Days 17 & 18 (31 May and 1 June). The Flint Hills of Kansas

From: Tulsa, OK

To: Council Grove, KS, then Lincoln, NE

Miles today: 96 & 185

Total miles: 4267

More overcast skies when I got up, but no rain.  I pulled out of Tulsa and northeast for Claremore, Oklahoma, to pay tribute to the legendary Will Rogers.  His memorial is there, near the ranch he lived on.  For some reason I was expecting a statue and maybe a small display of his life.  No, the memorial is a 26,000 square foot museum with everything about him you could imagine, including clips from some of his “talkies.”  Tribute has been paid!  There is, of course, some irony here.  While he famously “never met a man he didn’t like,” and while he thought all politicians were basically clowns, he was a staunch Democrat and spoke at the 1932 convention for FDR.  This large museum makes plain his feelings about Republicans (at least the 1930’s variety), which is not good; yet today Oklahoma is one of the reddest states in the union. 

The Will Rogers Memorial Museum, Claremore, Oklahoma

It is unmistakable that I am now in the Great Plains.  Point the cycle due north (or east or west), set the throttle for 70, and sit back.  Few trees; lots of grassland being used as pastures.

My next objective was the Flint Hills National Scenic Byway in Kansas (KS 177).  I took US 169 north across the border with Kansas, cut west on US 160 (through Independence, KS) and then US 400, using KS 99 to connect the two.  Then US 77 north to El Dorado, and US 54 back east for a little while to catch the southern edge of KS 177.  This road does not officially become the Flint Hills Scenic Byway until the town of Cassoday, and stops being the byway about 50 miles later in Council Grove.  During this journey it passes through the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, just north of Strong City.  I am pleased to report that the heavy stratus cloud cover finally broke up into fair weather cumulous about the time I started on KS 177. I did stop at the National Preserve (it was closed, but I walked down one of the trails a ways), and then stopped for the night at Council Grove.  This was actually a lovely town with a well-preserved historical district; it is on the Santa Fe Trail, and has one of the “Madonna of the Trail” statues in it.

The next day (Monday, June 1), it was 57 degrees at 9 am, but the sun was shining. I continued to ride north on 177 to Manhattan, Kansas, the largest city in the Flint Hills.  There I spent a very nice morning exploring the Flint Hills Discovery Center that is located there, along with Kansas State University (the Wildcats; 25,000 students).  I spent the rest of the day riding north to Lincoln, Nebraska, mostly along US 77, which was two lanes most of the way.  Lincoln is another college town, home to the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers.  That is where I am now. 

OK, so what is the deal with the Flint Hills? And “Tallgrass Prairie” for that matter?  Right. The Flint Hills are a Physiographic region mostly in eastern Kansas.  Unlike most of the state, which is really flat, this is gently undulating “Hill Country” and so in fundamentally attractive. 

Having said that, it is a subtle attractiveness that is easy to miss at first glance.  I did.  South of Independence, I pulled off at a site that said “Scenic Overlook.” When I got there, I almost said “OK, where is it?” out loud.  But then you get it.  It’s not the same with borders, but here are some pix.

Flint Hills, Kansas

OK, so it’s a bit hilly.  What else?  Well, the biome there is “prairie,” like pretty much all of the Great Plains.  Biologically, the American prairie comes in three flavors: Tallgrass, to the east where the elevation is lower and the rainfall is higher; Shortgrass, to the west where the elevation is higher and the rainfall is lower; and “mixed” in between.  Here is a map. 

Great Plains Biomes

The thing is, virtually all of the prairie in North America has been converted to farmland, and this is especially true for the wetter tallgrass zones.  Except in one region: the Flint Hills.  Here, limestone with chert (aka flint, a form of quartz) is very close to the surface, so it is not practical to plow it. Instead it is used as pastureland for cattle, which are trucked in from as far away as Texas.  (This has been going on for quite a while; the original “cowboys” would drive cattle from Texas up through the flint hills of Kansas specifically so they could fatten up on the grass that grew well there, and was not fenced off and farmed by “homesteaders.”)  Thus, the look of the Flint Hills is one in which the sky touches grass instead of trees.  It is actually a striking effect. 

This brings us to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.  It is an old cattle ranch that was donated to the Government (the Nature Conservancy also played a role), and it is one of the few places where you can see what eastern Kansas (and all of the Tallgrass Prairie biome) looked like 200 years ago. Basically, it looks like knee-deep grass (at least at the end of May) with a bunch of other plants thrown in. (Some of these are sunflowers, thus producing Kansas’s nickname.) Maintaining a prairie is not a passive operation; they do a controlled burn at the end of April every year, and have actually brought in the original “big herbivores,” bison, to mow it.  (Prairie is an ecosystem, not just the plants.)  For me, it was just really cool to see what this part of the world looked like for thousands of years, not that long ago.  I have often heard it said that no creation of man can be seen from the moon.  I bet if the prairie that has been converted by man to farm land were painted, say, electric yellow, it would be unmistakable.  I consider this transition an example of Terra-forming.   

From the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas

Before readers think I’m being morose about what man has done to the planet, let me add an important point that I got from the great Flint Hills Discovery Center in Manhattan.  First, prior to the end of the last Ice Age (about 10,000 years ago), Kansas was apparently deciduous forest. (The ice sheets varied in extent, but generally covered a lot of Nebraska but not much of Kansas.)  When the ice retreated, the environment became much dryer and grasslands spread, reaching their maximum extent about 8000 years ago.  There were Paleo-Indians here then!  About 5000 years ago, the environment got a bit wetter (much like it is today).  It is known that the indigenous peoples burned the prairie every spring to stimulate new growth, which in turn attracted bison and other game animals.  The consensus, at least as stated in the film loop at the Discovery Center, is that if it were not for this human activity of annual burning, all of the (low, wet) tallgrass prairie would have converted back to woodland by now.  It may only exist because of humans!  (Having said that, trees have a hard time in the subset of the tallgrass prairie biome called the Flint Hills because of the very thin soil.)