Last week, I had to fly into Tulsa, OK to pickup my Transit van and bring it back to Santa Fe. Just 48 hours of pure travel… Sometimes driving is less of an adventure-based activity and more of a chore. But, after sitting on an airplane, a 3 hour layover that turned into a 5 hour layover and another flight, I was ready to inject some adventure into my trip. So, I pulled up the ExploreHere app and looked for anything interesting along the way back to Santa Fe, thats when I found the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge in Jet, Oklahoma!
I’ve been a lot of places, but somehow salt flats have eluded me, so this naturally piqued my interest! It was marked as a protected National Wildlife Refuge in 1930 to help migratory birds and it’s the only place in the world where you can dig for hourglass selenite crystals.
It was that last part that really got me curious… What’s a selenite crystal? How rare are they? “The only place in the world”? I didn’t really do a lot more research than that. I found the address to the ‘dig site’ and the next morning left Tulsa to find me some crystals.
It was about a 2.5 hour drive from Tulsa to the refuge. I stopped for gas and to pick up two gallons of fresh water that I could use to drink and help me dig. I thought I had a shovel in the back of the van… but it turns out I only had this random tiny little gardening trowel... it’ll have to do…
As you get closer to the flats you can see what looks like a huge lake in the distance, except it isn’t water you see its salt! As you come to the entrance there’s the big welcome sign and a boardwalk overlook with a cool panoramic view of the plains.
As you finish the drive to the parking lot where the digging is allowed, you’ll see signs all over the place saying where you can / can’t go. Just stay within the boundaries and dig away!
I walked towards the back of the dig site so I could see other peoples techniques and figured it would be less disturbed out there. There were hundreds of holes in the ground, some were 3 feet wide and several feet deep! Overly confident I found a spot, set my gear down and grabbed my $2 trowel and got digging. 1 inch… 2 inches… uh oh, it’s a lot harder than expected. I made a 'hole' about a foot wide and 2 inches deep, a far-cry from the suggested 2 foot x 2 foot hole in the ‘how to dig’ instructions at the front of the refuge. While digging I was thinking ‘where is all this salt coming from…’ well… after I got back, I did some research…
The salt at Salt Plains is Permian, laid down some 270 million years ago when shallow seas covering this part of the continent evaporated away. But it isn't sitting where the sea left it. Those salt beds are buried hundreds of feet down, and groundwater is constantly dissolving them, carrying the brine back to the surface, where the Oklahoma sun evaporates it and leaves a fresh white crust. That sea has been gone a quarter-billion years and it's still coming up through the ground.
I poured in some fresh water and felt around… in the mud. I was judging myself a bit hard here but then I felt something sharp and hard in the mud. I gently pushed the surrounding sand off it and found my first crystal! A small 1 inch crystal, but wahoo! I kept going and found another and got more and more muddy before finding a few more! In that moment I felt really proud of myself. I looked up over the landscape - it was windy, super bright and not hospitable. I looked around my dig site and saw, next to me dozens of crystals sitting exposed right on the surface…
It’s said that if you know what you’re doing, and get a little lucky, you can find larger clusters of crystals that weigh several pounds on their own. I was happy with a few smaller ones. After about 30 min of digging and looking, the wind and sun were getting to me. The salt reflects all the sun back up at you from the ground, so there’s nowhere to hide from it. So I took my lot back to the van to cleanup and continue on my way.
The salt flats were great - I haven’t ever seen an environment so alien-like, and who wouldn’t love to dig up one-of-a-kind crystals that you can take home, while still being good for the environment! It’s a great place to bring kids, and let them dig their heart out. You’ll have a great time and get a keepsake for later. Make sure to bring a towel, fresh water (2x the amount you think you need), sunscreen, a real shovel, and extra clothes to change into after - the salt and mud really does get everywhere!
That internal arrow shape is what makes these crystals really unique, the Salt Flats in Oklahoma are the only place this formation happens at scale in the world. The crystal started forming where the two points meet, and as it grows outward the crystal pushes away the mud and sand at different rates and traps some of it inside causing this really cool pattern!
These crystals are quite soft, scientists use the Mohs Hardness Scale to rank minerals. For reference our finger nails are a 2.5 out of 10 on the scale. These selenite crystals are a 2 out of 10, meaning we can actually scratch them with our fingernail. That means you have to be careful when cleaning and handling them, or you might scratch them and cause haziness.
