The Los Angeles Times’ travel staff included Kansas’ Flint Hills in a feature highlighting “underrated places of the world,” paying tribute to their “undulating carpets of green” and advising readers to find a safe place to stop along U.S. 56: “It is here, on a perfect spring day or a crisp autumn afternoon, that you know you have found the heart and soul of bluestem grass country. You will hear nothing but the pure strain of a meadowlark’s song or the sweep of the wind through the grass. You are alone in the quiet. It’s such a non-L.A. moment that you may wish it could last forever.” Fortunately, Kansans get to enjoy that bliss whenever they like.
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19 Comments
Looking forward to my next trip up to Cottonwood Falls in the heart of the magnificent Flint Hills of Kansas.
For God’s sake, somebody spike this story quick. The last thing we want is a bunch of left coast pukes moving back here and spoiling this State the way they have Colorado and now Montana.
Perfect place to build 500 to 1,000 environmentally clean wind turbines.
Good bird huntin’ in them thar hills…..
Hollyfornian’s are amazed at anything with nature because they have turned their state into a concrete and steel, smog producing, energy wasting pile, Draconian-taxed horde of humanity thriving on hubris and narcissism.
DFB
Posted April 23, 2009 at 7:46 am | Permalink
Good bird huntin’ in them thar hills…..
===============
I’ve kilt me some mighty fine gobblers in dem der hills….might fine.
Obama does not have the authority to unilaterally declare that the Justice Department would take no action on possible crimes.
Actually, he has exactly that authority. And, in the the exercise of that discretion he has, had exercised it. Until he needed to placate the moonbats.
Oh well.
Ooops. Wrong thread. and gotta go . . . no time to fix it now.
GMC70,
I don’t think O’bama has visited the Flint Hills.
Is Highway 56 that road from Strong City, through Cottonwood Falls and Matfield Green (one of my favoritest of all town names; sounds like an author’s name)? I’ve driven it lots of times, too fast, feeling like a car commercial on TV.
I’ve driven with the top down (fortunately I have a convertible) in the sun as storms brew in the sunset on the other side of the Flint Hills.
I always thought you had to be a native Kansan to appreciate such beauty. But apparently someone from the LA Times caught it, too. Drive slower at night on that road during burn-off season and you get a clue what Dante imagined the circles of Hell were like.
Breathtaking (in more ways than one) and spectacular.
Flying over the Flint Hills is an altogether different perspective. It looks like a green velvet pool table with dents running through it. From the ground they’re hills, from above they’re a bunch of mesas.
The first tornado I ever saw in the flesh was in the middle of the Flint Hills. I was cruise controlling on Highway 54 and happened to look out to the left and there was this huge mother-lover of a funnel that looked practically on top of us. Turns out it was more than a mile away and even bigger than it appeared; picked up some cows but not much else damage.
I wouldn’t mind energy-producing wind farms in the Flint Hills. They’d end up looking like daisy gardens on God’s front lawn.
I don’t see the down side.
To see/appreciate the Flint Hills, one needs to use either a bicycle or a motorcycle. You see, hear and smell things you don’t using a car.
I wouldn’t mind energy-producing wind farms in the Flint Hills. They’d end up looking like daisy gardens on God’s front lawn.
I don’t see the down side.
=========================
Well, not until a tornado hits them and spills thousands of gallons of gear oil all over the green grass, killing it for decades…..Other than that I suppose you’re right.
#
gster
Posted April 23, 2009 at 9:56 am | Permalink
To see/appreciate the Flint Hills, one needs to use either a bicycle or a motorcycle. You see, hear and smell things you don’t using a car.
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Let’s hope those are bio-diesel motorcycles.
The Flint Hills are killers!! Doesn’t anyone remember the multiple car pileup caused by the greenhouse gas emitting grassfires there a few years ago? On top of that, they grow cows there! And cows are a key contributor of flatulation, a far greater threat to our environment than fossil fuels! It should be paved over and turned into a skateboard park with stimulus money!
MonkeyH: Highway 177 is the north-south highway leaving the Turnpike at the Cassidy exchange and going north past the almost ghost town of Matfield Green (about two miles west of the Matfield Green Turnpike rest station). Then on north passing the old Knute Rockne airplane crash site back in the 1930’s about a 1/2 mile to the west. Then past the little town of Bazaar and its country school and cemetery. Then on north to Cottonwood Falls with the wonderful old 1870’s limestone courthouse and another mile north to Strong City on Highway 50.
Highway 56 is an east-west highway from about Olathe west to Council Grove and onto McPherson, as I recall. I believe Highway 56 more or less follows the old Santa Fe Trail across Kansas and parallels Highway 50 a little further south.
This is a case where one map is worth a thousand words of description.
However, Highway 177 is on my list of all-time beautiful scenic roadways in Kansas. Others would be Highway 59 from Ottawa north to Lawrence especially at dusk and Highway 74 north from Leavenworth to Atchinson in the fall.
