The Flint Hills, the Santa Fe Trail and the Chalk in 5 Days

Start on the bluff above the Missouri in Kansas City, Kansas, at Quindaro, the free-state landing a company of Wyandot leaders and Emigrant Aid men laid out in 1856 on Nancy Quindaro Brown Guthrie's allotment. An overlook on North 27th Street looks down on the ruins, and the marble John Brown statue from the Western University years stands at 27th and Sewell Avenue. Take I-70 west to Lawrence. The Haskell Cultural Center, open weekdays from 10, tells the boarding school that opened here in 1884 in its own words: children as young as three or four, hair cut short on arrival, languages and prayer forbidden, a campus jail used until 1933. Downtown, the Watkins Museum of History fills J. B. Watkins's 1888 mortgage-company bank, with the town's antislavery founding and Quantrill's raid of 1863 on the second floor. In Topeka, Monroe School, where Linda Brown went, tells how Lucinda Todd and 13 families brought the case decided on May 17, 1954. From Topeka it is about an hour west on I-70 and K-177 to Manhattan.

Walk early at Konza Prairie, south of town off McDowell Creek Road, where the nature trails open at dawn. The short loop, about two and a half miles, crosses Kings Creek, passes the Hokanson Homestead and climbs limestone ledges to a view over the Kansas River valley. The station is named for the Kanza, forced out between 1846 and 1872. Back in town, the Flint Hills Discovery Center opens at 10 with the overview, from the rock to the ranchers who still burn and graze the pastures. Then take K-177 south through Council Grove to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Stephen F. Jones's ranch, whose 1881 house of Cottonwood limestone is full of fusulinid fossils the size of wheat grains; the Scenic Overlook Trail climbs 3.2 miles into the bison pasture. In Cottonwood Falls, the Chase County Courthouse of 1872-73, built of the same stone, is open until 5. Drive back north to Council Grove and southeast of town to Allegawaho Memorial Heritage Park, the Kaw Nation's own land, where a two-mile trail passes the ruins of three of the 1862 stone houses.

This is the long day, so leave Council Grove early, west on US-56, the line of the Santa Fe Trail, past Herington and McPherson to Lyons. The Coronado Quivira Museum, open from 10, starts with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, whose towns stood in Rice County from about 1425 to 1700 and whom Coronado found in 1541 instead of gold; a full-size grass lodge stands inside. Go on to Great Bend and northeast on K-156 to Cheyenne Bottoms, a 64-square-mile sink where an estimated 45 percent of North America's migratory shorebirds stage. The Kansas Wetlands Education Center is free. US-56 runs past Pawnee Rock to Larned. Two miles west of town, the Santa Fe Trail Center spreads over ten buildings, from a sod house to the Frizell depot. Four miles on is Fort Larned, its sandstone barracks of 1866-68 around the parade ground, open until 4:30; if time is short, go to the fort first. In April 1867 Hancock met Cheyenne chiefs here, then burned the empty Cheyenne and Lakota village up the Pawnee Fork. Drive south through Kinsley and west on US-50 to Dodge City.

Be at the Boot Hill Museum when it opens, at 9 outside summer. Its collection, begun by Chalkley Beeson in the 1870s, runs past 60,000 objects, and the museum is plain that Gunsmoke was shot on a Hollywood set. Nine miles west on US-50, the Santa Fe Trail ruts braid across 140 acres of shortgrass for about two miles, as much as 400 feet wide. Follow the Arkansas west to Garden City, then US-83 north past Scott City until K-95 drops into the canyon at Historic Lake Scott. Its springs watered the fields of El Cuartelejo, the stone pueblo that Pueblo families fleeing Spanish rule built among the Plains Apache in the later 1600s; the rebuilt foundation is on the west side of the lake. Back on US-83, Gold Road leads west to Little Jerusalem, chalk walls more than a hundred feet above the Smoky Hill, seen from two rim trails. Across the highway, Dakota Road and about nine miles of county gravel reach Monument Rocks, pillars of the same seabed on private ranch land, where the Keyhole Arch widens every year. Skip the gravel after rain. Then go north on US-83 to Oakley.

Take I-70 east to Hays and the Sternberg Museum of Natural History, open from 9 in the dome by the interstate. It carries the name of the family who dug for Cope and Marsh, and it holds the Xiphactinus with a Gillicus inside it that George F. Sternberg collected in 1952, beside a diorama of the Cretaceous sea. Go on east and north on US-281 and K-18 to Lucas and S. P. Dinsmoor's Garden of Eden, 113 tons of cement poured between 1907 and 1928 around his post rock cabin: Adam and Eve on the west side, Labor crucified by a doctor, a lawyer, a preacher and a capitalist on the north, and his own glass-lidded coffin. K-18 runs east to US-81 and I-70 for Abilene. At the Eisenhower Presidential Library, the last museum entry is at 3:30, and tours of the boyhood home on Southeast Fourth Street are paused until late November 2026. The grounds and the Place of Meditation, where Ike, Mamie and their son Doud lie, are free and open until sunset; if the day runs long, the museum opens at 9 the next morning.