The upcoming official opening of the new visitor center at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve reminds me of the first time I visited the preserve. I still recall back to 1997 driving to a new national park in the Kansas Flint Hills called the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, wondering what the heck it was and what I would find there. As I approached the nearby sleepy town of Cottonwood Falls I was greeted by this sign voicing opposition to the formation of the preserve. I didn’t have a clue what the controversy was about when I first saw it. A new national park seemed like a good idea to me. While I didn’t know it at the time, less than four percent of the original 140 million acres of tallgrass prairie remains in North America. Most of that remaining tallgrass prairie is in the Flint Hills in Kansas.
Initially, the Flint Hills communities surrounding the proposed park were supportive, but then opposition developed. According to National Park Service document “Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve Legislative History, 1920-1996” most local business owners were supportive but many ranchers had overall concerns about federal involvement and federal land ownership with some ranchers specifically concerned about land being lost by eminent domain. The park proposal became a divisive and heated issue between the two community groups.
In the end, an unique compromise was reached with a public/private partnership between the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy. Today, the 10,894-acre Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is the only unit of the National Park Service dedicated to the preservation of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem.
A lot has changed since 1997 when I photographed that sign. Now Flint Hills ranchers work with The Nature Conservancy to implement pro-conservation policies like patch burning to protect prairie chickens and other native species. Ranchers have developed agritourism opportunities for tourists to visit their ranches. Local restaurants, lodging and retail establishments have obviously benefited with the increased numbers of tourists.
According to a National Park Service press release, 22,047 visitors in 2010 fueled $1,048,000 in spending at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve and in communities near the park. “Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is clean, green fuel for the engine that drives our local economy,” said Park superintendent Wendy Lauritzen.
For me, driving past that sign was the start of a life long fascination and love for the tallgrass prairie and the Flint Hills. It was also a new start for the communities near the park.
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My October visit to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in the Flint Hills of Kansas did not disappoint. The prairie was ablaze in the colors of fall and some of the early dawn skies were spectacular displays of clouds and sky that appeared to be on fire; reminiscent of the flames of the nighttime prescribed burning of the prairie I witnessed in April.
These pre-sunrise displays of color are often referred to by photographers as the golden or magic hour. It’s really not an hour per say and the golden hour also refers to the evening sky just after the sun has set. The moment of optimum color can be a fleeting few seconds or it can last for hours. The key is that if the sun is visible on the horizon in the morning, chances are you have missed the best display and if the sun is still on the horizon in the evening, the best is yet to come. The early dawn photos of the Lower Fox Creek School at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve are a prime example.
Anyone who studies the photos of National Geographic photographers will see that many of their outdoor photographs are taken in the very early morning hours and in the fading light of the early evening. National Geographic photographers know this and plan their day accordingly, shooting interiors, traveling, etc. during midday.
Spectacular pre-dawn photos come at a price — sleep. If you’re not hiking to your location in the dark (and by dark, I mean having to use headlamps), chances are you’re going to miss the magic light. If the sun is already above the horizon, you might as well go back to bed. On countless mornings I have had to force myself out of the warmth and comfort of my sleeping bag to head out in the darkness and on countless evenings have had to return to camp to make dinner in the dark. On a few occasions when I was car camping I would have to move the entrance barrier to the campground to exit in those early hours. Neighboring campers would wonder if I even existed as I was never seen.
A lot of photography is about luck, and by luck I don’t mean just being lucky. You need to make your luck. Research is probably the most important secret to a good photograph. Knowing when, where, and why will always increase your luck. It’s like buying a thousand lottery tickets instead of just one. To help make my luck I use several iPhone and computer apps that will show me precisely where and when the sun and moon will rise and set, their position through the day for shadows, where the Milky Way will be, and what approaching cloud cover (or lack of) will be. I’ll even use 3D mapping programs with satellite imaging to give me a feel for what I might see.
If you look at the photos in the slideshow, you’ll notice that many of the images might seem redundant. As a stock image photographer, I need to keep the needs of a designer in mind. For example, there are multiple images of the Lower Fox Creek School silhouetted in the pre-dawn light. No, it’s not a case of I can’t make up my mind which photo I like better, but rather there are multiple images to give designers choices. Would a page design work better with the school on the left, or the right? In addition, I’ve left plenty of space for story or cover text. I’ve also included vertical and horizontal options. These examples of shooting with possible design usage in mind are all things that I looked for when I was a magazine art director/designer and bought usage licenses. Here again, I’m making luck that hopefully will result in a licensing sale.
The tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills takes on a whole new personality in the fall. Grasses and wildflowers turn brown and red after the first chill of fall and the incessant frantic calling of dickcissels are replaced with the quieter chirps of crickets. It’s like the prairie knows that it is time to rest. The tallgrass prairie simply feels calm and quiet, just like the drowsiness a person feels just before falling to sleep. I’m looking forward to traveling back to the Flint Hills in the weeks ahead to walk the sleeping prairie as it is blanketed in snow.
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I knew I wasn’t in Missouri anymore when I looked down at the feet of the two other men I was in line with me at the Pizza Hut in Council Grove, Kansas. Sure, all three of us had boots on. I had on what I thought until that moment were pretty manly backpacking boots. The other two gentlemen had me beat; dangling off their cowboy boots were spurs. Welcome to the world of real cowboys and cattle ranchers of the Flint Hills tallgrass prairie.
I returned to the Flint Hills region in June to see how the tallgrass prairie was regenerating itself. What was two months ago blackened scorched earth was now an ocean of prairie grasses swaying in the steady wind. Describing the prairie as ocean-like is probably an overused metaphor, but it is accurate. The never ending waves of blowing grass, reminds me of the ocean when sea kayaking in Alaska and Hawaii – an ocean that is always moving, never ending, as far as the eye can see.
The timing of my trip in early June was picked for what I believed would be maximum wildflower opportunities and to beat the hot weather of summer. Unfortunately, I was only right on one those points. On the day I arrived in the Flint Hills it was 104 degrees F. and would stay above 100 for most of the week I was there. It was a cooker. To keep expenses down I car camped at Council Grove Lake, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoir on the Neosho River. Camping at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is prohibited, though the preserve is open 24 hours (which, as you shall see, was important).
After only a quarter of a mile of hiking the next morning at the preserve that it was painfully clear that I was going to have to re-think my plans. The heat was just unbearable. Plans for carrying extra equipment to do HD video – scrapped. It’s enough that I carry 30-35 pounds worth of still camera equipment; there was no way I could carry more in the oppressive heat. Oh, and for those who haven’t ridden in my 1991 Honda Civic — I haven’t had working car air conditioning for 15 years.
When faced with an obstacle, I look for an opportunity. In this case, I decided if it was too hot during the day to shoot, how about shooting at night. That got me thinking about all kinds of possibilities — sunsets, twilight, and eventually star-filled skies. My days quickly became a split shift. I’d be up a little before sunrise to mine sunrise opportunities along the The Flint Hills National Scenic Byway (K-177). Head back for a nap and a swim at the lake, hike out on the prairie for several miles around sundown, then returning well after sunset. For part of the trip the moon didn’t set until after 2 a.m. This meant getting up again, every so quietly unlatching the giant squeaky swing gate of the now closed and sound asleep campground and driving the 25 miles or so to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve for shooting the Lower Fox Creek School under the stars.
Some nights afforded views of the stars, others not. There is relatively little light pollution from nearby cities (the only light coming from Emporia 25 miles away), making it possible to see deep into space and peer at the Milky Way. I found the starlight attempts tricky. The main trick is to get your exposure long enough to record as many of the starts without getting the movement. It’s a delicate balance between adjusting your shutter time and the ISO with your lens wide open.
The nights on the prairie were thankfully cool. On one late night/early morning, I swear every coyote in Chase County, must have been howling. What a hair-raising treat! I could just picture the coyotes and other nighttime critters wondering what this crazy person was doing out so late at night.
This was my routine for several days. Towards the end of my trip, the temperature forecast looked like it was going to be more reasonable so I decided to hike the relatively new Bottomland Trail and Fox Creek Trail (approximately 7 miles round trip) that traverses the lowland prairie along Fox Creek. One of my goals for the hike was to climb a high hill that would afford (or at least what I had hoped) a view of the historic Spring Creek mansion and it’s massive barn with a vista of the prairie in the background. Unfortunately, trees obscured most of the home, meaning I’ll need to attempt the shot in the early spring before the trees surrounding the home are leafed out.
