08/22/2026
When my children were young, we visited the Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument. It's close to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon in the US. The really HARD thing about visiting is seeing all these gorgeous specimens and knowing that you can't take any! We went to a presentation of flint knapping, and the ranger was throwing out the leftover bits. I asked if we could have some of the leftover little pieces, and she allowed us to take a few. I still have my rainbow flint to this day!
On a mesa above the Canadian River in the Texas Panhandle is a stone quarry that people worked for something like 13,000 years. 🪨
Alibates flint is agatized dolomite, and it is unmistakable — banded in maroon, orange, cream, and purple, hard, and it fractures cleanly enough to hold a razor edge. That combination made it some of the finest toolstone in North America.
Clovis hunters were using it at the end of the last ice age. Later Plains peoples quarried it continuously, digging shallow pits into the caprock with hammerstones and antler tools to reach unweathered material. The Antelope Creek people, who farmed and built stone-slab houses along the Canadian around 1200 to 1450, worked it intensively and traded it widely.
And it traveled remarkably far. Alibates flint has been identified at archaeological sites hundreds of miles away in every direction, which tells you those trade networks were extensive long before anyone wrote anything down about the plains.
The quarries are protected as Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, the only national monument in Texas, and can be visited only on a ranger-guided tour to keep the site intact.
Had you heard of it?
