For those interested in visiting three states at once but not in that long a hike, there is a marker where the three states merge. The Black Mesa Summit hike is the most popular draw to the park, an 8.5-mile trek taking roughly four hours into Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico. The Preserve is home to the actual Mesa, the highest point in the state of Oklahoma. There is Black Mesa State Park, as well as the Black Mesa Preserve, which is managed by the park but located several miles away.
“You can come out here and you can just chill. Henceforth, I will take Vicki’s word as fact.
“What about Kenton?” I protest, thinking about heat lamps and dizzy taquitos.Īn hour and a half later, after adding another 72 miles onto my Subaru with a trip back to Boise City, I pull back into Black Mesa. “I told you there’s nothing out here,” she says empathetically. When I tell her I thought I’d run to Kenton and grab something to eat before taking off on a small hike, she, like the Mesa, goes from inviting to foreboding concern: “You didn’t bring anything to eat?” I shake my head, feeling curiously ashamed. Vicki greets me as though she’s known me my whole life. The charming home sits on a once-working cattle ranch and includes a ground-level, double-occupancy room, a second-story suite that sleeps eight, a bunkhouse with two separate rooms that sleep four each and an upper room that may sleep two, and the Sunrise Cabin that sleeps four. I am officially hungry when I pull up to the little farmhouse that is the Black Mesa Bed and Breakfast. It is at once inviting and foreboding the kind of place that at a distance appears almost pastoral in its beauty, but as you get closer, reveals an unexpected ruggedness that requires respect. Thirty-six miles later, the world turns from the endless flat plains of the panhandle to the unexpected lush green buttes, small cacti and otherworldly rocky spires of Black Mesa. I’m sure there will be something in the town of Kenton, even if it’s just a dried-out taquito spinning behind a sneeze guard or a depressing bag of Fritos from a dusty filling station. I’m hungry, but more excited to arrive, so I press onward despite her warning. The next day, with an evening of hiking and a night of stargazing ahead, I pass two service stations in the “last stop” town Boise City.
According to the internet, Black Mesa State Park and Preserve is on the fringe of the town Kenton, so when Vicki says the last stop for snacks and gas is the town of Boise City, 36 miles before the park’s entrance, I simply say “I understand.” “Water, snacks, medicine … if you don’t bring it, you won’t have it.” After a punctuated silence, finally I say, “OK …” feeling suddenly less “intrepid Oklahoma adventurer” and more “pale kid being told to put on sunscreen.” “Make sure you bring everything you need,” says Vicki, who along with her husband, Monty Joe, owns the Black Mesa Bed and Breakfast located in the northwest corner of the Oklahoma panhandle.