Konza Prairie near Manhattan Kansas.
We stopped at Konza on May 14 a year ago on our way back from the West. I had just gotten off the Colorado River, Ed had met up with me at Albuquerque and we had a week for driving home. In Santa Fe we learned that his mother had died, and so the trip took on a different life than we had planned. Things have a funny way of working out that way some times.
Konza is close to the northern end of the Flint hills, those hills immortalized by William Least Heat-Moon in PrairyErth. It was early in the growing season, so we didn't see the great diversity of flowering plants that we might have seen in another month, or two. Instead we saw the views, the bones of the landscape, and migrating birds, and buffalo far off in the distance. Everything in this picture is part of Konza, preserved as a fragment of the heartland before Europeans descended upon it and plowed it up. The Flint Hills defied the plow and so the tenacious and precious prairie survives.
