Big Well Museum & Visitor Information Center

Parks & scenic

Thirty-six miles of deep loess-soil ravines and gullies slice into the far-northwest corner of Kansas like a miniature badlands -- a landscape so unlike the surrounding wheat plains that early surveyors assumed a mapping error, best seen from a gravel ridge road that Nebraska's border straddles.

Roadside Americana

A 16-story, 11-million-pound electric shovel -- the second-largest of its kind ever built -- sits abandoned in a former strip-mine pit because it was too enormous and too expensive to scrap when the coal ran out, so the crew just walked away and left it standing.

Landmark

Built on the actual original Boot Hill Cemetery -- where Dodge City buried the gunfighters who lost -- the museum's reconstructed Front Street lets you walk the same ground where Wyatt Earp kept the peace between buffalo hunters, cowboys, and the Santa Fe Trail's rowdiest cattle-town commerce.

Attraction

Twenty-eight themed gardens -- including a butterfly house and a carousel rescued from the shuttered Joyland Amusement Park -- pack 17.6 acres a few blocks from Old Cowtown and the Keeper of the Plains. It's the softer, slower-paced stop that gives a road-tripping family a place to let the kids run while the adults actually smell the roses (350-plus of them).

Landmark

Monroe Elementary was almost lost to a scrap-metal auction in the early 1990s before the Brown Foundation saved it -- now you can walk the same segregated-era classrooms that anchored the 1954 Supreme Court case that ended 'separate but equal' nationwide, told through the words of the Topeka families who sued.

Parks & scenic

A 70-foot chalk pillar rising alone out of eroded badlands, 11 miles of dirt road south of I-70 -- the kind of formation that looks trucked in from Utah until you remember you're still in Kansas, on land a rancher still lets strangers walk across on the honor system.