Delights of southwestern Kansas

A significant otter

Pallas cat staring contest

Red panda breakfast buffet

The Lee Richardson Zoo will always be the best place to stretch your legs in southwestern Kansas. 

Sure, you could stretch them anywhere the 70 miles from Liberal to Garden City, but the menagerie of exotic creatures within sight of Garden City’s grain bins will always be too tempting to skip. The only bison you might spot close to the road on that empty stretch is fake; I had to circle around and take pictures to figure this out. 

The Arkansas River was dry south of Garden City, an empty floodplain like the Cimarron across the Oklahoma Panhandle. Hopefully water will return if winter wallops the Rocky Mountain headwaters of the Arkansas. 

The zoo was just as quiet. If you walk inside, the zoo is free. That’s hard to beat given its variety of animal residents Aside from a number of keepers tending to animals, I walked alone around animals almost surprised to see a human. The otter took notice of me between furious sessions of water aerobics. An Asiatic bear glanced up repeatedly, sometimes making eye contact, but mostly stuck to grazing in its habitat. The camels broke from eating hay to trot in my direction. 

I came to see them, yet I interested them. It was a good juxtaposition. 

Native birds in the trees frustrated the bobcats (The Two Bobs, as I think of them). The mountain lion stood alert atop its enclosure, likely listening to the same birdsong. The Pallas cat – a housecat-sized mound of fluff that lives above the Himalayan tree line - could have cared less about the cold. 

The zoo’s male lion bellowed unseen, as the exhibit was closed due to fears of airborne illness. Cats can acquire COVID too, and the lion sounded none too happy to be off exhibit. 

Other African animals stayed indoors. The two troops of lemurs stayed away. There would be no rhino appearance. The zoo had a giraffe born just after Christmas. When the afternoon warmth arrived, mother and calf emerged. But that is the problem with hitting the zoo early; not all its residents will be ready to wander their enclosures. 

 I did not loiter in Garden City. The road home had other stops. Besides, I started hitting new scenic stops at sunrise in Liberal. 

Dorothy and the Land of Oz

I visited Liberal’s famed Land of Oz, which recreates the cottage home of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz. A statue Dorothy stands outside the small tourist location, which has more kid-oriented options and a gift shop twice the size of Dorothy’s house. 

Other southwestern Kansas houses have uglier histories. I am not sure if the Clutter house still stands outside of Holcomb. Given the grisly, senseless murders that happened there, I would hope not. The road into Holcomb forks, one direction heading to a giant chicken operation and other plows into a quiet town. It’s impossible to traverse the miles west of Garden City without thinking of the tragedy that shocked this region decades ago. 

Whether or not Truman Capote fabricate portions of In Cold Blood, it serves to keep alive the memory of four people needlessly killed for a safe flush with money that didn’t exist. The Finney Country Museum keeps an exhibit on the case, because the murders remain a source of fascination sixty years later. 

I have blown down U.S. 50 many times, just not this time. I needed to explore. There weren’t many towns along 50, which mirrors the Arkansas River and the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, but more lively places than one might expect on the edge of Kansas. 

Syracuse and Coolidge, the last towns before the Colorado border, both lie within the Mountain Time Zone. 

Syracuse, a town of almost 2,000, deserved a little more time. Its main drag still contains numerous buildings of beige brick, including the Northrup Theater, which still shows first-run movies. Movie theaters hold a strong record in small towns across the West. Whether through tenacity of their owners, their role as community gathering spots or demand from locals living long distances from other entertainment, they definitely show staying power. 

If I was hungry, the Black Bison Pub would have been the easy choice. The former Ames Hotel had been turned into apartments. Window air-conditioning units drooped in the windows. A laundromat had no Sunday morning customers. 

Coolidge only has eighty residents but has a notable monument to its most famous fictional resident. A brick building in Coolidge hosts a mural of Cousin Eddie from the Vacation films. 

No filming actually occurred in Coolidge; the actual house from the first Vacation film still stands in Boone, Colorado, east of Pueblo. These stops only added minutes to the drive home. A later stop at Bent’s Old Fort took far longer. But goats, horses and peacocks will do that. 

In Coolidge, I just had a goodbye wave from Cousin Eddie, five miles from the Colorado line. 

On this relentless gray day, Syracuse and Coolidge provided a needed brightness seldom visible on the Great Plains in winter.

Cousin Eddie gives the official Kansas valediction.