KSKansas Geography

For sixty-two years the survey grid of an entire continent hung on a brass disk set into a pasture in Osborne County. Meades Ranch Triangulation Station, established in 1891, was chosen as the origin of the North American Datum of 1927, so every property line, coastal chart and topographic map from Panama to Alaska traced back to a spot in north central Kansas. About forty miles northeast sits a second centering claim: the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, marked near Lebanon in Smith County.

The 3,360-foot tilt from Mount Sunflower to the Verdigris

The state reaches 4,039 feet at Mount Sunflower, a swell of shortgrass pasture in Wallace County about half a mile from the Colorado line, marked with a sculpture welded from railroad spikes rather than a summit cairn. The floor is the Verdigris River where it crosses into Oklahoma in Montgomery County, at 679 feet. The 3,360-foot spread is larger than the full vertical range of Ohio and Indiana combined, but it arrives across roughly 400 miles of eastward slope, about eight feet per mile, which is why nobody experiences it as a descent.

That gentleness made Kansas the standing joke about flatness. A 2003 paper in the Annals of Improbable Research took the comparison literally, scanned a pancake, ran a topographic profile of the state against it and concluded that Kansas was technically flatter. Later analyses using digital elevation data put Florida first, with Kansas in the top ten.

Eleven landscapes, from chalk spires to glacial erratics

The Kansas Geological Survey divides the state into eleven physiographic regions, which is a lot for terrain that photographs as one thing. The western third is High Plains, a smooth surface of eroded Rocky Mountain debris. Cut into it in Gove County are the Monument Rocks, Niobrara Chalk spires standing about 70 feet above the plain and among the first sites named a National Natural Landmark in 1968. The same chalk beds produced the mosasaurs and the famous fish-inside-a-fish fossil now at the Sternberg Museum in Hays.

South of the Arkansas River, the Red Hills of Barber and Comanche counties expose Permian red shale and gypsum, riddled with sinkholes; St. Jacob's Well in Clark County is a collapse pond that has never been recorded dry. In the northeast corner, the Glaciated Region carries pink boulders of Sioux quartzite that a pre-Illinoian ice sheet dragged down from the Dakotas and left sitting in Kansas fields. In the far southeast, Cherokee County holds a few dozen square miles of the Ozark Plateau.

The Flint Hills, running north to south through the eastern third, survived because they could not be plowed. Bands of chert nodules in the Permian limestone wrecked steel plowshares, so the sod was never broken, and the belt now carries the large majority of the tallgrass prairie left in North America. Congress protected a piece of it in 1996 as Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, about 10,900 acres, where bison were returned to the range in 2009.

Rivers that run dry and the water beneath them

The Arkansas River enters Kansas from Colorado near Coolidge and then, for long stretches through Hamilton, Kearny and Finney counties, is not a river at all. Upstream diversion and groundwater pumping leave dry sand in the channel through much of the year, with flow reappearing downstream toward Great Bend and Wichita. Kansas took Colorado to the Supreme Court over that water in 1901 in a case that was still producing orders a century later.

The Kansas River, the Kaw, does not exist until Junction City, where the Smoky Hill and the Republican meet; from there it runs 148 miles east to join the Missouri at Kansas City. The Missouri itself forms the short northeastern boundary. Every drop that leaves the state, by either route, ends up in the Mississippi.

Under the western counties sits the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala, which made irrigated corn possible on ground that gets sixteen inches of rain. Parts of southwest Kansas have lost more than half their saturated thickness since center-pivot irrigation spread in the 1950s. On the surface, Cheyenne Bottoms near Great Bend covers about 41,000 acres as the largest marsh in the interior United States, designated a wetland of international importance in 1988 and used by an enormous share of North America's migrating shorebirds. Quivira National Wildlife Refuge nearby holds inland salt marshes fed by brine seeping up from Permian beds.

Four counties that keep Denver's clock

Kansas runs on Central Time except for Greeley, Hamilton, Sherman and Wallace counties along the Colorado line, which observe Mountain Time because their commerce points west. Goodland, the seat of Sherman County, is the largest Kansas town on Mountain Time.

Three of the state's four boundaries were drawn with instruments rather than water. The Nebraska line follows the 40th parallel, the Oklahoma line the 37th parallel, and the Colorado line the meridian 25 degrees west of Washington, at about 102 degrees 03 minutes west. Only the Missouri boundary bends, running due north along a meridian from the 37th parallel until it meets the Missouri River, then following the river's channel to the Nebraska corner.

What the record book says about the weather

The state high is 121 degrees, recorded at Fredonia on July 18, 1936 and matched at Alton six days later. The low is 40 below zero at Lebanon on February 13, 1905, a 161-degree spread. Annual rainfall drops from more than 45 inches near Pittsburg in the southeast to about 16 inches near the Colorado line, because Kansas is where Gulf moisture finally runs out.

The southwest counties were the geographic core of the Dust Bowl, and the storm of April 14, 1935 that gave Black Sunday its name rolled through them. The Udall tornado of May 25, 1955 killed 80 people and remains the deadliest in state history; the Greensburg tornado of May 4, 2007 was rated EF5 and flattened most of the town.

Neighboring states and more Kansas pages