Sandsage Bison Range and Wildlife Area

In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt set aside land south of the Arkansas River and southwest of Garden City as the Garden City Forest Reserve, an experiment to learn which trees could grow there. By April 1906 the government had planted 50,000 yellow pines and 30,000 hackberry, locust and Osage orange trees, and 170,000 more went in the next year. In 1908 the reserve was enlarged to 302,387 acres across five counties and renamed the Kansas National Forest. A drought in March 1911 killed 90 percent of the living trees. The hardiest, a stand of yellow pine planted in 1906, never grew more than two feet tall, and President Woodrow Wilson abolished the forest in 1915 and opened its land to homesteaders.

A 3,760-acre piece stayed public. Once the Finney Game Refuge, it is now the Sandsage Bison Range and Wildlife Area, which the state calls home to the oldest publicly owned bison herd in Kansas; the county visitors bureau dates the herd's return to October 1924 and puts it at more than 100 animals. The land is sand sage prairie that was never turned into cropland, with mule deer, kangaroo rats and scaled quail, and a remnant of the tree planting still stands in one pasture.

Visitors may not enter the bison pasture on their own. The Friends of the Sandsage Bison Range lead guided tours by reservation, taken by phone on weekdays, from March through October. The range lies about half a mile south of Garden City on the west side of Business 83.