Monument Rocks National Landmark
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 .
Thanks to my friend D. Parkinson for this description!
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