Monument Rocks & the High Plains

West of Hays the land climbs onto the High Plains, a wedge of sand and gravel washed off the Rockies, and keeps rising to 4,039 feet at Mount Sunflower on the Colorado line. Where the Smoky Hill and its creeks cut down through that cover they expose the Niobrara chalk beneath it, the floor of an inland sea about 80 million years ago. U.S. 83 south of Oakley runs through the best of it: Monument Rocks, the Little Jerusalem badlands, and the spring-fed canyon at Lake Scott.

The northern tier along U.S. 36 and U.S. 24 is different country. There are the loess canyons of the Arikaree Breaks above St. Francis, wheat towns on the creeks that feed the Republican and the Solomon, and Nicodemus, settled in 1877 by Black families from Kentucky and still home to their descendants.

This was Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting country, and their warriors fought the stage road and the forts pushed up the Smoky Hill in the 1860s. In April 1875 soldiers destroyed a small Cheyenne camp on Sappa Creek. In September 1878 Northern Cheyenne families walking home from Indian Territory fought the army at Punished Woman's Fork, and small parties among them killed about 41 settlers along Sappa and Beaver creeks. Long before, Plains Apache and Pueblo people who had fled Spanish New Mexico farmed beside the springs at Lake Scott.

What to See in Monument Rocks & the High Plains

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park

Oakley

A maze of Niobrara chalk walls above the Smoky Hill River, once ranch land, now held by The Nature Conservancy for raptors and a buckwheat that grows nowhere else.

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Monument Rocks

Oakley

Chalk towers and an arch from the floor of an inland sea, standing beside a county road in Gove County pasture, still losing pieces to weather and still full of nesting cliff swallows.

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Natural Areas

Arikaree Breaks

St. Francis

A strip of loess canyons two or three miles wide cut across the northwest corner of Kansas, followed by a signed gravel tour north of St. Francis into Nebraska and back.

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Historic Lake Scott State Park

Scott City

A spring-fed lake in a hidden canyon off U.S. 83, where water seeping out between gravel and chalk drew Apache and Pueblo farmers, a homesteading couple, and finally the state.

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Historic Sites

Fort Wallace Museum

Wallace

A museum complex on US-40 in Wallace gathered from across the county: the 1865 Pond Creek stage station, the Weskan depot and a Swedish colony's 1888 church.

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Nicodemus National Historic Site

Hill City

The town Black Kentuckians founded on the Solomon in 1877, named from an emancipation song, bypassed by two railroads, and still the home its descendants come back to every July.

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Roadside Stops

Mount Sunflower

Weskan

The highest ground in Kansas, 4,039 feet on the Harold family's ranch half a mile from Colorado, with a sunflower of railroad spikes, a mailbox register and an invitation to stop by the house.

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Scenic Drives through Monument Rocks & the High Plains

Monument Rocks & the High Plains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.