Manhattan, highway 177 north off I-70. The Flint Hills and tall grass prairie. Lots of limestone, cedar trees.
It is very different from western Kansas. West, about Abilene or Salina, I-70 gets flat and straight all the way to Colorado and the foothills.
“A sound as lonely as the whistle of a freight train heading west from Abilene at 3:30 AM on a moonless night, followed by the engine’s wheels breaking ice off the track.”
Well, this is way OT, but it’s 12:40 Sat. a.m., so, what the heck.
Just as a woman does not have to have a 36-24-36 figure to be beautiful, in nature, beauty comes in many forms, and spectacular is one of many. Sometimes — well, often, actually — one has to get off the beaten path, or look a little harder or in a different way to find it...
I-70 through Kansas (and Eastern Colorado, I’d add!!!), doesn’t seem very impressive until you’ve seen a major front or derecho bearing down on you, there, but there’s an awesomeness in that which is almost unmatched anywhere else. The almost “infinite” sensation one gets from the clear air and desolate plain is part of it... And, yes, the area north of Manhattan is interesting in its own way, whether it’s fossil hunting in the rocks as a kid, chasing collard lizards in the rocks or (especially) along the rock fences. (Those suckers - the lizards, I mean - will scamper along a rock fence on their hind legs faster than seems possible!). Or maybe it’s a little hidden meadow in the spring, or watching the range fires march around the hills at night, from one’s bedroom window.
I-70 through the Midwest reveals so little. It misses in Missouri:
Current River
Alley Mill (and spring)
Johnson Shut-ins
and many more.
Or take Illinois - south of Chicago, it’s all flat fields of corn and soybeans, right? But then you’ll miss places like Garden of the Gods, Ferne Clyffe, or Rimrock Trail.
One can find similar surprises in every “un-scenic” state I’ve been to.
Sure, those places I’ve mentioned can’t match the scale of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Rockies, or the mountains’ “wow” factor at seemingly every turn. But scale isn’t the only type of beauty. Sometimes it’s detail, or “coolness”. Sometimes the very seeming “out of placeness” of a spot like G.O.T.G. is part of its charm.