You'll discover many sites to see, the majority open five-days a week with free admission. If you know the exact date of your visit, it is highly recommended to get a temporary pass or badge early by stopping by the Visitor Control Center or you can send an email. Emails will be answered within 48 hours Monday through Friday and 72 hours if received Saturday through Sunday. Please note there are longer wait times for passes during periods of higher traffic - especially weekday mornings and weekday afternoons-when Soldiers and civilian employees are traveling to work and physical fitness activities.
If you're unable to get a pass early, make sure to allow extra time the day of your visit to get through processing at the Visitor Control Center.
Interstate Highway 70 and is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Cavalry Museum. Arrow Left Arrow Right. Junction City is the largest city in Geary County and is the county seat. It is situated on the main line of Union Pacific railway and is the terminus of a branch from Belleville. Milford and Alida are small towns on Republican river on the Belleville branch railway. The chief industries of the two counties are agriculture and the industries related to agriculture-general farming, stock feeding and breeding, poultry breeding, and some truck growing.
There is a direct relationship between the type of agricultural products and the type of topography within the area. In the river valleys corn, wheat, alfalfa, kafir corn, sorghum, and some fruit are produced. Some cattle and hogs are raised in the creek and river valleys, but large numbers of cattle are pastured on the rough uplands. On the high rolling land, which is generally the dip slope of Fort Riley limestone, corn, wheat, alfalfa, oats, kafir corn, sorghum, and prairie hay are produced and cattle and hogs are fed for market.
Urban industries are primarily related to agriculture and general merchandising. The proximity of the army post to Junction City tends to direct activities along lines unusual in most Kansas towns. The railroads offer adequate shipping facilities throughout the area, but the motor truck has almost superseded the railroad in the hauling of local freight. United States highways 40 and 24 pass through Manhattan. Most of the roads are graveled or hard-surfaced. Others are kept in good repair, and all parts of the area are accessible by automobile.
Most of the towns are served by motor stage routes. Manhattan has an airport, and the military flying field at Fort Riley is excellent.
The area is part of a region in which the climate is marked by extremes of precipitation and temperature. The table Carter and Smith, , p. The amount of rainfall varies greatly from year to year and occasional droughts are experienced. The summers of , , and were extremely dry, and farm crops suffered serious damage.
The average growing season from last to first killing frost extends from April 20 to October 9 Carter and Smith, , p. Riley and Geary counties lie within the physiographic province generally called the Central Lowlands, an area bordered by the High Plains on the west and by the Ozark and Appalachian plateaus on the east. This great area, like other natural physiographic units of the United States, has been divided by geographers into sections Fenneman, Almost the entire area of the counties treated in this report lies within the section called Osage.
A small part of northern and eastern Riley County lies within the limits of the Dissected Till Plains. In general the Osage Plains are best described as "scarped plains," an area in which strata dipping gently to the north of west have been beveled by an erosional plain sloping eastward, and in which the resistant rock layers form eastward or southeastward facing escarpments. Streams are incised below the old plain and the topography is semirugged.
This area is part of an older erosional plain that is now being dissected, and maturity has been reached in the present erosional cycle. The erosional history of eastern Kansas is probably very complex and certainly has not yet been satisfactorily deciphered.
The crests of the escarpments, which are the physiographic expression of resistant rock layers, lie very nearly in a plane, which slopes gently downward from the eastern border of the Cretaceous sediments eastward to the western boundary of the Ozark plateau. Fenneman , p. The overlap of Cretaceous sediments on the beveled Permian strata of Kansas and on older rocks to the north and east indicate that the pre-Cretaceous erosional plain in eastern Kansas may also have been very near this level.
In another part of this report it is shown that Dakota sandstone has only recently been eroded from the tops of cuestas in Geary County where it formerly lay not far above the Fort Riley limestone, and that similar Cretaceous rock is still present not far above the Herington limestone in northwestern Riley County.
