In the opening pages of Kansas Geology, there's a quote from longtime Kansas Geological Survey senior geologist Dr. John Mark Jewett, who wrote, Landscapes except were marred by human maltreatment, show perfect harmony in all their parts.

And I submit Kansas without lofty mountains or awe inspiring canyons is a thing of beauty composed of placid forms.

It was created less violently than some of the other parts of the world, but by forces just as relentless and just as exciting.

In the May/June 2003 edition of the Annals of Improbable Research, scientists shared the results of a comparison of scale variations in topographical datasets meant to prove that Kansas is in fact, flatter than a pancake.

So they did a bunch of calculations and had cooked a pancake, and then they magnified it up and they had it all settled in on the elevations and stuff.

And they found out that Kansas was flatter than a pancake in general.

The way they magnified it, you know, a little bump or a little lump in a pancake looked like a mountain and stuff.

The way it is, so.

Kansas isn't all flat, although people think so.

One of the people that was a northwestern Kansas person.

And I asked her why she didn't come back and she said only thing in western Kansas is one horizon after another.

Kansas is mostly known throughout the state of having the rolling hills.

Now, this applies to the Smoky Hills, the Flint Hills, hills along the streams.

That is, they're usually fairly low and fairly rounded.

Down in the south central part of the state are the red hills.

Very attractive.

There are rolling hills, but steep.

But when you get into western Kansas, you don't see many rocks.

There's soil build up on it.

But there are a lot of places in here.

You go to Scott County, State Lake and you drop into a canyon with a lake.

The lake is manmade, but the canyon has always been there and it's always been a little oasis on the plains used by the Native Americans for thousands of years.

There are these little pockets everywhere, and there's a lot of variations in Kansas, but you may have to look for them.

Not far from Scott Lake, north of Scott Lake and the Smoky Hill River is what is now a state park called Little Jerusalem.

And this is where most of the Cretaceous formations are exposed.

And it's mostly a hiking trail with signage as interpretation.

You can arrange for a guide, I believe, to be there during the season, but you can wander and see the layers of the rock.

You can see the fossils.

The outcrop of rock at Little Jerusalem is part of a stretch of similar geological features located east and west along the Smoky Hill River.

Chuck Bonner of the Keystone Gallery, north of Scott City, has explored these chalk outcroppings his entire life in search of fossils left from the time that this area was covered by an ancient sea.

I'm Chuck Bonner and I'm co-owner of Keystone Gallery, where we're in here right now, and we specialize in local fossils that are found within 30 miles of here.

This was all part of an inland sea during the Cretaceous period, so the chalk runs for over 100 miles.

So any place that chalk outcrops, you can possibly find fossils.

I have a long background in fossils because my dad was good friends with George Sternberg and I was kind of raised around paleontologists.

We've collected.

We find them, collect them and prepare them for display.

And I've had good experience with that because I worked at the Sternberg when I went to college and kind of honed my craft there.

But I got a degree in art.

I guess I didn't want to be stuck in a basement somewhere working on fossils, so I'm stuck in my own location working on fossils instead.

So for the most part, we're dealing with a lot of the chalk outcroppings which Monument Rocks, Little Jerusalem, Castle Rock farther to the east, but it goes over 100 miles of badlands, I would say, from eastern Wallace County all the way to Ellis County.

Well, Monument Rocks has 50 feet of sediment that laid down, and it's actually 500 feet.

So we have a bunch above it, a bunch below it.

The stuff below... Below it you go farther east, and normally as you go east in Kansas, you get into older materials.

But this inland sea was was here for millions of years.

So there's a lot of different changes over over the time that it was laid down.

So but basically the only reason that they're exposed is that during the Pleistocene, what we refer to as the Ice Age, the Rocky Mountains were all glaciated.

So we didn't have glaciers in western Kansas.

There's a little bit of glacier activity in northeast Kansas, but we had tons of runoff off of the glaciers and the Rockies, the now Rocky Mountains.

So what happened through this area?

We had a we had an uplift while we had drainage.

So when you have uplift and drainage, it cuts.

