Monday, March 14, 2016

Back Where It All Began

Just a quick post--mostly pictures--of a recent trip that I took home to Kansas. After speaking in Kansas City, I spent a couple of days with my parents and managed to get out with the camera a time or two.  I love sharing the back roads and Kansas has plenty of them to discover!
A sepia tone version of the old grain elevator at Lasita, Kansas. Now a ghost town, Lasita was once an important stop on the LK&W Railroad.

Looking out across the prairie, trees were always an indication that fresh water--a river, creek, stream, or spring, was nearby. Cottonwoods, in particular, were indicators of fresh water.

Watercress (with the round leaves) is an edible green that only grows in the freshest, cleanest water sources. You'll rarely, if ever, find it growing in a sluggish, muddy stream. It is always in the cleanest, clearest streams and springs. Here, it grows with a tiny species of Equisetum, also known as horsetail or scouring rush.

The water in this spring is so clean! Everything in the photograph is underwater, even though it looks like the upper portion of the photo may be the creek bank. I assure you it's not!

There are no trees I love more than these big, old burr oaks that have been standing on the prairie for a century or more (some of them two centuries, easily).

These old back roads are the roads of  my childhood, where we would go fishing, exploring, or just out for a Sunday drive. There were many Sunday afternoons spent on these old roads with my grandfather.


Pillsbury Crossing, near Manhattan, KS, was a flat, shallow, stone ledge in the river where, unless it had just rained, the water ran only 3 or 4 inches deep over the rock. It was a very popular crossing for wagon trains as the settlers expanded westward across the prairie.