I had long heard about a mound in the Kansas Flint Hills that was littered with glacial erratics. These lichen-covered pink and purple boulders stand out among the region’s pale yellow limestone and in the northeastern part of the state you’ll occasionally see one, either in a rancher’s field or propped up in a city park with a plaque on it (There’s one right here in Lawrence in Robinson Park). The ancient glaciers only ever reached this one corner of Kansas and it’s thought that this erratic-littered hill was right at the very edge of the glaciers furthest advance. Basically, the glacier pushed all of these rocks along its leading edge for hundreds of miles and then left them behind when it retreated.

With the help of some geological books and the ever-handy Google Maps satellite view, I found that hill last week:

Fellow photographer and road-tripper, Doug Stremel, kindly provided some scale to this shot.