Day 2 - Tuesday, 7/25/2023: Kansas City to Manhattan, KS

Preface for Kansas:

Before I dive into my time in Kansas, I want to give some serious praise to the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS). Any time I plan a collecting trip, I scour the internet for potential sites, and most of the time, there’s not a lot out there. Not so for Kansas. The folks at KGS have done a tremendous job of putting publications regarding the geology of the state online; the amount of information is truly amazing, and frankly, no other state I’ve seen thus far comes close to providing this much detailed and useful data on their website. That said, most of the data I found for Day 2 of the trip came not from the KGS but from various other websites—which probably explains why this was not such a great day.

I also want to give a shout out to Rex C. Buchanan and James R. McCauley for their book Roadside Kansas. I'm a huge fan of Mountain Press's Roadside Geology of . . . series, but there's no volume for Kansas. Instead, I found the second revised edition of Buchanan and McCauley's an invaluable travel companion as I roamed the Sunflower State.

I started the morning early and on a high note: I headed back into Missouri, and the first site I hit in Kansas City paid immediate and plentiful dividends. Based on the sources I’ve found, I’m guessing the tightly coiled, cone-like gastropods are genus Turritella, while the others are most likely genus Worthenia. The site was primarily a gastropod heaven, but I found a decently preserved brachiopod (probably genus Neochonetes) and what I believe to be a small piece of cephalopod (one end of the specimen is concave, while the other is convex, suggesting segmented chambers). Based on Macrostrat, I believe the formation is the Ladore, part of the Kansas City Group, and is of Middle Pennsylvanian age. I was delighted my day had started off so well, but I had a full list of sites ahead of me, so after about 30 minutes of collecting, I hopped back in the truck and headed for the second site.

I crossed back into Kansas and soon arrived at the next locale I had turned up in my research, an exposure of the Plattsburg Limestone of the Lansing Group (upper Pennsylvanian). The roadcut was long, and the lower wall was topped by a slanted bench about six feet above the ground. The “bench” ran uphill for about 15-20 feet at a pretty steep angle before dead ending at another cliff about 25 feet tall. I scouted the cliff wall at ground level first then found a path up to the bench. It was covered in scree, and I had to watch every placement of my boot lest I slide off. It was tough going, but I was rewarded with a few crinoid stems and pelecypods, a good bryozoan specimen and some brachiopod pedicles that would have been truly amazing had they been whole. Not what I had hoped for based on some info I’d found online, but there were a dozen other spots on my list anyway. Surely one of them would bear the same kind of fruit my first stop had provided.

The next few stops were westbound along K-10. Talk about a busy road! For about 10 miles west of Olathe, the traffic was nuts. My first stop was a cut in the Bonner Springs Formation (Kansas City Group again), and while there was a lot of rock, I didn’t find a lot of interesting stuff—just a few brachiopods. I saw several cuts I would have liked to explore, but traffic was so heavy, I couldn’t just pull off the road any old time unless I wanted to cause an accident.

And I didn’t. I did manage to catch site of a promising cut near an offramp and had enough lead time to put on my signal and pull off the road like a careful driver (instead of the insane rockhound I am). Here, I was back in the Plattsburg and found more brachiopods, including avbracheode. Had to chip that little guy out of some pretty dense stone, but the way my morning had gone, I was taking something cool home with me! In all fairness to K-10, I’m sure I missed a lot of opportunities because the shoulders were so overgrown. I’d taken my weedeater, but clearing a cliff face of decent enough size to collect would have drained both batteries in no time. Note to self: hit Kansas in April next time.

Next big stop on the agenda was the Clinton Lake spillway. Southwest of Lawrence, several members of the Oread Limestone are on display. “Display,” however, is a bit misleading since the hillsides were basically covered in vegetation, making collecting impossible. This was a big disappointment, since there are undoubtedly a lot of lovely late Pennsylvanian dead critters there to collect, but after driving around an insane series of one-way roads for about an hour trying to figure out how to get to the spillway and whether it was worth my time, I checked my watch and opted to head for my next stop near Topeka instead.

It’s worth noting that I took backroads rather than using the Kansas Turnpike. I hate toll roads. My take on them is that I already paid the taxes to help build them and don’t appreciate being charged again for the pleasure of speeding down them. Not that my taxes built the Kansas Turnpike, but it’s the principle that chaps my tail and makes me set Waze to “no toll roads.”

After another go-round on one-way roads (though legitimately so this time since they were on/off ramps), I found the next spot outside of Topeka, but like the others, it was not the promised land I’d hoped for. A few brachs were all I had to show for my visit to the Topeka Limestone (Upper Pennsylvanian), and a little bit of coal from a cyclotherm in the Calhoun Shale. At least the cyclotherm was photogenic.

By this time, the hotel breakfast had long since worn off and I was starving. I pulled into a Sonic on US Hwy 24 in Topeka and plotted my next move over a cheeseburger and tots. Turtle Creek Lake promised yet another spillway, so I headed that way and was, again, disappointed. The spillway was gated—and guarded. I suppose I could have found the Army Corps office and talked to them, but my morale was pretty ground down. Wandering the roads around the lake, I found, surprise, a brachiopod or two, but this was not the warm welcome to the Permian I’d hoped for. I scuttled around Manhattan for another hour-and-a-half or so checking out promising cuts and finding jack nothing before I headed to the hotel for a shower and out for a steak, baked potato and grilled asparagus with a glass of wine. The steak was amazing, so at least a VERY disappointing day ended with a good meal and a slight buzz.