A Yellow Rock Garden

 The Indian called it "The Sacred Place". For centuries they came here to dance their Sundance ceremony.  They treated this as God's special place. Not unlike the Garden of the Gods, the Yellowstone Valley, the Black Hills, and every other significant topographical location of the west. But here, in the middle of only rolling prairie, was a window into time.  Surviving chalk cliffs of the Jurassic Age. Full of shells and sea creatures bones.

We saw it yesterday on an auto tour in TOAD with Bob & Zaida, our next door neighbors at Scott Lake State Park.

Hey Ma.  What's that little red thing over there?

And we saw a few other things as we drove around several counties of West Central Kansas trying to find out way OUT of the Sacred Place.

He moved over

Oil rigs and cattle.  And corn.

 The dust was thick on the roads though a couple of them had recently been washed out.

Turn around time!



A visit to the wonderful museum and personal collection of the Keystone Gallery just west of Monument Rocks

And a very dusty car stopped for lunch at the Oakley Truck Stop north of the Rocks at I-70.





The Oakley Fisk Museum and library AND the Buffalo Bill Heritage Center honors Buffalo Bill, who won his sobriquet right here when he was hunting for the Kansas Pacific Railroad and Bill Comstock, who was a hunter for the army at Fort Wallace and Custer's chief scout. They were challenged to a buffalo hunt duel which began when they turned up a herd near the Monument Rocks and chased it, each in his own way, throughout the day and 20 miles or more to a place west of Oakley.  Comstock had shot over 40 and Cody over 60.  Buffalo Bill said to his dying day that he did not ever kill buffalo for anything but meat for the railroad. But his fame in this duel didn't help the fate of America's once thundering herds.

We could not resist

Here either

But the most beautiful thing we saw all day were these gorgeous 300 to 400 acres of Sunflowers

Mona said, "here's a place Jim would LOVE to set up his tripod!"

-Ken