![]() I put 1,346 miles on this thing in 48 hours. Highest stuffed bear in Oklahoma! (he's sort of like the Travelocity gnome.) Interestingly enough, South Carolina and Oklahoma were 2 of the 3 final states to outlaw cockfighting. Driving northwest from Amarillo, these are the first "mountains" you can see in the distance. Looking east, you can tell that the mesa-y looking terrain quickly peters out into our sterotypical though of Oklahoma sceneryĪ closeup of Rabbit Ears Mtn. Whoodathunk that honest-to-God mountains would be visible from Oklahoma? View to the west - if you look closely, you can see Capulin rising just to the right of the smudge-looking mountain in the distance (Sierra Grande). View to the south from the southern edge of the mesa If this marker wasn't here, you'd have no clue that you were any higher than any other part of the mesa around View to the northeast toward the trailheadīlack Mesa itself, considering it is a mesa, is pretty damn flat I realized running, or even having headphones in, would be a bad ideaĪ bit over two miles in the trail starts to ascend the mesa It's more of a dirt track than a trail, so it made for pretty good speed. The trail starts just to the north of Black Mesa itself. This was a pretty nice way to break up the drive (120 miles in, only 380 miles to go!). It's located a few miles north of the boomtown of Kenton, OK, and has a large parking area which I doubt has ever been filled up in its existence. There is a nature preserve that has an 8-mile out-and-back trail/track up to the mesa's summit. While there is a Black Mesa State Park, that park isn't near Black Mesa itself. This part of Oklahoma is closer to Denver, Santa Fe and Wichita than it is to Oklahoma City, so this is really Oklahoma in name only. Black Mesa is large mesa that starts out in southern Colorado and proceeds through the northeastern fringe of New Mexico, before dissipating a few miles over the border in Oklahoma. ![]() ![]() Is there any more obscure border out there? There is an interesting history lesson behind it related to the Missouri Compromise, but this is a hiking site so I'll shut up. When thinking about American geography, something seems strange when you realize that New Mexico and Oklahoma actually have a border. I settled on Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma at around 4,950 ft. Hiking = happiness, so I had to find a decently long hike to break up the drive. However, common sense set it, and I realized that I faced the challenge of finding an "interesting" route from south central Colorado to central Oklahoma. At this point I was thinking, "hell, Oregon seems closer than Oklahoma City, let's keep going, Enterprise and their one-way fees be damned". This was after flying from Portland to Atlanta to Oklahoma City, then southwest to Lawton, then northwest into Colorado. Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Canyon, Texas. This is the 4th of 4 posts about my recent trip to the southwestern Great Plains I took this weekend.Ĭapulin Volcano National Monument, Capulin, NM. ![]()
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