Robbers Cave is a sandstone shelter high in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeast Oklahoma, and its reputation rests on who is supposed to have used it. Belle Starr and Jesse James are both named as having hidden out here, and the terrain makes the claim plausible even where the paperwork does not exist: the cave sits above a narrow approach with a long view over the country below, which is exactly what an outlaw wants and a posse does not.
The area was hunting ground for a very long time before that. Archaeological evidence links the earliest people here to the builders of Spiro Mounds, and by the 1600s the Osage and Caddo dominated the region, with French traders arriving later.
The park was originally called Latimer State Park and took its current name in 1936. Together with the adjoining wildlife management area it covers more than 8,000 acres and holds three lakes, five miles north of Wilburton on State Highway 2.
The cave itself is a short but genuinely steep scramble from the car park, up through a cleft in the rock, and it opens into a chamber with a second exit, which is the detail that makes the outlaw story work.
What the park is best known for now is climbing. The sandstone cliffs here are among the few places in Oklahoma with serious rappelling, and the park is a fixture for climbers, along with equestrians using the horse trails, mountain bikers, and anglers fishing the trout season. The Sans Bois woodland turns properly in autumn, which is the busiest time to visit and, most people would say, the best.
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Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
