WaltersRail

With the advent of Artificial Intelligence and its ability to compose completely and coherently and generally accurately from simple queries, the art of writing may soon be lost, or at least may soon become an esoteric talent possessed by a very few initiates, like pipe organ building or carburetor maintenance.

In a similar vein, film photography is vanishing from the earth, never to be seen again.

I have written an earlier post about both the joy and frustration of film photography. [https://www.waltersrail.com/2016/02/mountains-may-begin-with-montana-but_24.html]. Because the guild of film photographers has grown so small, however, my lamentations fall mostly on deaf ears, or better said, on no ears at all.

But here is where things get even more desperate. An even more obscure talent than simple film photography is film photography in the snow. I do not claim to be a master at it. I do not claim even to be very good at it. If you follow the light meter in a film camera, your images taken in snow will be seen "through a glass darkly," and no amount of post processing can save them. Bright snow, you see, causes a light meter to over-compensate and reduce the exposure necessary for a decent photograph.

Thus, you must overexpose to obtain passible results, and even then there is no guarantee. If you "stop up" too much -- a phrase that almost no one understands anymore -- your images will be thoroughly washed out, in a word, "useless."

So getting the right f-stop for snow is part guess-work, part patience, part persistence, but mostly just plain luck.

Also, I live in a place (central Oklahoma) that some years sees no snow at all and on the average sees about five inches per year. When it does snow, the white stuff usually melts fast. So snow photography in my small corner of the world is rare and difficult.

Thus, when I have the chance for serious snow photography in other locales, I jump at it -- work permitting. Such an occasion was January 2025, when the Flint Hills of central Kansas were buried under two successive storms. Snow covered the ground as far south as north Texas, a few inches in most places, but Kansas was buried alive. So I loaded the Black Beast -- one of my two Jeep Wranglers -- and headed into the Great White North.

BNSF constructed a second track through the Flint Hills in the early 2020's, and this would be my first look at the expanded capacity of a railroad already crawling with trains.

A westbound manifest (compass south) prepares to duck under Kansas 177 -- the Flint Hills Scenic Byway.

Another westbound. Beside the tracks, the snow is almost three feet deep.

Eastbound (compass north).

If you have never seen the Flint Hills, you should, in part because they contain the largest area of tallgrass prairie in North America. These hills, as their name implies, are filled with flint eroded from bedrock lying near or at the surface. The rocky soil prevents agriculture, so the area is the province of huge cattle ranches where the ground is burned each fall to prevent timber growth and to renew the native bluestem grass, which can grow four feet or taller. In some of the images herein, the top of the bluestem rises above snow drifts that almost reached your author's waist.

Because this land has either never been or only rarely plowed, the Flint Hills are really the only land left in North American where you can view the native tallgrass that once blanketed the Great Plains. Your first glimpse is similar to a first view of the ocean. The grassland stretches to the horizon, billowing in the wind like waves. Walking to the top of a hill, you see more endless grass stretching to the next hill, and this sequence repeats itself for almost two hundred miles north to south, ending in northern Oklahoma, where the locals call this geologic formation the Osage Hills after the tribe forcibly resettled there by the federal government in the 19th century.

Westbound autos. Because this area sees significant snow each year, the county plows all country roads. In my small corner of the world, country roads (in fact, almost all roads) are clear only after the snow melts.

Another westbound.

A Q-train headed to Chicago.

Many millions of years ago, central North America (including what became the Flint Hils) was covered by a sea that geologists have christened the Western Interior Seaway. As the map below demonstrates, this huge body of water connected the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean and what today is Hudson Bay. Geologists estimate that at their largest, the waters were 2,500 feet deep, 600 miles wide and over 2,000 miles long. If I had been alive then, my home in central Oklahoma would have been less than 100 miles from the beach.

https://images.angelpub.com/2014/38/26539/wis-map.jpg

The Flint Hills were formed by the erosion of limestones and shales after the interior sea disappeared. Limestone consists primarily of the accumulation of corals and shells in the ocean, whose skeletal remains pile on top of one another, eon after eon. If the water disappears, this detritus is then slowly covered by sediment, again over millions of years, which fuses the skeletons into rock under tremendous pressure and heat. Wherever limestone is found, a sea once existed.

