The
87 million year old, world-famous Monument Rocks. The first natural
landmark in the nation chosen by the US Department of the Interior as a
National Natural Landmark
http://tinyurl.com/kacqn
, this Stonehenge-like cluster of 70-foot-tall outcroppings of
wind-and-rain-carved, calcium carbonate/shale badlands, spread out over
several acres, juts majestically from the flat, cactus and
yucca-studded buffalo grass prairie, looking like some kind of eerie,
ancient ruins as you approach them from a distance over the dusty back
roads and the green, misty valleys and canyons of the scenic Smoky
Hills. Situated on private land but open to the public, this
breathtaking and fascinating geologic formation is located within view
of the historic Butterfield Trail, the Smoky Hill River, and old Fort
Monument in the timeless heart of the richest ancestral hunting grounds
of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, Sioux, and Apache, where even today
private herds of buffalo roam in the far distance and groups of wild
deer and pronghorn antelope still graze and play close by under azure,
sunny skies. These 'Chalk Pyramids' as we locals call them, were a
spiritual site for the Native Americans as well as the most famous
landmark for early European travelers along the Smoky Hill
Trail/Butterfield Overland Stage route in the years before, during, and
after the Civil War and were first noted by the great "Pathfinder",
John C. Fremont during his famous expedition of discovery in 1844. You
can still find sharks' teeth and fish bones, as well as thousands of
clusters of oyster shells and coral just sticking out of the site's
sheer walls and in its many jagged crevices, and on the ground
surrounding the site, as the towering structures consist entirely of
preserved remnants of bottom sediments from the Cretaceous-era sea that
used to cover this region, a sea which the BBC's documentary 'Chased By
Sea Monsters' called "Hell's Aquarium" because of the most brutal
menagerie of killers ever to grace the oceans of Earth, and which
terrorized the warm, shallow waves that then covered Kansas
http://tinyurl.com/enojb
. It still smells like Chesapeake Bay there after a rain, and deposits
of this era were also the source of George Sternberg's famous 'fish
within a fish' fossil
http://tinyurl.com/gpnn4
, which is on display about an hour-and-a-half to the east of these
rocks at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, Kansas
http://tinyurl.com/g6d5j
, as well as thousands of other fossils which now grace the halls of
great museums the world over. More pteradon fossils, the great flying
reptiles of that era, some having wingspans upwards of twenty feet,
have been found in this Kansas shale than anywhere else on Earth, and
local paleontologist Chuck Bonner is available for day-long fossil
hunts in established fossil beds, which are a real treat
http://tinyurl.com/k639l
.