So it cut these canyons out.

When the Smokey Hill River was formed and all these modern rivers, which they're not that old geologically speaking.

And then as far as Monument Rocks being isolated like that, my best guess is there was probably a big lake after the runoff.

And then at some point and there was another rush of water and it blew out the obstruction and left them standing because there's a lot of formations as tall as monument rocks.

Little Jerusalem has a lot of big pillars.

But the ones... the fact that like Castle Rock and Monument Rocks are so isolated, it makes them pretty unique.

But if you explore other canyons, you'll see the same type of big pillars.

And that cap rock is probably marker unit 10 or 12 in the strata layers of the chalk.

So it's kind of mid range within how much sediment there was.

So being out it being as an inland sea for that long, there was a lot of change there, a lot of things that are the same.

Another thing about fossil hunting, the vertical stuff is really not that good because you're only getting so much of an area to look at.

And then if you do find something, you want to dig into a big pillar to try to collect something?

I don't think so.

So mostly the fossils come out of the slopes where you find you get more of a surface wash too, and you have a slope.

So the formations of the rock are basically there was a structure of rock that was pretty well stratified and it was just erosion coming around it and washing it.

So these are the remnants of some big massive thing at one time, and they're still eroding.

Castle Rock has fallen in the last 30 years.

A lot of it is near as big as it was, as I remember, which I'm over 30.

I remember seeing it for the first time.

And the same thing with Monument Rocks.

These are ancient seas, but the erosion around it has exposed them.

Now, the problem is with the erosion and all the history of the geology, the time, sometimes things are covered after hundreds of thousands of years and others are exposed.

And then if they're exposed, they tend to deteriorate.

But really, when you get out here, you don't see a lot of mountains, but you see a lot of formations that were and basically you get down in the canyons and you have you have mountains kind of because it's not like it's not like New Mexico or Arizona, but we do have our formations that are really kind of cool.

It's kind of interesting.

Almost all of these places have two names, at least.

Monument Rocks' original name for Monument Rocks, because when the Smoky Hill Trail went through there, they named them Monument Rocks.

In fact, the Smoky Hill Trail had a station called Monument Station, which was in that same area.

And you can see the Smoky Hill River just south of where Monument Rocks are.

And it was a landmark not only for Native Americans, but also a longer Smoky Hill Trail.

But then when the settlers came in here, they started calling them the Pyramids.

And the funny thing about it, there's there's...

It was an isolated head shape that was out to the north.

It fell over in 1986.

This isolated one was called Old Chief Smoky by locals.

And then it got...

When they started calling the Monument Rocks the Pyramids, they called it the Sphinx.

So these these formations are evolving as we wait.

You know, there was no there's an arch down there that is very... People take pictures of it all the time.

There was no arch when I was a kid.

So that opened up, you know, in my short lifetime.

Little Jerusalem, the first paleontologists out here, they named it Castle City because it was like Castle Rock, only more of it.

So some of the early paleo people named that Castle City.

But settlers started to call it a little Jerusalem, and that's a name that stuck with it too.

As far as it being unique, it is unique in just the amount of exposure in one area.

And there's there's other places that are almost about that big too, all through the 100 mile stretch.

So but that is a nice snapshot of a large area of Badlands.

So it is fairly picturesque too.

You got a lot of big, tall, different shaped erosion things.

There's probably some little natural bridges down in there too, and stuff.

So at Little Jerusalem is just some place that's been popular with locals for years too.

It's got another name to besides... People call it Hell's Half Acre, even though it's a lot more than a half acre.

But a lot of people, a lot of locals called it that too.

Lone Butte has stayed Lone Butte.

I don't think it's ever changed much so.

Lone Butte was probably cut around too.

I mean, it does have an Ogallala Caprock, but so the caprock around the top of that is harder sandstone.

So it kind of preserved.

And then below you can see chalk.

So it's kind of a little different than what what we see out here very often being an isolated butte like that.

So it's like instead of being up, you kind of go down to to appreciate the height that you're you're dealing with.

So and a lot of the things that we see out here have been cut around or eroded and left.

