Category: Our travel

I have been donating to the Nature Conservancy for more than twenty-five years. The donor relations manager was nice enough to invite me for coffee and ask if there was anything she could do for me.  There was.  I wanted to visit the Conservancy’s tall-grass prairie.  Actually, anybody can visit the unit, but her call meant that I got a special welcome and tour.

The unit is in Osage County.  The land was never plowed.  This was not due to any particular foresight but rather because the rocks are very close to the surface, making plowing difficult.  It was a working cattle ranch, however.  The people at the unit told said that the cattle ranch owners had been good stewards of the land.

I will let you read details of the tall-grass prairie at this link.

Today the cattle are gone, replaced by bison, as you can see in some of the pictures. The land is managed for tall-grass prairie, which requires fire and grazing.  The tall-grass prairie is a particular ecosystem.  As the name implies, it is dominated by tall grass, big bluestem.  Bluestem grows 6-9 feet tall, with roots about that deep too.   This means that it can withstand drought and burning.  It REQUIRES burning.  Tall-grass prairies are located in regions with enough rain to support forests.  W/o burning, the trees would take over.  As you can see in my pictures, the system has both trees, mostly oak, and grass. They coexist in dynamic tension.

W/o grazing, the prairies would be much less diverse and robust.  Big grazing animals, bison in the old days and cattle etc now,  fertilize the soils, spread seeds and help push them into the ground.  Bison also provide little wallows where water accumulates.   The bison also support the unit. Each year they cull about 700 animals from the herd so that they do not exceed carrying capacity.  The culled bison are auctioned off.  The round up the bison every fall, to give them vaccinations, check them out and cull some. Above shows the pens where this is done.

TNC has done a great job of restoration.  They are also doing ongoing research in cooperation with Oklahoma State University and others.  One of the best things about TNC is its cooperative nature. They partner.  In this case, local ranchers are seeing the benefits of some of the land management techniques and working with TNC to expand the area of sustainability.

The original ranch has an interesting history.  We saw a painting of cowboy actor Ben Johnson.  He played along side John Wayne in many movies, including one of my favorites, “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”  He was a real cowboy and he worked on the ranch here.  His father was a ranch foreman.

I have a few pictures and places that I thought were interesting but did not have a whole post.  Above is the world’s largest easel in Goodland, Kansas.  Besides the easel, Goodland claims the first U.S. Helicopter.  It didn’t fly.

Wyoming is a state with lots of contrasts.  You saw the mountains. This is between the ranges, as very dry place.  Good for geologists and fossil hunters. Below shows some cabins.  Why you want a cabin against that rock is beyond me, but some do.

Below more arid Wyoming on the road from Riverton.

This is the University of Colorado.  It is in Boulder, a truly pleasant place, at least in the summer.

Finally, below is a really big cottonwood at University of Colorado.  Cottonwoods are great trees.  They are less popular than they should be because they grow very fast & very big, with greedy roots.  They also give off a cottony seed, hence the name, that tends to be messy.   But the big complaint is that they don’t live very long.  This is true but not usually relevant.  A cottonwood will live 75-100 years.  This is not very long for a tree, but long enough for most human needs.  Few trees in a human environment ever get at chance to live longer, since somebody moves a road or builds a house and cuts them down.   A tree that could live 500 years is no better than one that could live only 100 years if both are cut down before they are 50.

Our parents and grandparents used to tell us how easy we have it today and they were right. Life was much harder in times past. I was reminded on my drive through Kansas and a visit to the Prairie Museum of Art & History in Colby.

Look at the house above. This is a house made of sod, i.e. blocks of dirt. It is not much bigger than the can I lived in when I was in Iraq, but my accommodation was more comfortable. Beyond that, the little dirt house on the prairie probably housed a family of five or ten.

Today we complain when schools don’t have the fastest computers. People in Kansas had those one-room schools. Yet they taught kids to read and write, using simple readers. They were McGuffey readers, that taught grammar, spelling and good behavior.

So let’s get this straight. We have people living in dirt houses, working all the time, periodically facing real hunger and often physical dangers still managed to build little schools and teach their kids to read, write and count and generally did a good job.  They built a great society and did their duties to God, man & country. Maybe we have it too easy today.

The Kansas plains are pretty … plain. Recall that there was no TV, Internet or even radio. I suppose there was time to read. When you look at the physical surroundings, the little dirt home surrounded by a sea of grass, you wonder how these people kept their sanity. One reason was that they kept the faith. The picture of Chrissy up top wearing a bonnet shows an example. She looks very beautiful so I figured it was better to put in this picture than just the church.

I am not one to glorify the past. My study of history convinces me that I would never choose to live in any period of history before our own. Everybody in the past was poor and life was hard. And they suffered the worst hard times with the dust bowl, an ecological disaster never seen before or after in the U.S.
We should recall their struggles and put our own in the context. What they did with so much less, we should be able to do with so much more. And maybe quit complaining as much.

