The road is there, it will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.

~Chris Humphrey

Two days before departing on our journey, we finally made plans to head toward Colorado. Why not, right? We had been there last year about the same time and it was beautiful, but this time we would try southern Colorado, a new area for us. But, from my mom’s place in the Virginia mountains, roads to Colorado cross the vast plains. Crossing the Midwest means long days of driving and searching for isolated campsites in areas other than national forests (for the most part). Once again, Melissa did some excellent online searching and came up with a couple of destinations for us for the first leg of the trip.

Our first day ended in Hoosier National Forest in Indiana at Buzzard Roost Recreation Area. Our first free camping site was an actual Forest Service campground with five campsites on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River. The site was named for the large numbers of buzzards (Turkey Vultures) that once roosted here when there was an operating meat smokehouse nearby in the late 1800’s. It was a quiet little campground and a short walk to the overlook provided us with a beautiful scene to start the first full day of our journey.

As we had learned on our last trip, Kansas offers free camping at most of its State Fishing Lakes (SFL), so Melissa charted a course to Chase SFL in eastern Kansas.

We pulled in late in the day and found a secluded site at the far end of this small lake. Rolling grasslands surround the lake for miles, reminding us a little of the Sandhills of Nebraska from our last trip.

Great Blue Herons, some ducks, a Great Horned Owl, and Coyotes accompanied an incredible moonrise that evening. A Bald Eagle flew across the lake the next morning at sunrise before we loaded up and headed across the flat lands of Kansas once again.

On our last trip, we fell in love with the patches of remnant prairie we visited in Nebraska, so this time we wanted to include more of that unique habitat. We made a side trip to the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in the Flint Hills of Kansas. It is a joint project of The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service. We hiked one of the trails out to see their herd of Bison. The views are expansive, with rolling hills of grasses (though not as “tall” as I had expected) and abundant evidence of wildflowers that had bloomed earlier in the season, plus the greatest number of meadowlarks in one place I have ever seen. It is no wonder the Western Meadowlark is their state bird.

After a morning on the prairie, we headed to a couple of other public lands, Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area and Quivira National Wildlife Refuge. We were sort of in between peak times for migrating shorebirds and Sandhill Cranes for these two areas but we saw a lot of gulls, waders, and shorebirds nonetheless (especial American Avocets, one of my favorite shorebirds). We first stopped at the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, a great starting point for a birding exploration of the region. I definitely would like a return visit in the future (Whooping Cranes are also regular visitors during migration).

Driving through parts of Kansas involves incredibly straight stretches of highway through some of the flattest landscapes you will ever encounter, so it was quite a surprise to suddenly come upon a series of deep canyons as we approached our next campsite at Clark SFL.

Once again, the campsites were beautiful and there was only one other camper on the lake. We settled on an isolated site that ironically had a vulture roost adjacent to our site (is that a bad sign?).

The next morning we drove the rough road up out of the canyon and headed out across the flat plains dotted with wind turbines and hay rolls. We eventually hit a landscape more suitable to raising crops, and drove for miles seeing almost no wildlife other than meadowlarks.

Then we hit a stretch of recently harvested cornfield with a large group of raptors soaring overhead. We pulled over and started glassing the birds to try to identify them. It turned out to be a huge group of migrating Swainson’s Hawks. This species tends to migrate in groups (called kettles) and are particularly common in October over the plains where they often can be seen doing just what this group was doing – feasting on insects and small rodents found in crop fields. The strong northerly winds blowing across the open landscape of this region undoubtedly help these birds in their long migration to their wintering sites in the vast grasslands of Argentina.

We detoured a bit to visit Cimarron National Grasslands in southwestern Kansas, the largest tract of public lands in the state, and the only one in Kansas administered by the U.S. Forest Service. Let’s just say it was an interesting side trip. The bulk of the grasslands seemed to be dry and overgrazed, but did have some nice camping spots along the Cimarron River. One particularly interesting spot was what we decided was the Kansas equivalent of NC’s Pilot Mountain, a high point in the seemingly endless landscape of sage and grasslands. It had the unimaginative name of Point of Rocks, and, though it appeared as only a slight rise on the horizon as we approached, is the third highest point in the state at 3,540 feet.

It was an important landmark along the famed Santa Fe Trail, an 800-mile wagon route that was an important trade link between Mexico and the eastern U.S. from 1821-1880. This “high point”, along the Cimarron River (note the greenery along the river corridor compared to the distant dry grasslands) was a critical stopping point due to the nearby water source for thousands of wagons that made this six to ten week journey across this seemingly endless and dry terrain. The wagon ruts from those trading caravans can still be seen in many places along the trail.

This leg of driving in southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado was the most barren of our trip. At one point, we took a county road (dirt and gravel) where the speed limit was 55 mph and we drove that straight as an arrow for over an hour (passing only one other vehicle) across dry, flat fields and the occasional farmstead every 10 or so miles. I can’t imagine eking a living in such a place, but there are some hardy souls that seem to manage it. Our next campsite would be in the mountains of Colorado!