Seventy-foot chalk spires from an inland sea
Eighty million years ago this was the floor of the Western Interior Seaway, the arm of ocean that ran from the Gulf up through Canada and cut North America in two. What settled out of it was carbonate, mostly the shells of things too small to see, and what is left of that seabed now stands up out of the shortgrass in Gove County as chalk towers reaching seventy feet.
They are called Monument Rocks, or the Chalk Pyramids, and they are worth the drive for one reason above the others: there is nothing else on the horizon. The Smoky Hill River cut the bed apart and wind and rain have been finishing the job ever since, leaving buttes, spires and at least one clean arch standing alone in open prairie. In 1968 the Department of the Interior made this the first National Natural Landmark chosen in Kansas.
Read the access rules before you go, because they are unusual and they are the whole reason this place is still open. The rocks stand on PRIVATE LAND. The landowners allow visitors and ask for no permission in advance, which is a courtesy rather than a right, and the Kansas Sampler Foundation sets out what that courtesy costs you: no climbing, no fossil hunting, no camping, no littering, no bonfires, and do not honk at the cattle. Take only pictures.
The no-fossil-hunting rule is not decoration. The Smoky Hill Chalk these beds belong to is one of the great Late Cretaceous marine fossil records anywhere, and the temptation to pocket something is real. Look at the rock face instead. What you are reading in those bands is time, laid down grain by grain on a seafloor, under water that was warm and full of animals with no legs.
Getting there is dry-weather roads only, off US 83 south of Oakley. They are impassable when wet, and that is not a suggestion either. Go in the last hour of light. The chalk turns the colour of the sun and the shadows make the shapes.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
