Will Rogers World Airport

In November 1929, twenty-six years after the Wright brothers' first flight, the Department of Commerce had issued 117 pilot licenses to American women. Amelia Earhart sent letters to every one of them inviting them to gather and form a professional organization. Ninety-nine of the 117 responded. The organization that emerged took its name from the count: The Ninety-Nines. Earhart was its first president. The membership was — and still is — restricted to certified women pilots. The organization headquartered itself in New York City for the first twenty-six years. In 1955 it moved to Oklahoma City, taking space in the terminal of what was then Will Rogers Field. In 1975 the city granted the Ninety-Nines a parcel of land on the airport, and the organization built its own international headquarters at 4300 Amelia Earhart Drive. The museum collection — which had grown over forty-six years on shelves and in display cases inside the headquarters offices — finally got its own space and opened to the public in 1999 as the 99s Museum of Women Pilots. The collection holds the largest gathering of Amelia Earhart memorabilia in the world: her flight goggles, one of her trademark silk scarves, the lucky bracelet she accidentally left behind on her final flight, a lock of her hair, parts of her engine. Beyond Earhart, the museum traces the entire arc — the 1929 Women's Air Derby (the first cross-country race for women, won by Louise Thaden), the WASPs of World War II who ferried every American military aircraft type including the B-29, the Mercury 13 candidates who passed the same physical tests as the Mercury astronauts but were never allowed to fly, the first women airline captains in the 1970s, the first female Space Shuttle commander Eileen Collins, the first all-female Space Station crew. The Ninety-Nines is still headquartered in this building and still has chapters in 44 countries.

On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 children in the second-floor daycare — until 2001 the deadliest act of terrorism on American soil. The memorial built on the site is one of the most quietly powerful in the country. Two great bronze "Gates of Time" frame the moment: one marked 9:01, the minute before, the other 9:03, the minute after. Between them lies a still reflecting pool, and beside it the Field of Empty Chairs — 168 hand-crafted glass-and-bronze chairs, one for each victim, arranged in nine rows for the nine floors, the smaller chairs for the children. On the slope above grows the Survivor Tree, an American elm that lived through the blast.

Oklahoma City's great museum of the American West holds one of the finest collections of Western art and artifacts anywhere — Remington and Russell bronzes and paintings, a full re-created turn-of-the-century frontier town you can walk through, the Rodeo Hall of Fame, and James Earle Fraser's monumental 18-foot plaster sculpture "The End of the Trail," the iconic image of an exhausted Native rider slumped on his horse. It sits on Persimmon Hill overlooking the old Route 66 corridor on the city's northeast side. Oklahoma is also where Route 66 runs longest — more drivable miles of the Mother Road than any other state — and 2026 marks the highway's centennial.

Sixty thousand acres of granite mountains and mixed-grass prairie in southwestern Oklahoma, established in 1901 by President McKinley as the Wichita Forest Reserve — making it the oldest unit in the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service refuge system. The granite is roughly 500 million years old, uplifted between 290 and 330 million years ago. The refuge's most important conservation moment came in 1907, when 15 bison (six bulls, nine cows) arrived by train from the New York Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo) at the urging of the American Bison Society. Comanche leader Quanah Parker welcomed the herd in person — bison had been functionally extinct on the southern Great Plains for thirty years. Those 15 bison are the founding population of today's 650-strong free-roaming herd, plus 220 Texas Longhorn cattle (added 1927 for breed preservation) and roughly 1,000 Rocky Mountain elk (descended from a herd imported from Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 1911). Mount Scott, at 2,464 feet, is the highest publicly accessible peak — the road to the summit was built by the CCC, and the view is across the entire southern Oklahoma plain. The Holy City of the Wichitas, an Easter pageant set built by the WPA in the 1930s, is on the eastern edge of the refuge.