The Keeper of the Plains

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.

Roadside Americana

Hand-dug entirely with picks and shovels in 1887 to water Santa Fe Railroad steam engines, this 109-foot-deep, 32-foot-wide well is the world's largest of its kind -- and after an EF5 tornado leveled 95% of Greensburg in 2007, the town rebuilt around it as a green-energy showpiece, with the well and its museum still the anchor of downtown.

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.