Three miles west of Medicine Lodge, a sign reading Scenic Drive marks the turn south off US-160 onto Gyp Hills Road. The loop runs south, turns west on Scenic Drive and comes back north to the highway on Lake City Road, about 22 miles in all, much of it unpaved. It crosses private ranch land and open range where cattle can wander onto the road, and the Kansas Geological Survey warns that it can be precarious in bad weather. The paved alternative is the Gypsum Hills Scenic Byway, the 42 miles of US-160 between Medicine Lodge and the US-183 junction north of Coldwater.
The hills are sandstone, shale and siltstone laid down in the remnants of an inland sea in the Permian Period, about 260 million years ago, and stained red by iron oxide. Their flat tops are gypsum, an evaporite left as the sea dried up. It resists weathering better than the soft red layers beneath, so it caps the mesas and buttes, but it dissolves in water, and the hills are full of caves. Of the 528 caves the Kansas Speleological Society has cataloged in the state, 117 are in Barber County and 128 in Comanche County next door. A natural bridge south of Sun City, 35 feet wide, stood 12 feet above its creek until it fell in 1962.
Gypsum is also the local industry. It was first mined southwest of Medicine Lodge in 1888 and is still taken from a quarry and a mine north of Sun City for sheetrock and plaster.
The closest stops worth working into your route
Roadside plaques and monuments within a short detour