Southwest Kansas Road Trip

Occasionally I do this thing where I look at a map, identify a region I’ve never been to, and a zany road trip commences. The region this weekend was southwest Kansas.

Our first stop Friday afternoon was the home of Carry A. Nation, famous for supporting the temperance movement and smashing saloons to pieces with a hatchet, in the town of Medicine Lodge. Carrie Nation’s militant opposition to alcohol paved the way for prohibition. Her methods were extreme, but she got her point across in a world where usually only men could be heard. Her house included old furnishings and historical items on display. It is right next to an old stockade and local history museum that are included with admission. Before leaving town we stopped at Barber State Fishing Lake and hiked around the lake. It was about 100 degrees F.

From there, we followed the Gyp Hills Scenic Drive. This region, just west of Medicine Lodge, has a rugged landscape of red canyons, cliffs, and interesting rock formations. For the most part, it’s entirely on private property and can only be enjoyed from a distance as you drive by. We got out and briefly snuck onto some rocks to play around and fortunately were not shot. Generally, I would encourage speaking to landowners to try to get permission to explore the hills. We drove from there to Greensburg and camped at Kiowa County State Fishing Lake.

Saturday morning we went into Greensburg, known for it’s big well and monster tornado. We went to the Big Well museum, where you can walk down into the largest hand-dug well in the world. The well was dug in the 1800s and provided water to the city and the passing locomotives. The museum also covers the story of the EF5 tornado which decimated Greensburg in 2007, leaving only three buildings standing. The town has since been rebuilt using energy efficient green technologies, living up to its name. Next we drove out to the Fromme-Birney Round Barn, a small but free and unattended museum on a nearby farm. It’s a big round barn – not much more to say about that.

From there we went to Dodge City and visited the Boot Hill Museum which was chock full of artifacts, recreated scenery, and period-costumed actors from the old west. Some of it was pretty hokey, but there was a lot to learn there as well. For example, famous lawman Wyatt Earp began his career here in Dodge before becoming famous for his role in the gunfight at the OK Corral. We just barely made it in time to watch the shootout in the street and drank a Sarsaparilla soda in the saloon. There is a considerably large Mexican population in Dodge with an abundance of Mexican restaurants that reminded us of our recent trip south of the border. We tried one but left with unsettled stomachs.

From Dodge, we went to Garden City, then Ulysess, and finally on to Cimmarron National Grassland. Cimmarron is not easy to navigate unless you have a good map, but we eventually found our way to the campground and settled in for the night. Cimmarron is the largest piece of protected land in Kansas and from the sounds we heard all night, serves as an important habitat for a lot of wildlife including birds, frogs, and coyotes.

We woke up at 5:30AM to go biking around the grassland before the brutal mid-day heat arrived. We had intended to follow the Santa Fe National Historic Trail, supposedly still clearly visible from the ruts carved by Conestoga wagons over a hundred years ago. I spent about 40 minutes biking around, dodging cacti and looking for said trail and found absolutely nothing. It seems that the abundant growth of grasses and other vegetation and lack of trail maintenance has prevailed. I eventually gave up and we instead biked on the dirt roads crisscrossing the preserve. We saw dozens of jack rabbits zipping across the prairie and walked on the dried bed of the Cimmarron River.

Leaving Cimmarron , we stopped in Liberal to look at Dorothy’s house (it was closed) and eat a pancake from the pancake house on Pancake Blvd. We went to Meade State Park, hiked its only trail and checked out the Meade Lake. Our final stop on the way home was Fort Larned National Historic Park where the buildings of the military fort still remain and are kept in their historic state along with a museum and hiking trail.

It was a pretty productive weekend with a good mix of natural areas, historical sites, and tourist traps. The most useful resource for this kind of trip is the book The 8 Wonders of Kansas by Marci Penner. This book is full of interesting destinations all over the state (there are actually 216 of them despite the title). It doesn’t have everything, but it’s a good starting place. Another strategy is to talk to as many local people as you can and ask them what there is to see. Western Kansas has a bad reputation for not having anything to see or do, but we were easily entertained for a weekend.