Also on my list until this past month was Highway 54 from Kingman to Pratt crossing the meandering formerly always running Ninnescah River and crossing the Ninnescah alluvial wetlands lined with the 70 year old Eleanor Roosevelt shelterbelts. However as I have sadly previously reported, the Kansas Highway Department is using one hundred million dollars of Kansas taxpayers money to rip, shred, burn and destroy this formerly beautiful Kansas roadway to build an unlegislated, divided limited access, concrete throughway from Wichita to the southeast corner of Kansas. There it will tie in with the planned divided freeway to El Paso, Texas, and across the Rio Grande River to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Incidentally, this road could be turned into a national Turnpike to produce funds to patrol and maintain it (and transfer ownership to China if necessary … no Kansas legislator will speak on this issue.)
Is this to be the new NAFTA Super Highway from Mexico via Wichita to Kansas City since the former planned route was effectively nixed through central Texas. If so, all states, counties, municipalities along this Highway 54 route will have to vastly increase their law enforcement protection at local taxpayers expense. You know the story, the federal government is broke and will not be able to shoulder its share.
In order for satire to work it has to be clever.
Beber: Its hard to be “clever” and accurate at the same time. I am generally always correct in my comments particularly in my criticism of the vaunted downtown Intrust ice hockey arena …. as opposed to the arena cheerleaders. They wasted almost 1/2 billion dollars of taxpayers money with nothing of value to show for it. Most of the arena cheerleaders are now gone … turning to give the sign to Wichita as they sped past El Dorado on the way northeast on the Kansas turnpike.
One of my favorite ways to spend a day is to go exploring and photographing in the Flint Hills. Yes, the route from Cassidy to Cottonwood Falls (with its classic Victorian courthouse) is beautiful, but there are lots of other places too. The hills take on a completely different character and color going south to the Sedan area, and also north along I-70 west of Manhattan, and again around Independence.
There are also other non-flat locales in Kansas, like the Gyp Hills between Medicine Lodge and Sun City, or Coronado Heights to the north on I-35 near Lindsborg (a fantastic place to stop for lunch) that make for a great day-trip!
There are even people in Kansas; a sizable Czech community (with festival) in Caldwell, the aforementioned Swedish Lindsborg and several Old Order Amish communities between Newton and Huchinson that serve homemade German sausage and pastries to die for, and drive horse-drawn carriages with carbide lights! There’s a gorgeous Arboretum in Belle Plain that offers good live music on weekends, and The Garden of Eden sculptures in Lucas.
If you’re into wildlife, we have Bobcats, Armadillos, Raccoons and Skunks, Ornate Box Turtles, Wild Turkeys and Turkey Vultures, Deer, Antelope, a few Bison, Coyotes and lots of other fauna of interest, if you’re willing to spent the time looking for them.
If museums are your thing, we’ve got hundreds of tiny small-town museums displaying a vast assortment of such things as huge Birger Sanzen landscape paintings, collections of barbed wire, horse tack, Victorian porcelain dolls, monster balls of twine or aircraft, space items, meteorites, fossils, just about any odd or esoteric items you won’t find anywhere else.
If none of that interests you, we have talented hookers on South Broadway.
Anyone from any coast who thinks Kansas is flat and boring ought to take a look around. They obviously didn’t expect to see New York or Los Angeles, or even Seattle when they came here! If you’re bored, get off that sofa or bar stool, take an afternoon drive and go see the things you won’t on the coast. You might even be pleasantly surprised to find you preconceptions shattered and replaced by memories of beautiful places and people. Be sure to take your camera, and plenty of extra batteries and flash memory cards. You’ll need them! If you have a DSLR, you won’t go wrong bringing a macro lens too. And the Flint Hills is a good place to try out that panorama feature you haven’t used yet. Go get ‘em!
Jed: You made some great suggestions on your list of Kansas places to visit.
You mentioned the road through the Gypsum Hills northwest from Medicine Lodge through the semi-ghost towns of Lake City and Sun City. I would continue that on northwest to the old town on a ranch, Belvidere. In the 1890’s, the old Frank Rockefeller ranch was located there. Frank thought he had been cheated out of millions in oil money by his famous Rockefeller brother so moved to Belvidere for a time.
From Belvidere, you can go north perhaps 15 miles up out of the beautiful Medicine River valley to return to Highway 54 (Wichita’s Kellogg) on the “High Plains” between Greensburg and Pratt.
Then turning east towards Wichita, visit the progressive community of Pratt surrounded by countless producing oil wells, grazing cattle, vast wheat fields out along the beautiful meandering Ninnescah River. Pratt features a great small community college, a 1920’s fish hatchery, an old WWII Army Air Base, a thriving 1930’s era Main Street complete with perhaps the best historical museum in Kansas.
In the 1920’s, young Wichita airplane manufacturers, Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech and Lloyd Stearman went to Pratt bankers to get financing for their fledgling Travel Aire Manufacturing Co. Travel Aire was then located on Wichita’s Douglas Avenue, just west of the Arkansas River and the present day Metropolitan Baptist Church.
Good traveling Kansans!