Buffalo Lake National Wildlife Refuge

Buffalo Lake was a New Deal project. The Farm Security Administration dammed Tierra Blanca Creek three miles south of Umbarger in 1938, finishing Umbarger Dam that June, to make a recreation lake on the High Plains. For years people came to boat, fish, swim and water-ski. The project passed to the Soil Conservation Service, then the Forest Service, and in 1958 to the Fish and Wildlife Service, which made it a national wildlife refuge in 1959.

Tierra Blanca Creek is an unreliable stream. It can dry up completely, then flash-flood after a thunderstorm, and most of its large drainage basin is thought to send no water downstream at all. The lake is now dry, and the refuge's habitats are on land: shortgrass prairie on the caprock, marsh and woods in the old lakebed, and the walls of the canyon the creek has cut. Some 175 acres around a black-tailed prairie dog town are a National Natural Landmark, kept as an example of the High Plains grassland.

An auto tour road loops through the refuge. The Cottonwood Canyon Birding Trail follows the old lakebed under cottonwoods, elms and Osage orange, the Grassland Loop winds through prairie along the caprock, and the Prairie Dog Trail skirts the town, where burrowing owls also live. Warblers, flycatchers, tanagers and orioles pass through in spring and fall, and bald and golden eagles hunt the grassland. There is a campground with picnic tables. Mornings and evenings are best for wildlife.