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This wasn’t the only reason for hiking these trails. The area along Fox Creek encompasses rare lowland prairie — rare because most lowland prairies have been lost to farming. The National Park Service is in the process of restoring this lowland from crops and cool season grasses planted by farmers as hay to true (warm season) prairie grasses. The restoration will be a process could take decades — a process that will involve invasive plant removal, burning, and reseeding.
I look forward to the day when it’s fully restored. It’s hard to believe that less than four percent of the original 140 million acres of tallgrass prairie remains in North America. Most of the remaining tallgrass prairie is in the Flint Hills in Kansas.
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The tallgrass prairies of the American midwest are one of America’s classic landscapes — big skies and panoramas of never-ending seas of wave-like grass. Tallgrass prairies are also one of America’s endangered ecosystems. Before being plowed under for agriculture, tallgrass prairie once covered more than 140 million acres of the United States. Less than four percent of tallgrass prairie remains, most of it in the Flint Hills region of Kansas.
One of the places in the Flint Hills where the prairie is being protected is at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve — an innovative public/private partnership with the National Park Service (primary land manager) and The Nature Conservancy (primary land owner). The preserve’s mission is to protect the natural and cultural history of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem — one of the most complicated and diverse ecosystems in the world.
The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve is located within close proximity of the Kansas towns of Strong City, Cottonwood Falls, Council Grove, and Emporia and is located on the Flint Hills Scenic Byway – Kansas State Highway 177.
More than 500 species of plants, nearly 150 species of birds, 39 species of reptiles and amphibians and 31 species of mammals make their home in the preserve. In October of 2009, 13 genetically pure bison from Wind Cave National Park in South Dakota were introduced to the preserve. On Mother’s Day 2010 a calf was born and became the first bison born on the property since at least the mid-1800s when the property was fenced for cattle ranching. The preserve plans to add more bison form Wind Cave with a final herd size between 75 and 100 bison. America’s bison once numbered 60 million but were by the end of the 19th century, little more than 1,000 survived. Today the total number of bison in North America is 450,000 including those raised for food.
Most of the remaining tallgrass prairie is located in the Flint Hills because 200-300 million years ago the land was once a shallow sea whose sea floor that eventually turned into limestone and chert (also known as flint). This rock-laden layer of shallow soil was not suitable for plowing. Instead, the land was used and continues to be used to cattle ranching. I found particularly interesting that the cattle in the Flint Hills are referred to as “tourists.” Most of the cattle are shipped to the Flint Hills in the Spring to feast on the prairie grasses for the summer where they can gain up to two pounds a day.
Given that my visit was during the heat and humidity of summer, shooting during sunrise and sunset was as much for practical as photographic reasons — make sure you take plenty of water.
You also want to make sure you give bison, plenty of room as they are unpredictable and can be dangerous. They appear to be peaceful, but their demeanor can change instantly. Bison may look like they would be slow, but in reality they can reach speeds of up to 35 miles per hour and have great agility. In earlier times, bison were feared equally as much as a grizzly bears due to their ability to kill or inflict injury. For my visit I gave them plenty of room, shooting primarily with my 600mm lens.
I was lucky enough to find the herd easily on the vast open space of the preserve. It was even luckier that I was able to photograph the previously mentioned bison calf who was easily identified by it’s temporary light-colored fur. The older bison were shedding their much darker chocolate-colored fur. This shed fur is used by birds for nest building.
The Flint Hill prairies along with the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve seem to have been good for the local economy. I first visited the area in the mid-1990s. Back then the Chase County towns of Strong City and Cottonwood Falls seemed pretty sleepy. Today, I sensed a resurgence in these communities. For part of the visit, the five-unit Millstream Resort Motel in Cottonwood Falls served as base (no camping at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve). It was a charming and restful place. Part of the reason that I only stayed there for part of the visit was, because unbeknownst to me, the Kansas City Symphony was performing out on the prairie nearby and rooms were unavailable for much of my stay. “The Symphony in the Flint Hills” sounds like a pretty incredible experience. Every year a different ranch serves as the host for the one-night event. In 2010 Lyle Lovett performed with the symphony to a crowd of approximately 6,000 who hiked in to the prairie performance site — in a county whose population is only 3,000.
The Flint Hills region is beautiful. I often tell people that in my mind it’s comparable with Alaska. I always get the strangest looks when I describe it that way, but when it comes to big sky panoramas they are much the same. I am looking forward to documenting the prairies of the Flint Hills in the years to come.
