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Kansas

September 2009 .............

Flint Hills: They were created approximately 250 million years ago when the area was covered by a shallow sea. The hills are composed of limestone and shale with plenty of fossils of prehistoric sea creatures. Much of the honey colored limestone has been used for building blocks. The Flint Hills is a high, wide, gently rolling landscape blanketed with the largest continuous area of tallgrass prairie left in the world. They remain sparsely populated today and the main agricultural enterprise is cattle ranching. Each spring the ranchers do controlled pasture burns, I think now some are burning a third of their pastures every year. Burning was in opposition to popular opinion until a couple of decades ago. In recent years the efficacy of this folk practice has been vindicated by the experiments of rangeland scientists who have shown that controlled pasture burning, particularly if conducted in mid to late spring, is an efficient and economic way to maintain a tallgrass prairie. It keeps the pastures relatively free of trees and brush while at the same time promotes better weight gain in cattle. There would be no tallgrass prairie without a fire in the Flint Hills as the annual rainfall is high enough to support dense stands of trees. There are some wonderful old stone houses in the Flint Hills. Pictures below are two such houses, first three photos are of the same house, I have watched it ( in 1987 we climbed the fence and walked through the house - a no no on private land) and photographed it over the years (1987, 1991 and 2009.) It looks like Laura Ingles Wilder could step out at any minute - or it did when I first saw it, now it's just a shell. The house is South of I-70 on H-K177 just a mile or less, on the west side of the highway. The other house was somewhere around Strong City. It breaks my heart to see the old stone houses and barns falling down, however I know it would take lots of time and money to save them.

Flint Hills of Kansas