The Talimena and the Choctaw Highlands: Ouachita National Forest in Oklahoma

The Ouachita National Forest straddles the Arkansas-Oklahoma state line, and while most of its one and eight hundred thousand acres sit in Arkansas, a substantial portion extends into the Kiamichi Mountains and Winding Stair Mountain National Recreation Area of eastern Oklahoma. The Oklahoma side of the Ouachita holds a particular road that most visitors to the forest never take: the Talimena National Scenic Byway.

The Talimena runs about fifty-four miles from Talihina, Oklahoma, to Mena, Arkansas, following the ridgeline of Rich Mountain and Winding Stair Mountain at elevations between two thousand and twenty-eight hundred feet. The road was completed in nineteen sixty-nine, built specifically as a scenic drive rather than a transportation corridor, and it offers the longest uninterrupted ridge-top views in the Ouachita system. In mid-October, when the hardwoods turn, the Talimena draws visitors who drive the ridge in both directions simply to watch the color move through the valleys below.

The eastern Oklahoma region traversed by the Talimena was assigned to the Choctaw Nation as Indian Territory following their forced removal from Mississippi under the Dancing Rabbit Creek Treaty of eighteen thirty. The Choctaw established a functioning government in this landscape, built schools, and created a legal system before federal policy, beginning with the Curtis Act of eighteen ninety eight, dissolved their political authority by the time of Oklahoma statehood in nineteen oh seven. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, headquartered in Durant, remains one of the largest federally recognized tribes in the United States and maintains substantial cultural and governmental presence across the Ouachita region.

The forest the Talimena crosses has been managed for timber, watershed, and recreation since the Ouachita was established as the first national forest created from public-domain land in nineteen oh seven, the same year Oklahoma entered the Union.