| A foggy start to the morning. |
 |
| There were lots of little oil wells in the fields along the highways. |
 |
| First stop of the day was the Gloss Mountain State Park. |
 |
| It is a rather small park. |
 |
 Off we go on the trail to Cathedral Mountain. |
|
| There's a little bit of an uphill climb to start. |
 |
 So basically it's just a small mesa in the middle of a prairie. This is the view to the west. |
|
 And to the east. |
|
| I was the only one there at that hour of morning. |
 |
| Drove past a lot of grain elevators on my travels. |
 |
| Beautiful downtown Cherokee, Oklahoma. |
 |
| Ingersoll was presented on the Oklahoma tourism website as a ghost town. All I found was this, the Ingersoll Tile Elevator, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. |
 |
| On the road again. |
 |
| Kansas welcomes you. |
 |
| The long and (non) winding road. |
 |
 This is the Big Basin, a geological feature about a mile in diameter and more than a hundred feet deep. Although it has the appearance of a valley, it is entirely surrounded by higher ground. It was formed thousands of years ago by the dissolving and collapse of massive gypsum and salt formations lying several hundred feet below the surface. I only stopped here because I needed a pee and it was fairly private, but it was rather windy so I did not. |
|
| In Meade, Kansas is the Dalton Gang Hideout. |
 |
| There is small independent museum there. Like others, there was just a lot of old stuff in a room. |
 |
| In the mid-1880's, Eva Dalton, sister of the Dalton Gang, moved to Meade, married J.N. Whipple (what a great name!) and they built this house. |
 |
| Yeah, old dolls are just creepy. |
 |
| Kitchen furnishings. |
 |
| So years after the Whipples left town,
a tunnel was discovered that went from the house to the barn on the
hillside below. which is where the museum is now. It is believed
that the tunnel was used by the Dalton Gang to come and go
undetected. This is not how the tunnel looked back then. It was reinforced with stone. |
 |
| There was a stretch of road where there were hundreds of windmills in sight. |
 |
| Yeah, here's another grain elevator but hey, it's Kansas. |
 |