Alabaster Caverns State Park

More than two hundred million years ago, in the Permian, a shallow sea covered this country and dried away, leaving thick beds of gypsum. Water working through the gypsum after it was lifted near the surface cut the cavern that runs under Cedar Canyon here. The Oklahoma Historical Society counts it among the world's largest gypsum caves open to the public: the main passage is three-quarters of a mile long, up to fifty feet high and sixty feet wide, and it stays between 52 and 58 degrees. Its walls hold selenite, white and pink gypsum and rare black alabaster.

Nobody recorded who found it. The first known exploring was in 1898, after Hugh Litton homesteaded the land in the Cherokee Outlet run. In the 1920s and 1930s leaseholders showed visitors the Bat Caves for a small fee, and in 1939 an Englishman, Charles Grass, bought and fixed up the cave and named it Alabaster Caverns. When his health failed, businessmen from Freedom and the Waynoka Railroad Labor League pressed the state to buy it, and Oklahoma paid $34,000 for two hundred acres on September 1, 1953. It became a state park in 1956 and in the mid-1950s served as a fallout shelter.

Up to ten thousand bats of five species use the cave. Guided tours leave on the hour from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and the park issues permits for wild caving in four other caves, from 550 to 1,600 feet long, but none from October 1 to April 30, while the bats hibernate.