The widespread distribution of Tertiary sediments in the same plane is indicated by the deposits of flint gravels, locally several tens of feet in thickness, capping the cuestas from the Flint Hills to the Ozark plateau. Both Arkansas and Kansas rivers are obsequent to rock structure across central and eastern Kansas and thus have the characters of streams that were superposed upon a plain of deposition.
It has been my observation that Marais des Cygnes river has inclosed meanders in eastern Kansas as it has in Missouri Osage river of Missouri Winslow, , pp.
Flint gravel, very probably of Tertiary age, is still present on the uplands near the inclosed meanders in Linn county, Kansas, and similar gravel is still very widespread on uplands on each side of Kansas river.
The relief of Riley and Geary counties is between and feet. The lowest point is the surface of the water of Kansas river east of Zeandale, on the eastern border of Riley County, normally approximately 1, feet above sea level.
The highest point, near the southeast corner of Riley County, has an altitude of approximately 1, feet. The topography can very well be divided into three minor types: the high uplands or prairies, which are the cuesta uplands or the "dip-slopes" of resistant limestone layers and for which the term "high" is used in a relative sense; the creek and rivers valleys, including the alluvial floors and terraces; and the broken, billy country extending from the borders of the uplands downward to the valley floors or to the terraces where present.
This last division includes the escarpments, and it includes the Flint Hills, which are discussed separately. The high prairies of the first division generally lie at an altitude of 1, to 1, feet above sea level and are above the Fort Riley limestone although small areas below that stratum of rock have similar aspects.
Although the uplands are described as dip slopes of the limestone strata, they are almost everywhere covered with a part of the shale unit overlying the scarp-making limestone. Streams cutting into the thick shale above the Fort Riley limestone have carved most of this area into a rolling plateau.
In eastern and northern Riley County the Cresswell and Herington limestones and to a minor degree the Towanda limestone, resistant strata above the Fort Riley limestone, form small buttes and sinuous escarpments. The eastern boundary of these uplands is extremely irregular because many streams have cut into and below the Fort Riley limestone. In southern Geary County the uplands are cut into great finger-like strips pointing toward Smoky Hill river and away from the greater expanse of similar terrain.
River valleys range from 1 to 4 miles in width and creek valleys from 0. River valleys are almost level and are modified by swamps and by a few ox-bow or crescentic lakes. The flat "bottom land" of the smaller streams is being built up more rapidly by downwash from the valley walls than by deposition by the streams themselves, hence they are principally colluvial and the streams themselves are cutting into bed rock but these areas are subjected to occasional floods during which alluvium is deposited.
Creek valleys are somewhat elevated above the creek beds and generally are somewhat rolling. Although the colluvial and alluvial soil of the small stream valleys conceals the rock strata at the sides of the valley, the resistant layers can generally be seen in the stream beds. In many places the streams are actively widening their valleys and evidence of landslides of considerable magnitude is visible, especially along the right valley walls.
At Rocky Ford, north of Manhattan, bed rock is exposed in the channel of Big Blue river, but there the stream is now flowing near its right valley wall and is only locally and temporarily degrading the limestone beds. There is no doubt that soundings on the east side and remote from the river would show that the bed rock is lower there than in the present channel.
River channels have shifted actively, even very recently, and pronounced changes have taken place since the area was settled. The channel of Big Blue river has shifted eastward a mile or more at Manhattan since the city was founded and an old mill formerly at a dam on Fancy creek in northern Riley County is now separated from the creek by a wide field. Valley walls are steep, rugged bluffs 50 to feet high, except locally, as near Zeandale, Manhattan, and Ogden, where the valley of Kansas river is bordered by rolling uplands--a modification of the prevalent type of valley-wall topography due to the presence of deposits of loess.
In many places remnants of a former fluvial, or possibly lacustrine filling, now form a distinctive terrace along the sides of the valleys above the present flood plain of the larger streams.
