Images of Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument – Texas panhandle, taken in July 2016.

Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument preserves a unique area along the Canadian River where man has mined flint for tools and weapons for over 13,000 years. Arrowheads from this time, created by the Clovis people, have been found imbedded in mammoth skeletons in the region. Later, between 1200 and 1450, the Antelope Creek people not only used the flint deposits to create tools and weapons for themselves but also traded flint to other peoples in and around the region.

This is a very raw park in that there are few places that the untrained eye would recognize as man-made. I went on a one hour ranger guided hike, the only way you can get in to see the flint pits, to get a better feel for the area and hear the story of the peoples that mined the area so long ago.