You're not going to see something just built up.

We didn't have a lot of uplift in this area.

It was mostly cut into.

A lot of people, you know, they always said that Kansas was flyover country and some people still consider that.

And then with interstate 70, it goes through the part of Kansas where they built the road, as they did the railroads and the early trails on the route of least resistance.

So they avoided the hills and the rivers and stuff.

And that's why I-70 parallels the Kansas Pacific Railroad that now Union Pacific because that's where it was built, because it was flat.

They built a railroad there.

They had surveyed it.

So the interstate parallels.

Interstate 70.

Granted, when you get into the flat top areas where the farm ground is, it is pretty flat.

I mean, it makes it great for farming.

You don't have to do too much to get a nice flat farm ground.

Now, the Pleistocene is all of the farm ground, the alluvial dirt that's on top.

So that's very recent geology.

Of course, some of the soil out here is sometimes 40 feet deep.

And so this eroded easily and stuff.

But so it's this has stayed flat for a really long time.

I mean, it was flat water and it's still flat farmland.

But the fact that we have the erosion in the lower areas kind of gives you, you know, a feeling of it's not really mountainous.

No, it's not at all.

But it is striking in the kind of different shapes and colors you get because the chaulk goes from deep gray all the way to orange, reddish orange.

And there's whites and lighter grays and yellows all through the chalk.

So it's depending how much minerals are in the chalk.

A lot of times the reddish orange color is because there are a lot more iron in the sediment.

So it colored the chalk differently.

And then not too far from here, Scott Lake is a later geologic phenomenon, which is Pliocene sandstone formations.

But a lot of those are were laid down much later than the inland sea material.

But that's one thing that's good about the Pliocene is that that's where the groundwater, the Ogallala Aquifer is through that period.

So when you're at Scott Lake down here, you're right down on the aquifer and that there's springs coming right out that are on the aquifer and hopefully they'll keep running for ever.

So that's our hope anyway, so.

You go to the northwestern corner of the state to the Arikaree Breaks.

That is highly eroded through there with the sandy soils and the way the rocks are.

And it is rough country.

To learn more about life on the Arikaree Breaks, we traveled to the Cheyenne County Museum in Saint Francis to visit with Mark Mills, Sherri Gregory and Debra Harker.

It starts over in Colorado around Cope, maybe.

Cope-ish.

Cope-ish and it comes up along the Arikaree River and the Arikaree Breaks are the canyons that go in on both sides of that.

And some of them are, I don't know, 30, 40 feet deep or more.

I guess, you know, growing up there, to me, it was just it's there.

It's pasture.

It's a pain to fence.

Yeah, it's it's gorgeous.

Especially this time of year.

If you get an inch or two of snow on it.

I mean, it's just gorgeous.

And in the spring it's gorgeous when the grass is green and the wildflowers are in bloom.

And this year, this year was even better because we had so much early rain.

Yeah.

And we had grass that was knee high.

But it was like he said, we we didn't think anything about it.

It was just you go get the cows and you have to search through the canyons to find them sometimes.

And once in a while one of them will fall into the canyon and break a leg or something.

We had a bull that did that, but our friends would come out and just love playing out there with us.

You never want to get too far because you could get lost Exactly In the break.

We'd be putting cattle in, we'd be on three wheelers or four wheelers, and we'd have to take a stop and get up on top of a hill somewhere and.

To figure out where you were.

Were.

Where am I?

I'm lost.

I've been running the bottoms, but now I'm lost.

Some of the issues you want to consider when driving through the breaks is that sometimes cattle get out.

And if you come up over a hill and there's a cow there, you need to.

You're going to have to miss it or whatever.

You don't want to drive fast and you want to stay on the road.

The property is all private property.

And if you know somebody and want to hunt in there, you have to get permission.

You have to find out who owns the property, get permission to get on there.

And you always have to watch out for rattlesnakes in the...

Walk in that deep grass up in the ditch, And bobcats and coyotes.

I guess.

You know, the Breaks back in the early eighties really weren't a thing.

Nobody...

It was just there.

