns and hamlets through which we pass today pepper the Panhandle and each has at least one mega-sized grain elevator, an elementary, middle and high school, a tractor supply, ten churches (Sunday attendance required), a meth lab in an abandoned 7-11, a town park and a ‘Cattleman’s Café”. Not much happening. Not much traffic coming and going.

This is the Great Plains. Oklahoma sits astride the 100th meridian, which means annual precipitation west of that line is sparse and increases as one travels to the eastern part of the state. The Panhandle is west of the line. It floats atop the Ogallala Aquifer. And guess where the irrigation water comes from for that hog processing plant. That’s right, the Ogallala aquifer. More draw down. Very little put back.

Farming is king in this country. Feedlots, corporate pork farms, dry land wheat, dairy and irrigated crops dominate the economy, all water intensive land uses.  Natural gas wells dot the landscape, with wind energy production and transmission in recent years diversifying landowners' farms.

Next is Hooker, OK (population 1,900). Its town motto says, "It's a Location, Not a Vocation". In Hooker we pick up route 64 due east and pass through Turpin (population 467), Forgan (population 547), Knowles (population 11), Gate (population 93), Rosston (population 31) and Buffalo (population 1,300).

Ten miles east of Buffalo we cross the Cimarron River which takes me back to 1958 and fond memories of Cimarron City, a television series I rarely missed, in which Mayor Matt Rockford teams up with the town’s blacksmith and deputy sheriff to thwart bad guys. The intrepid Dan Blocker plays Tiny Carl Budinger, one of Rockford’s ranch hands, until he and his dad, Ben Cartwright, bought a ranch, named it Bonanza and got their own show.

The Cimarron River flows for 700 miles from its starting point in southeastern Colorado through a silver of northeastern New Mexico, into Oklahoma, then Kansas, back into Oklahoma and on to Tulsa where it joins the Arkansas River.

It enters Oklahoma near Kenton (population 17) where an intrepid traveler can take a dirt, gravel road and drive for a hundred miles down the spectacular and secluded river valley, ringed with dry buttes and mesas. The river itself runs dry for most of this way. Emily and I visited here on another trip. Highly recommended for the adventurous traveler.

The use of the Cimarron for irrigation illustrates a niggling problem one encounters throughout the Great Plains. Cimarron water quality rates as poor because the river flows through natural mineral deposits, salt plains, and saline springs. Guess what happens when farmers use that water for crops. The irrigated water dissolves more salt that naturally occurs in the poor soil in this region and that water finds its way either back into the river or into the aquafer where it cyclically and incrementally increases the salt content. At some point the soils become too salty to farm.

If one looks at a google map of this region, besides the crop circles on irrigated land, one will see that the landscape divides into one square mile parcels, exactly 640 acres, each exactly a square. Over time folks scraped out perimeter roads around the parcels so they could get farm machinery in.

So instead of driving around in circles in this country to get lost you can drive around in squares. People buy and sell land here by the 640-acre parcel. That has its origin in the 1862 Homestead Act which led to the settlement of the West. Any American could claim as much as 160 acres of federal land, one square mile. And all that country was federal land because we took it from the Native Americans. Pretty good deal for us. Not so much for the Indians.

Eventually strong, brave pioneers, fooled into believing that if they just went west and plowed the land it would rain, settled on 420,000 square miles in all pursuant to the Homestead Act, all nicely parceled off.

Boy they were surprised, I bet, when they discovered that plowing the land does not  necessarily bring rain. Then somebody discovered the Ogallala Aquifer, and everything was cool and wet after that.

We pass through Tegarden (population 0) and Alva (population 4,595), home of the Northwestern Oklahoma State University Rangers.

On to Ingersoll (population 2 ghosts) and finally we cross the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River that feeds the Great Salt Plains Lake, part of the Great Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge.

The Salt Fork River 

A hidden gem this place is. Of course, the lake should not be here. It owes its existence to a dam on the Salt Fork. The lake spills out onto a vast salt flat put there over geologic time by the Salt Fork and other tributaries. 

The Great Salt Plain

The salt flats of this refuge provide nesting site for endangered interior least terns, threatened western snowy plovers and American avocets and a migration rest area for hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and waterfowl during spring, summer, and fall.

Many birds come to feed on larval and adult salt brine flies, a curious animal that has a special organ that removes excess salt from their bodies. Any self-respecting fly that is going to live here needs one of those.

That Water Is Really Salty

During the winter four and a half foot tall, endangered whooping cranes show up and, in the fall, one can see them foraging in local farm fields with sand hill cranes. Large flocks of migrating American white pelicans come to feed on lake fish.

A Squadron of American White Pelicans. See the Blue Heron in the Foreground.

The American White Pelican, a ponderously spectacular bird with a nine-foot wingspan, bigger that its cousin the Brown Pelican that we have on the east coast.   

Many other birds frequent the refuge including mallards, northern pintails, wood ducks, redheads, American widgeons, common mergansers, great blue herons, great egrets and white-faced ibis’.

Loner American White Pelican

American White Pelicans on the Dam Spillway

My Pretty Pelican Headed for the Lake

Refuges like this one are essential for the birds and beasts we have left in America. Now than parking lots, housing developments, industrial agricultural enterprises, artisan breweries, road houses, skyscrapers, airports, military bases, drive through Starbucks, shopping malls, football stadiums and thousands of dams have wiped out so much wild life habitat these ‘islands’ are critically important.

Good Habitat for us too where we find an excellent camp site for the night in the Great Salt Plains State Park.

Good night all.