Total mileage driven: about 1,000

 

South Central KS Road-Trip

My parents recently visited us here in Kansas. Knowing that they are as hyperactive as I am , I planned a weekend circuit to visit a bunch of random things in the state. Our two-day road trip covered a pretty good swath of south central Kansas, a region we hadn’t explored too thoroughly yet. Our route looked something like this:

The first stop: Eisenhower boyhood home, museum, and burial site in Abilene KS. We spent the morning learning the ins and outs of the 34th presidency. Fittingly, we reached Abilene using I-70, part of the very system of interstate highways that Eisenhower is responsible for.

Next, Lindsborg KS, a town known for its large Swedish population, assortment of Swedish stores and restaurants, and ornately painted wooden Dala horses (once carved by Swedish lumberjacks). We scarfed down some Swedish pancakes (kind of like crepes) and went to National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson’s gallery which was full of beautiful photos of Kansas and beyond.

From there we hit Coronado Heights, a small stone castle built atop a hill by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s and believed to once have been visited by Spanish Conquistador Coronado. There are some trails winding around the castle and a many great views of the country-side.

We next drove to the town of Marquette to grab some treats at City Sundries, an old-fashioned soda fountain. We played in the park and went antiquing while dad occupied himself at the Kansas Motorcycle Museum. From there we went to Dillon Nature Center in Hutchinson KS where we enjoyed the peaceful fishing pond, visitor center, and a prairie hiking trail just outside of town. For 50 cents you can buy a waffle cone of food pellets and have a gang of fish, turtles, and geese follow you around.

We stayed the night in Hutchinson and the next morning went to Stratica, the underground salt mine. It’s a little touristy, but it’s the only way you can descend 650 feet and learn all about the process that extracts good old sodium chloride from the earth right here in Kansas. There’s a self-guided museum, two guided rides to other parts of the mine, and even the opportunity to go off on your own and explore the less regulated sections.

We had heard that there was a particularly popular Mennonite relief quilt auction going on at the Kansas state fairgrounds so we figured we should go scope it out. It was mostly building after building of people selling ice cream and pies. Eventually we found the auction buildings where a fast-talking auctioneer rattled off numbers until their ornate, hand-made covers were sold (sometimes for thousands of dollars!).

Finally, Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. We’ve been there numerous times, but since it was basically on the way home we decided to stop and hike a little and check out the native stone buildings of the old homestead.

If this looks way more fun than your weekend, then I challenge you to create your own Kansas weekend road-trip. It beats staying at home!

North Central Kansas

This Saturday’s tour of north central Kansas brought us to some of our state’s unique historical sites and geographic oddities that made for an excellent mini-road trip. Eight folks from the Prairie Fire meetup piled into two vehicles and set off for a day of defying the cold and avoiding home.
The first stop was the Concordia World War II Prisoner of War camp. We met a guide who gave us a private tour of one of the few remaining original buildings at the camp. Over 40,000 German soldiers were held here in what turns out to be a surprisingly compassionate story of Americans treating their enemies with care and respect. The prisoners were treated so well that few ever tried to escape and many stayed or returned to the area after the war.
Our second stop was the National Orphan Train museum. Here we learned the sad story of poverty and squalid, overcrowded streets in the mid-1800s that led to countless abandoned children living on the streets of New York. Charles Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society to help the homeless youth improve their lot in life. One tactic was a train that would place thousands of kids with willing families throughout the rest of the country. The museum, while mostly text-based, did a good job of preserving the records and history of this unique story. Occasionally they hold events in which actual orphans that rode the train talk to the public.
We ate lunch at Heavy’s BBQ where some of us devoured large piles of sauce-drenched meat’ while the vegetarians scored cheap meals consisting of side dishes. Everyone was relatively happy.
Next was the Pawnee Indian Museum. They had intended to close for the day, citing impassable snow drifts as the reason. But we convinced the lone staff member that our group had journeyed a long ways and he must let us in. He yielded and gave us a quick tour. The museum was a building constructed around the site of an ancient earth lodge of the Pawnee tribe. The ground in the middle remained undisturbed, with various artifacts lying as they were found during the excavation.
Back in the cars, we drove to the geographic center of the lower 48 Untied States. The exact spot was determined in the 1930s, according to Wikipedia, by scientists who made a cardboard cutout of the US and balanced it on a pin. There was a stone marker, flag pole, stone post arch, and a little chapel.
Finally, conveniently on the way home was the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City. It was pretty neat.
There was much driving, but I think we walked away with a much deeper appreciation for Kansas and its past.