Mount Sunflower

The Harold family homesteaded this ranch in Wallace County in 1905, and the highest point in Kansas, 4,039 feet above sea level, sits in one of their pastures about half a mile from the Colorado line. It owes its height to the Rocky Mountains. Over millions of years streams carried sand, gravel and rock worn off the Rockies east across the plains and laid it down as a great wedge, the Ogallala Formation, the foundation of the High Plains. The state's low point, in the southeast corner, is more than 3,300 feet lower.

For decades the family has kept a small summit for visitors. There is a sunflower sculpture welded from railroad spikes, a covered picnic table, a memorial to the homesteading generation, a little free library, and a plaque reading "On this site in 1897, nothing happened." A mailbox holds the register, where visitors write their names, their towns and the size of their party, and a note inviting them to stop at the ranch house and tell the Harolds about their "trials and tribulations to the lofty summit." The family asks that you treat the place as you would your own.

Getting there is the work. From U.S. 40 or from Goodland it is long miles of gravel county road, with most of the turns signed, then a cattle guard and a ranch track through grazing pasture to the top.