11/22/19
I left Springfield today with plans on making it to Oklahoma City. I ended up only making it to Tulsa. I could’ve made it the whole way but I took Route 66 and stopped a lot along the way. I have that on my Route 66 page. The coolest thing that I did today, and one of the best of the trip so far, was to explore the ghost town of Picher, OK.
I didn’t know what to expect when I put it into the navigation. As I got closer I saw all of these roads that were barricaded off. I pulled into town and from a distance it looked like a normal small town. It had a water tower with the town name, a bunch of houses and a city building. When I got into town I noticed that all of the houses were gutted and there was keep out painted on the walls. I drove to the point in my nav and there was nothing there. I expected falling down houses or something. There was only blocked off roads.
I looked at the Google Street View and it showed a bunch of houses and normal streets. I thought that was really weird. I found a place to pull over and researched the town to find out that the government put a forced evacuation in place in the 2000’s because 34% of the kids in town had lead poisoning and the whole town was undermined and sinking into the mining tunnels. After the evacuation, there was a tornado that leveled a good portion of the town. After that the city bulldozed pretty much everything. All that was left was a couple houses and some government buildings.The city hall was burned down by arson sometime after that.
I found a road that wasn’t blocked off and went exploring. I looked around the concrete block houses that were still standing. There was one that was still being lived in. I researched some more and found out there were a few people that didn’t leave and still live there.after looking around the standing houses I found a way around the blocked entrances and made my way into the town proper.
There was a normal grid of streets, but nothing else. I found a couple of foundations that were left. Everything was overgrown and there was a couple of trailer houses that were falling in on themselves.I pulled up street view again to see what was there and compare to now and it was very eerie. I looked at the map and there was another section of town on the other side of the main road.
I made my way over there and first found the city park with a gorilla statue, the school mascot, and a flagpole. The rest was fenced off and abandoned.I went further and found more of the same, blocks with no houses. Then I came across some houses that must have had people in them after the rest were torn down, but have since been abandoned. It’s like they were frozen in time. There was one more house that was still being lived in at the far end.
I looked at the map again and found there was another part of the city that was on the other side of these two giant piles of chat, leftover mining material, with a single road in between them. I took the road and found more of the same, city blocks with no houses. It was really weird that this section of town was almost completely separated from the rest of it. It was a bit harder to make my way around this area as most of it was fenced off for the mining company and I had to go in the grass to make it to the main road at one part. I made it to the main road and ended my adventure in the abandoned city of Picher, OK.
After Picher I got down to Tulsa and stopped at the Hard Rock Resort and Casino to check it out and get a pin. Then, I made supper, hit up Broken Arrow Brewing, and found a place to park for the night.
