Flint Hills National Scenic Byway

For thousands of years this was the country of the Kaw, or Kanza, people, for whom the state of Kansas is named, along with the Osage and Pawnee who hunted and traveled the grasslands. The Kaw held land near Council Grove into the 1870s before being removed to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma, where the Kaw Nation continues today. Their long presence on this prairie is remembered in the town's museum and monuments.

When settlers arrived, they found that the tallgrass sat on a thin skin of soil over hard limestone and flint. Across the rest of the tallgrass region, deep rich earth invited the plow and the grassland vanished into cornfields within a generation. Here the rock stopped the plow, and the ranchers who came instead ran cattle on the native grass. That accident of geology is the reason the Flint Hills endured, and why the byway can still show you a landscape almost no one else in the country can.

The town of Council Grove at the north end of the byway was one of the most important stops on the entire Santa Fe Trail. Here, in 1825, U.S. commissioners met with Osage leaders under a great oak to secure safe passage for trade caravans, and the meeting gave the town its name. For decades afterward it was the last real outfitting point before the long haul across the plains to Santa Fe, and wagon trains gathered here to organize before setting out.

Reminders of that era still line the streets. The remnant of the treaty oak, the old Kaw Mission, a stone corral, and other trail landmarks make Council Grove one of the most history-rich small towns in Kansas. It is worth leaving the highway to walk the main street before or after driving the open grassland to the south.

The tallgrass prairie is a fire-shaped landscape. Big bluestem, Indian grass, little bluestem, and switchgrass grow tall through the summer and die back each winter, and left alone they build up thatch and let brush and trees creep in. Fire clears that away and returns nutrients to the soil, and the deep roots of the grasses, which can reach many feet down, survive the flames and green up fast afterward.

Ranchers here continue a version of that ancient cycle, burning the hills in early spring so fresh grass will feed the cattle that summer on the range. If you drive through in late March or April you may see smoke on the horizon or a night sky lit orange along the ridgelines. By early summer the burned ground is a brilliant carpet of new green, and the herds are turned out onto the open prairie.

The prairie is quiet but far from empty. Greater prairie-chickens perform their booming spring dances on open leks, and the grasslands hold meadowlarks, upland sandpipers, dickcissels, and hunting harriers and hawks. White-tailed deer move along the wooded creek bottoms, and the preserve to the south keeps a herd of bison, the animal that once shaped this whole landscape.

Spring brings green-up, wildflowers, and the burns, and it is many people's favorite time to drive the byway. Summer is warm and the grass grows tall and heavy-headed. Fall is perhaps the most beautiful, when the big bluestem turns coppery and the low sun sets the hills glowing. Winter is stark and open, the grass bleached pale gold under wide gray skies, and the emptiness of it has its own kind of beauty.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.