In the middle of an Oklahoma summer, the Great Salt Plains can look as though winter never left. The white surface is not snow or sand but salt, and beneath that crust grows something found in a distinctive form nowhere else: hourglass selenite crystals. In this episode of Red Dirt and Round Bales, Dave Deken explores a landscape valued long before modern roads or recreation. Native peoples used the salt for food preservation and hunted wildlife drawn to the area. In 1811, Osage guide Sans Oreille led George C. Sibley to what Sibley called the Grand Saline. Settlers and cattlemen later hauled salt away by wagon. The federal government established a wildlife refuge in 1930, and construction of Great Salt Plains Dam began in 1938. Today, the refuge protects salt flats, prairie, wetlands and open water used by sandhill cranes, shorebirds, ducks and endangered whooping cranes, while visitors come to dig for Oklahoma’s famous crystals. What appears barren from a distance turns out to be one of the state’s most unusual combinations of geology, wildlife and human history.