IMO, one reason for our discontent is that we have too much, too many choices. Life does not present enough real challenges, so we make up others. We worry about sugar, gluten, fat etc. Our ailments are those of prosperity, things like obesity & adult onset diabetes. Even many of our neuroses show our riches. Nobody in that dirt house has a hording problem, for example.

I am making my pilgrimage across the U.S. to get to know my country again and put things in perspective. This is helpful.

Most of my pictures are self explanatory, but not all.  The one that may not be is the uniforms.  Museums has uniforms contributed by local citizens who served their country from World War I to now. They have tags with the owners name and some bio details.  The windmills are taken through the windshield (explains the blobs).  Wind is a big industry out in the plains and getting bigger all the time.  We passed lots of wind farms and saw lots of trucks carrying the windmill parts.  On the flatbed trucks they look like giant tusks or dinosaur bones.  The trees in the picture are planted at the Prairie Museum.  In the front is a saw tooth oak. The trees grow well once established on the plains, but are not natural and don’t grow as tall.  The bottom picture is the museum’s earth berm.  It is sheltered by the earth, maybe a modern adaption of the sod house.  The grass is short buffalo grass.

This is one of the most beautiful parks.  We didn’t come at the very best time of day, since I had to take pictures into the sunlight induced haze.  Morning with the sun at my back would have been better.  But still very nice.

There are two important things to keep in mind about the pictures.  First is that they do not do justice to the beauty and they of course cannot convey the sounds or the feelings in the air.  The second thing is more positive.  When taking the pictures, you are usually standing among a gaggle of other tourists.  The pictures give an impression of lonely serenity that probably no longer can be had.

The geysers are amazing.  There are lots of places on earth with hot springs. Geysers are rarer.  Yellowstone has more geysers than the rest of the world combined.  Yellowstone lays on an enormous volcano.  When it erupted, it was one of the largest ever.  It left a big hole with the magma still close to the surface. Below is Old Faithful.  It erupts regularly, every 30-90 minutes.

Yellowstone is very big and you can indeed find quiet spots away from the iconic sites.  The picture below is the Yellowstone River.

I had a lot of experience with national parks when I was a kid, but all my experience was through old View Master, those 3D viewers.  Through them I went to Yellowstone many times.  It was nice to see it in person. I felt I knew the place that i was seeing for the first time.

One things that the View Master didn’t convey was the closeness of the wildlife.  The bison wandered onto the road and stopped traffic.  You were not supposed to approach wildlife, but the wildlife did not follow the same rules.

We saw lots of bison, no bears or elk and a few mule deer.  I understand the bears are out in June & July but retreat into the back country after that.  It is probably better to avoid the bears anyway.

On the way to Yellowstone, we went through the Big Horn National Forest. The mountains are interesting because of the great variety of biomes, among other reasons.  One side of a mountain might be arid and sparse while the other side is verdant and forest covered.

They found a sinkhole full of bison bones when they were building I-90 in Wyoming. They called in the archeologists and learned it was a “buffalo jump” where from around 1500 – 1800 native hunters drove buffalo off a cliff so that they could easily slaughter them. So they moved the highway a little and established a historical study archeologists from the University of Wyoming have been studying ever since.

Before the Spanish introduced the horse into North America, life on the plains was hard. There is a lot of distance to cover on foot. The natives hunted bison, but could not hope to run them down. They could stampede them over a cliff, hence the buffalo jump. They stopped using the jumps around 1800 because that is the time when plains Indians started to really use horses. They could now hunt bison from horseback. Horses transformed life on the plains in many ways.

The tribes that learned to use horses had a big military advantage over those that did not and the horse people used their new mobility to carry out aggressive war against their neighbors – think the Huns or the Mongols. The societies Euro-Americans found when they came to the plains were completely different from what they would have found a couple centuries earlier and very new. I always think it is funny when we get maps of the “original” locations of tribes.

But when we think of Indian wars, we usually are not referring to the natives fighting each other, although that was constant. We are thinking of the cavalry, the cowboys & Indians. I-90 follows the old Bozeman trail where a lot of the action in the plains wars happened. Near the highway, for example, is the location of Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman massacre. Fort Phil Kearny was built to protect wagon trains on the Bozeman trail.

The native Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho were unenthusiastic about the trail through their lands and the fort that protected it. They harassed the fort and on December 21, 1866 lured William J. Fetterman and 80 of his men into a trap. He thought he was chasing a few raiders and ran into more than 1000 warriors. It was the worst defeat of U.S. Army by native forces until the Custer massacre ten years later.

It seems like it would be hard to hide on the plains, but when I was walking around  the Fetterman site, I noticed how things are just hard to see in the folds & contours. It is also hard to estimate distance.  In other words, I can understand how those cavalry guys got tricked.  Most were young men (the average age was 23). Some were Civil War veterans, but fighting conditions were really different in that war and in the East.

We were extremely lucky with the weather. There were big storms all around us, but we only saw it in the distance. It was an interesting picture, as you see above.