Salt Plains Crystal Digging & Alabaster Caverns

A day of genuinely unusual Oklahoma geology, built around one of the only places on Earth where you can dig your own hourglass-shaped selenite crystals — and a rare gypsum cave you can walk through afterward. The morning heads to the Great Salt Plains, a blinding white flat left behind by an ancient inland sea, where you scoop a shallow pit, let it fill with brine, and pull out selenite crystals unique to this spot for their embedded chocolate-brown sand hourglass. The adjacent national wildlife refuge is a nationally important stopover for migrating shorebirds, pelicans, and one of the country's largest concentrations of wintering birds. In the afternoon you drop into Alabaster Caverns, the largest gypsum cave open to the public in the world, a cool underground corridor of black, pink, and white alabaster and roosting bats. It is a rare day where you leave with crystals in your pocket and a cave underfoot. Note: this is a far-northwest-corner day trip with roughly 6 hours of driving round-trip — start early, and treat it as a long day or consider an overnight in Alva/Cherokee.