Gloss Mountain State Park

The Glass Mountains, or Gloss Mountains, are not mountains. They are mesas and buttes of the Blaine Escarpment, a line of high ground that crosses northwestern Oklahoma, standing 150 to 200 feet above the flat land of Major County. A sea that once covered the region left layers of red shale and siltstone with a cap of gypsum on top, and as streams cut down, the caprock kept the buttes standing while the land around them washed away. The gypsum is full of selenite, which throws back the sunlight like glass and gave the hills both their names. The first Americans known to explore them, in 1821, called them the Shining Mountains.

In 1977 the state put up $125,000, matched by the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, to buy 640 acres along US-412 for a park, then could not pay to finish it and leased the land for grazing for twenty years. In 1997 people from nearby Fairview formed a conservancy to run it. The state provides the land, the residents keep up the restroom, pavilions and picnic grounds, and the conservancy pays a gatekeeper to open and lock the park.

There is no camping. The trail climbs from the parking lot to the top of Cathedral Mountain and runs across the mesa, with the valley floor below and Lone Peak Mountain beyond. Cars may enter from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; hikers may stay from sunrise to sunset.