Flint Hills: America's Last Tallgrass Prairie

The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas are the largest remaining intact tallgrass prairie ecosystem on earth — 4 million acres of bluestem and Indian grass covering the ancient limestone bedrock that defeated 19th-century plows. The prairie was never broken because the chert (flint) in the limestone layers destroyed farming equipment; that accident of geology preserved the grassland that once covered 170 million acres of North America. Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County protects 10,894 acres of the most intact section, with 40 miles of hiking trail through the undulating grassland above the Cottonwood River valley. Konza Prairie Biological Station south of Manhattan, Kansas, is a 8,616-acre research prairie maintained by Kansas State University with public hiking on three loop trails through the same grass species that blanketed the continent before European settlement.