Such terraces are noticeable along the west bluff of the valley of Big Blue river a few miles north of Manhattan, and south of Kansas river east of Manhattan. These terraces have yielded mammalian fossils of Pleistocene age. Detailed investigation will probably show that the terraces of the large stream valleys are equivalent to much of the "bottom land" of the small valleys. The third type of topography is represented between the stream valleys and the high uplands. It is limited generally by the outcrop of Fort Riley limestone, which forms a fence-like wall near the crests of the hills along the eastward extension of its line of outcrop, and farther west, in the direction of the regional dip, forms exposures near the streams.
With the exception of stream valleys and other minor areas, the hilly land lies east of the Fort Riley limestone outcrop. Below the Fort Riley limestone is the Florence limestone-a thick layer containing an abundance of flint nodules.
It is eroded into rounded hills that are cast of the great, flat-topped area capped by Fort Riley limestone. As soon as the weathering disintegrates the protective upper limestone, the less resistant flint bearing rock is rapidly eroded.
Strata below the Fort Riley limestone weather to steeply terraced slopes, and it is principally these strata that form the slopes of the Flint Hills in this part of Kansas. The hills capped by Fort Riley limestone and the knobs capped by Florence limestone, however, are a part of the general Flint Hills region. Glacial drift is not thick within the limits of the county, but northern erratics ranging from gravel to large boulders are present. The Flint Hills are a range of hills that has a relief of about feet and crosses the state in an almost north-south direction from Marshall county in the north to Cowley county in the south.
This range is one of several eastward facing dissected escarpments that mark the topography of Kansas. In the western central part of the state are the Blue Hills, marking the eastward limit of the Tertiary-mantled High Plains. In the central part are the Smoky Hills, the dissected escarpment of the Dakota sandstones of Cretaceous age.
Those two escarpments bound the physiographic sub-province called the Plain's Border. The Flint Hills are due to the presence of resistant Permian strata and are therefore physiographically like the other ranges named. Farther east is another range trending east to north from about the boundary between Montgomery and Chautauqua counties, which is near the 96th meridian, toward Leavenworth on Missouri river, but becoming less conspicuous to the northward.
This ridge is capped by the thick sandstones in the Stranger and Lawrence formations of the Pennsylvanian subsystem. In southern Kansas these hills are called Chautauqua Hills Adams, , p. Plate 3A --Flint Hills topography. A valey eroded in Big Blue strata; Cottonwood and Eiss limestone on the hillside in right background, southeastern Riley County.
The escarpments in the Pennsylvanian and Permian areas are capped by westward-dipping resistant strata that are separated by less-resistant beds. Their direction, of course, follows the strike of the beds; their spacing and height are governed by the vertical distance between beds that are strong enough to hold extensive benches or plateaus, and by the inclination of the beds.
The height of the Flint Hills, therefore, is due to the presence of a few hundred feet of soft strata beneath a few beds that will hold benches under the conditions of weathering to which they are subjected. In the northern half of the state seemingly it is not flint bearing limestones that are responsible the hills, but rather it seems to be the absence of flint in certain limestones.
In Riley and Geary counties the non-flinty Fort Riley limestone, the non-flinty part of the Three mile limestone, a bed in the Wreford limestone formation containing no flint, and lower beds, such as the Eiss limestone in the Bader formation, make extensive benches. In the same part of the state the flinty layers are readily weathered into steep slopes and rounded knobs. The Florence limestone is about 35 feet thick and contains an abundance of flint nodules.
Above the Florence and separated from it only by a few feet of shale is the Fort Riley limestone, which contains no flint. The Fort Riley limestone holds up benches over hundreds of square miles, but wherever the protective Fort Riley is removed the flinty Florence is reduced to rounded buttes. This difference may be due to a very slight difference in climate, but it seems more probable that in southern Kansas a protective covering of Tertiary?
The significance of these gravels in the physiographic history of eastern Kansas has already been discussed in this report.
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