And by probably early nineties it got to be more of a tourist thing So it's just beautiful, you know, in the fall when you get snow on it, in the spring when all the grass is growing and the cactus.

I mean it's just it's gorgeous.

I think in the late eighties, early nineties, there was a historian here at the Cheyenne County Museum that appreciated the lay of the land out there, and he started taking people that came to the museum out there on tours and that kind of traveled, you know, the news of where they'd been and what they'd seen.

They took photos and showed their friends and so then suddenly everyone wanted to see the Breaks.

For me, it's home.

I have lived in a lot of different areas of Nebraska, Kansas, Utah, Colorado.

I've lived in a lot of different places and always it's home to me.

Of course, it's because my family homesteaded the land here.

So they were some of the first settlers.

And there's always an adventure.

Oh back in the old days when we had just single axle wheat trucks taking the wheat truck to town, going through the breaks because you would have the white knuckle syndrome by time you got down on the flat at the highway was like (big sigh) Made it.

Made it here.

I think one of the things that I have noticed when I come back to visit when I wasn't living here is I would always take the dirt roads and drive around because it just, I don't know, it was a feeling of home, but it's also I don't know, you come up over a hill and there's a big canyon or a big, beautiful view of something like the river.

The canyons are just beautiful, always.

Unless you're fixing fence.

Exactly.

For me, living in town the last 50 years, it was a release to least to drive just a few miles north.

And you go over a hill and there's the Breaks below you.

And it is just like the most calming, breathtaking sight you'll see.

No matter what season it is.

I mean, there's there's always something beautiful out there and its simplicity.

It's all right.

If you believe in God, you feel real close to God at that time.

It was created from nature many years ago, but it's just a beautiful spot.

I just think Kansas is full of diversity in climate, scenery, everything, people.

You have to get off of the interstate in order to enjoy it because the interstate is boring.

Get on there and hit 75 on the cruise control, and just... Yeah.

And you never ever, ever get to really see Kansas if you stay on the interstate, you need to go you know north south any direction from the interstate.

There's always something to see and fascinating little things in each county.

So it pays to get out and travel Kansas roadways.

Get off the beaten path, go on a discovery and see this.

In fact, geologists have now retired from the Kansas Geological Survey but got together so an average person is crossing Kansas or a family, they're half way interested in geology or landmarks can take this book and find the route and follow it about any way you want so you can understand all the different rock formations and stuff.

And believe me, Rex Buchanan and James McCauley that had compiled this book knew Kansas, and they know it isn't flat.

Some people ask me what I see in Western Kansas.

Well, I see everything.

I have been throughout the state doing a lot of things, but Western Kansas was home to me.

The Rockies were closer than Kansas City, so we went to the Rockies a lot.

I enjoy the mountains, but I wouldn't want to live there.

I'm a flat lander and so I guess it's in my genes or in my little mentality.

But this is home.

I can see the storms come in.

I can see what's going on a mile away and not have to go up and investigate or be surprised.

You know, I like to rise pretty early and to go walk out at five in the morning and look at this blanket of stars out here.

There's nothing in the way.

There's no there's just a big, big open sky.

You get up there on the farm ground a lot and you can see for miles.

We can see Wheeler from our house, which is 30 miles away.

And oh, there were times.

Oh, you know, we used to always end up cutting wheat, unfortunately, on the 4th of July.

But we'd sit up there on the edge of the Breaks.

My cousin Pat and I would get out and sit on the hood of the truck and you could see fireworks from Benkelmen, Haigler, Wray and Saintie (St. Francis).

Which is a good 60 mile radius.

But you see all the fireworks that distance.

So if you think Kansas is flat, start on the eastern side of the state and start walking.

You think its flat, but keep walking because Kansas goes uphill all the way to the Colorado line.

And of course, on the Colorado line or near there in Wallace County is the highest point in Kansas, Mount Sunflower.

And if you go and look at Mount Sunflower, you will not need your parka or Sherpa guides or ice picks.

You can make it to the peak of that and see for a long ways.

And Mount Sunflower is very a popular place to go to the highest point in Kansas and see the horizons.