Are you looking for a little solitude, a little alone time, or just some time to sit back and think? The Gypsum Hills in South Central Kansas is a great place for that. You can drive for hours and hours and never see another soul or another car. Your scenic views will include beautiful bluffs, ridges, and valleys.
The best place to find that solitude you’re looking for is on the largest chunk of public land in Kansas, Cimarron National Grassland. The expansive 108,000 acres of the Grassland gives visitors choices of activities such as camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, or just watching the wildlife. Freight wagons used the area of Middle Spring to camp from 1821 to 1880, and if you look for them, you can see the ruts in the Grassland from the old wagons. They also used Point of Rocks as a lookout.
The drought of the 1930s, otherwise known as the “Dust Bowl,” wasn’t very kind to the area, and it was destroyed. Trying to help, the government began buying up the land in order to restore it. First named Land Utilization Projects, they were later changed as a whole to Cimarron National Grassland. Today the land is used for water conservation, livestock grazing, and recreation, among other things.
One thing you might want to do is take an auto tour through the Grassland. This self-guided fifty mile tour takes about three hours to complete, including eleven stops and six points of interest. You will get the chance to stop and observe wildlife, use a picnic area, see oil production, sand dunes, and a prairie dog town.
The type of camping you will do at the Grassland depends on what type of “roughing it” you would like to do. You can either set up camp on an established site or do primitive disbursed camping. If you are camping on an established site, there is a nightly fee of $7.00, and you can only have charcoal fires and use gas camp stoves, as open campfires are not allowed in this area. Primitive disbursed camping is allowed anywhere on the Grassland, except in the Cimmaron Recreation Area, the picnic grounds, and the Point of Rocks. No fee is charged for this, but your stay is limited to just fourteen days.
When fishing in the Grassland, the three separate ponds are open throughout the year, with trout being stocked in them in the winter months, and channel catfish being stocked in the summer months. Public hunting can be done here, with the animals ranging from big game, such as white-tailed deer, pheasant, and coyotes to smaller game like rabbit, mourning doves and prairie dogs. A hunting license is required, and those hunting that are born after 1957, have to have completed a hunting education course.
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