Magnus Goes North With Summer, Day 2

Wednesday May 28

High 75, low 61, no rain. There were stars in the sky last night, but it was overcast again in the morning. Chilly with a little breeze, too.

The trip for the day was to Elk City State Park near Independence Kansas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was a very short drive, only about two hours twenty-five minutes. We dawdled leaving (to accommodate the late check-in time) but still left by 10:30 and arrived around one. The guy at the office made no issue with the early check-in (check-in time was 2pm). And the campground was pretty much empty.

Big sites, lots of pull-thrus. Full hookup in the Comfort Cove loop. The loop over by the lake has prettier sites and more people, but they’re back-in W/E only sites.  And there’s another loop called the Prairie loop, back away from the lake. It might have been FHU but wasn’t nearly as nice as Comfort Cove.  And there was a tent camping loop that only had one person in it.

Comment at the time:

Elk City State Park is a pretty cool place.  But I may change my mind tonight after a few more noisy young adult jerks come into the campground. And park right beside us.

 

 

After settling in and giving Molly a walk, Ed and I went to the Little House on the Prairie homesite and museum. It’s funny how many trees there are now, in a place that she described as…

Kansas was an endless flat land covered with tall grass blowing in the wind. Day after day they traveled in Kansas, and saw nothing but the rippling grass and the enormous sky. In a perfect circle the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle.

But when you look at all the trees growing in the ditch between my middle field and back field—which was completely clear 25 years ago--you can imagine how fast cottonwoods, bois d’arc and box elder can grow in 150 years.  According  to the book Prairie I was just reading, the culprit is fire. Or, I should say, the lack of fire. 150 years of fire suppression can create a forest where one is probably not sustainable, climate-wise. But we shall see—all of these trees survived a number of droughts and seem to be thriving. So maybe it was the fire keeping the prairies clear after all.

 

 

 

The recreated house 

Weird. The one thing I’d like to see—and possibly I could see, but I didn’t put it on the agenda—is a piece of native tallgrass prairie preserved to look much like the ones of the 1870s. The field across from the museum has some pretty tall grass plus a whole lot of wildflowers and milkweed. But I didn’t see any big bluestem—could it be that I just don’t recognize it when it’s not blooming?  I heard tons of Dickcissels on our drive. Cool to finally hear one again, and to hear so many in quick succession.  The last one I heard back home was probably mowed over when the fields got mowed early in the nesting season.

Other than Pa’s well, there’s nothing to be seen of the actual homesite. Except grass and Dickcissels.  They’ve put a restoration of the log cabin there and it’s very well done, all the way down to a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece.  And the corded door latch that Pa built in such careful detail in the book.

 As to why they left, will anyone ever really know?  The reason she gave in the books could have been a plain and simple fabrication resulting from the many years of passed time plus the need to flesh out a well-told story. (Which it is!)  I don’t know whether she deliberately made it up or remembered it incorrectly or just remembered a vague notion told to her by the grownups.

In the book, the reason gave is that the government was sending soldiers to drive all the white settlers out of what was technically the Osage Diminished Reservation. When Pa heard that, he packed up the wagon and left rather than “being driven out like a criminal.”  But I do not believe there is any historical record of soldiers being sent—if he did hear it, it was a lie or a rumor told by someone else.

But the more probable reason is that they weren’t doing so well with their farming and needed to retreat to more civilized country. History doesn’t show that they ever established a formal ownership of the land, and if they’d tried, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. I’ll do some more research on this later and see if I can find a better explanation.

Enough. The trip over there didn’t take more than an hour total, so when we returned Molly and I went for a walk while Ed took a showev and cooked his barbequed chicken.  Molly and I went on the Green Thumb Nature Trail (I think). And wow. Not so much nature—although I did see an unidentified small varmint and Molly nearly lost her cookies over a small herd of deer—but wow, what a trail.  Someone chose a tortuous path up and down the side of the hill, finally reaching the top and then turning around and cutting straight through rocky outcrops to the bottom. 

I’d expected to be doing road walking, so I’d just worn sneakers. And that was a mistake on the downhills. I didn’t fall, but I had to choose my steps wisely for a while. The sneakers tend to be slippery especially on muddy rocks.

The trail with blue blazes

It wasn’t a very long trail, maybe three-quarters of a mile. After that Molly and I walked all around the lakeside campsites and stuff.

And that’s all for the day. Tomorrow it’s on to…somewhere. I don’t know where. But I know we’ll be spending two nights there so Ed can get a rest.

Review Elk City State park site 211 $27

Noisy, but endearing and very large

We were in Comfort Cove at a pull-thru site with FHU.  50-amp electricity, water and sewer worked as expected.

We were there in the very last week of May and on a weekday. It wasn’t crowded at all, in fact, you could even call it empty. And  it was very lovely.  Clean, big sites, wide open roads to walk on or drive.  Gorgeous lake. Lots of birds and big green trees.

But even so, the few campers that were there were noisy enough that I can imagine hating the place on a summer weekend. They weren’t doing loud partying or anything dangerous, but they had lots of loud voices, car motors, boat motors, and an awful lot of dogs off the leash.

The online reservation process was easy, and the price not bad but having to pay an extra 5 dollar per vehicle (RV and toad) didn’t make me happy.  The guy at the office  was very nice and helpful.

We took a couple of trails and did a good bit of walking around. Beautiful place. Absolutely lovely lake and a great place to bring your boat. There was a camping area near the lake, with a boat ramp and trailer parking area. And our camping loop, Comfort Cove, was just past a line of trees and a road from that one. Another loop, Prairie View, looked nice but was farther from the lake and was just in a big field.  But still okay, especially if you were going to be on the lake or out hiking around a lot.