2006/01 Southwest USA trip (MN-TX) - Chickasaw National Recreation Area |
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The Chickasaw campsite turned out to be a good place to get rid of our antifreeze and fill the camper with fresh water. We also took the opportunity to get those bags of firewood out of the camper and up into the pod. We couldn’t use the firewood yet anyway as fires were banned.
We took a walk along the lake below the campground, the Lake of the Arbuckles. Apparently we were in the Arbuckle Mountains, not a well-known feature outside of Oklahoma.
Thursday January 5th
I took an early morning run, my first in six months, and everything seemed to work OK, albeit slowly. We’d looked at the map of the area and drove to Travertine Creek, which looked interesting. The creek is fed by a number of springs, some sulphurous, 
some full of bromide, and some quite tasty. The minerals make travertine ledges in the creek, little waterfalls, so it’s a pretty
spot. We stopped at Little Niagara, with the emphasis on “little” and then walked up the creek to a number of the springs. Therewere lots of birds, mainly robins, and also many armadillos ferreting around in the leaf litter. Mostly, all you see is the armadillo’s back as its head is busy snarfing up the ants under the leaves, but occasionally its head comes up. We have lots of armadillo pictures.
By the time we came back from our walk it was obvious we weren’t going to get far this day, so we camped at 
the Rock Creek campground, just below Bromide Hill. We thought we’d have time to walk the long trail around the bison paddock and maybe see some bison. We did, eventually, find some bison, who looked unexcited to see us. We looked up at that point and saw the sky full of vultures, dozens of them wheeling around on the thermals of Bromide Hill. Then they were suddenly all gone. Somewhere, something had died.
We also found some more springs, some fizzy, some warm, and some very smelly. At one time this area was a commercial hot springs and swimming pool, and then it became Platt National Park, and now it is a mixture of city park and recreation area. Many of the area’s buildings and bridges were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in the 1930s, and their stuff still survives today. The park looks like it was built to cater to hundreds of people, but we were the only people in the campground on this January night. When we got back to the camper, we found a flyer stuck to the door telling us that the governor of Oklahoma had instituted a fire ban for the whole state. I resisted the temptation to use the flyer to start a fire!
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