Sand Springs Built Its Best Fall Out of Land Nobody Wanted
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
The lot where Chipotle is going up on Highway 97 used to hold rainwater. Nothing more. It sat behind the Sheffield Crossing pad sites for years as a detention pond, doing the unglamorous job of catching runoff so the rest of the corridor could be built. Then the Oklahoma Department of Transportation ran an underground stormwater system through the area, and the pond stopped being necessary. City Manager Mike Carter has said as much directly: the ground under the future Chipotle used to be unusable, and now it's some of the most contested real estate in Sheffield Crossing.
That's the small version of a pattern that's showing up across Sand Springs this fall. The land the town once wrote off is the land paying rent now, in two very different currencies. On Highway 97, it's national chains and a $26 million retail expansion. On the west side of town, it's a 1,360-acre stretch of cross timbers forest that spent decades fenced and forgotten before becoming the only Old-Growth Forest Network member in Oklahoma. Both stories are about the same instinct: take the parcel nobody wanted, invest in it slowly, and let it become something residents actually use.
Sheffield Crossing didn't start as a shopping center concept. It started as a steel plant, Sheffield Metal, that the city bought after deciding the plant wasn't coming back. Carter has described it as a long process of converting a dead industrial site into something that works for the people who live here, and the corridor that's emerged along Highway 97 and Morrow Road is the result.
What's already open there tells you the direction: Olive Garden, which opened in April 2025, along with Chick-fil-A, Whataburger, and Dutch Bros coffee. What's coming tells you the pace is picking up. Chipotle is under construction on that former detention pond site, with completion targeted for the fourth quarter of 2026. Mayor James Spoon called the addition a signal of confidence in the city, framing it as proof of "the vision we have for Sheffield Crossing." Behind that single restaurant sits a bigger move: a new $26 million, 77,000-square-foot retail center on the same stretch of Highway 97, with Ross, Ulta Beauty, and Burlington confirmed as tenants and at least one more still to be named.
For a resident, the practical shift looks like this:
None of this happened because a developer noticed empty land and made a bet. City records show a Sand Springs survey of residents shaped which restaurants landed here, which is a different kind of story than the usual retail-chases-rooftops explanation. The city asked what people wanted and then went and got it.
Keystone Ancient Forest is where the second half of this pattern lives, and it moves on a much slower clock. The preserve opened to the public in 2007 on a limited basis, staffed by a small volunteer base that could only manage to keep the gates open one day a month. Cedars on the property run up to 500 years old. Post oaks run up to 300. None of that mattered much to daily life in Sand Springs until the city started treating the forest as infrastructure worth building out, the same way it treated the old steel plant site.
That build-out shows up most clearly in the Falls Trail, the preserve's newest and hardest route. It opened in 2021 alongside the Irv and Sharna Frank Visitor Center, and it did something the rest of the trail system hadn't done before: it took hikers into a section of the forest with two small waterfalls and real elevation change, rated difficult, crossing creeks and climbing over rock the whole way. The weekend it opened, the preserve logged 740 hikers on Saturday and 567 more on Easter Sunday, numbers that would have been unthinkable back when the gates opened one day a month.
The trail system now breaks down like this for anyone planning a fall weekend:
Access has caught up with ambition too. In 2022 the city added two motorized Trackchairs, funded in part by a $25,000 donation from Phillips 66, giving hikers with mobility limitations a way onto the Childers, Fire Road, and Frank trails using tank-tread chairs instead of wheels. The forest still runs on a limited schedule, open Thursday through Sunday, and dogs are only welcome on the first Saturday and third Sunday of each month, so it rewards a little planning rather than a spontaneous after-work walk. Cooler fall temperatures make the Falls Trail's steeper sections far more comfortable than they are in July, and the tree cover along the route turns from green to gold as the cross timbers hit peak color.
What connects a discontinued steel plant and a fenced-off forest is the same civic patience. Neither site got developed because it was easy. Both got developed because the city kept showing up to marginal land and building something durable on it, one trail or one lease at a time.
It would be easy to read Sheffield Crossing and Keystone Ancient Forest as opposite ends of Sand Springs, one loud and commercial, one quiet and wooded. They read that way on the surface. But both are the product of the same civic habit: identify the parcel everyone else has written off, whether it's a drainage pond, a dead steel mill, or 1,360 acres nobody could safely access, and put real money and real years into making it usable. This fall is the first season both sides of that habit are fully visible at once. You can eat at a national chain restaurant that didn't exist a year ago and then drive fifteen minutes to hike a trail carved out of 500-year-old cedar in the same afternoon, and neither experience feels like the town settling for less than it wanted.
Downtown, the pattern holds at a smaller scale. The Box District, renamed in 2023 to honor longtime civic figure Montie Box, keeps its own fall tradition going with the 16th Annual Boo at the Box on October 29, 2026, a free, all-ages event hosted by the Sand Springs Chamber of Commerce. It's a small event next to a $26 million retail expansion and a 500-year-old forest, but it's built on the same idea: the parts of town that get consistent investment are the parts that end up mattering to daily life.
If you're watching Sand Springs from the outside and wondering whether the growth is surface-level or structural, the forest is the tell. Retail corridors chase rooftops all the time. Cities rarely spend two decades and a Nature Conservancy easement on a forest nobody was required to save. Sand Springs did both, and this fall is the season it shows.
If you're curious what any of this means for property values, buyer interest, or timing a move into or out of Sand Springs, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this market closely. Burke & Brown Home Team works across Sand Springs and the rest of the Tulsa metro, and we're always glad to talk through what a neighborhood's growth actually means for the people living in it. Let's work together.
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