For the past several weeks, everyone has been asking me, "Where are you going first?"
And I keep saying: "The tallgrass prairie of Kansas!"
And here I am.
My great Denver friend, A, is from Emporia, KS, and decided to drive east with me for us to spend 2 nights with her mom and to show me the tallgrass prairie before she flies back to Denver and I continue on my merry way eastward. So together we set out from Denver on I-70...
...said goodbye to CO and hello to KS, only to discover that we'd actually crossed the border 12 miles earlier and hadn't even noticed. I'm not sure what that says about my driving skills. But we sure weren't going to turn back for a do-over, as there was still most of Kansas to drive across before we slept.
Our destination and location for the past couple days:
It's been really wonderful staying with A's incredibly sweet mother, J, and taking a very long walk today in the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. (SS: I got a stamp in my NPS passport!) It was quite chilly and windy, but still so starkly beautiful, with the first green grass shoots of spring just starting to poke through.
A. tried to use her scarf to show how windy it was, but we learned that it was far too heavy to do the job impressively.
Very excitingly, we did get to see the buffalo herd that was imported to help naturally manage the prairie land.
I learned from Amelia that the flint for which these Flint Hills are named is to thank for this swath of prairie--tiny compared to the vast expanses that used to exist across the central U.S.--being relatively untouched; the farmers that obliterated the rest of it tried to do the same here but kept breaking their plows on the rock and abandoned the effort. Thanks, Flint!
We topped off the day with a drive through Strong City to the next-door town of Cottonwood Falls to check out its impressive, beautifully restored courthouse.
Hats off to Kansas!
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