US-83: The Chalk Badlands, Oakley to Scott City
About 47 miles on US-83 and K-95 from Oakley to Scott City: the Little Jerusalem badlands, Keystone Gallery's fossils in a 1917 church, Monument Rocks down the county roads and the canyon at Lake Scott.
The Route at a Glance
South of Oakley, US-83 crosses level High Plains, and the chalk the Smoky Hill River has cut into stays out of sight until the side roads. Monument Rocks & the High Plains explains the rock; this is the road through it, in Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting country.
Oakley, where I-70, US-40 and US-83 meet, was founded in 1884 and named the next year for Elizabeth Oakley Gardner Hoag, mother of David D. Hoag, one of its founders.
About 23 miles south, Gold Road runs west some five miles to Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park. Three miles on, at Dakota Road, Keystone Gallery stands beside the highway in a limestone building that was a church from 1917 to 1953. Chuck Bonner and Barbara Shelton opened it in 1991 to show fossils from the local chalk; Bonner's father, Marion Charles Bonner, was a paleontologist whose family's finds are in museums across the country. The gallery hands out maps for the nine miles of county road east to Monument Rocks, on private ranch land; the roads turn to mud after rain.
Farther south, K-95 drops off the plains into the canyon of Historic Lake Scott State Park, passes the lake and climbs back out to US-83.
Scott City was founded in 1885 on land two Chicago women had claimed the October before; one, Mrs. M. E. De Geer, started the Western Times that March. The drive is about 47 miles, an hour without the gravel. US-83 goes on 36 miles to Garden City, where US-50 follows the Santa Fe Trail.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
3 stops along the route, in driving order from Oakley, Kansas to Scott City, Kansas. 2 of them sit off the road itself — the distance is noted on each.
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That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let US-83: The Chalk Badlands, Oakley to Scott City do what it does best.
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