Shale is composed of mud and small grains of clay created at the bottom of water. The same process -- sediment producing pressure and heat -- occurs when the water dries up, producing shale. The shale is formed from the sediment that covers the limestone. Then the waters come back, and more marine creatures die and drop their skeletons. Then the water recedes and more sediment covers the skeletons. Then more limestone. Then shale. Then limestone.

The Flint Hills consist of alternating layers of limestone and shale, the limestone containing concentrations of chert (also called flint) -- a hard microcrystalline quartz. Shale erodes rapidly, exposing the limestone below it. As the limestone erodes, angular fragments of flint accumulate at the surface, giving the Flint Hills their name.

Although the day looks pleasant, the temperature is about 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

The sun has set as eastbound stacks from the La Junta subdivision arrive at Ellinor.

Westbound waiting for a green board at Ellinor.

Evidence of the interior seaway can be found in the abundance of marine fossils in what we call today the High Plains. Paleontologists have discovered the skeletons of sharks in Nebraska and Montana. In Kansas, the remains of a predatory fish were found -- with the residue of another smaller fish in its stomach. Your author has met a gentleman with a collection of shark's teeth found in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Paleontologists have identified over 70 different species of sharks that once swam in the waters covering western Kansas.

Beyond the fish with skeletons, the Western Interior Seaway left behind abundant evidence of invertebrates such as extinct relatives of the modern squid and octopus, whose spiral shells have been discovered in the Pierre Shale formation stretching across South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana.

https://ogden_images.s3.amazonaws.com/www.timesrepublican.com/images/2020/02/06233640/Outdoors-Today1-1100x557.jpg

A clue to the boundaries of the sea are the copious deposits of oil, coal and natural gas found in the High Plains. From West Texas to Alberta, this area is -- to coin a phrase -- awash with burnable carbon.

Eons ago, central North America was as warm, humid and verdant as today's equator and home to the same tropical vegetation and animals. Those wondering why the world is so much colder now should remember that we are currently living between Ice Ages. In the last, glaciers extended as far south as northeastern Kansas.

Once this land never froze, and flora along the seaway flourished like termites. Over the ages, as noted above, the shoreline expanded, receded, expanded again, receded again, and on and on over and over, and vegetation along the water grew, died, was covered with sediment, grew, died, was covered with sediment again -- repeating the process thousands of times -- the same process that created limestone and shale, except here we are dealing with plants. As the sediment piled higher upon the plant detritus, pressure and heat increased until the organic vegetation hardened into the carbon form of rock (coal), or liquid (oil) or gas (natural gas) depending upon the pressure and temperature. What was once the beach of a tropical ocean became the oven of a fantastic machine that created the energy that powers modern society.

Stack trains meet at Ellinor Junction.

Westbound on the Emporia Subdivision.

The moon rises over the Flint Hills.

Geologists have constructed an elaborate model to explain the creation of the Western Interior Seaway. Whether it is accurate cannot be confirmed, because the postulated events occurred millions of years ago, long before humans roamed the planet. The only evidence is circumstantial, but it makes a better story than anything your author has come up with.

During the Cretaceous, goes the story, an ancient oceanic tectonic plate called Farallon collided with and dove under (subducted) the southwestern portion of the North American plate at the rate of about two to eight centimeters per year. Eventually, after millions and millions of years, the Farallon plate disappeared into the bowels of the earth, never to be seen again, raising the North America plate on the west, tilting it downward to the east, allowing the ocean to flow into the depression.

Geologic studies have grown more and more fantastic in an effort to explain the interior seaway. Some argue that the Farallon Plate was actually divided into multiple plates which broke apart at different times. Others claim that the remains of the Farallon plate are the Explorer, Gorda, and Juan de Fuca plates, which are currently subducting under the northern part of the North American plate; the Cocos plate subducting under Central America; and the Nazca plate subducting under the South American plate.

As you can see, the theories grow more and more extravagant. Whether any of this actually transpired or not, one thing is certain. The center of North America was once under water.

Cassoday, Kansas.

Ellinor, Kansas.

In the valley of the Cottonwood River.

The Western Interior Seaway grew larger and smaller, repeating this cycle over several million years, creating the limestone and hydrocarbons found today in the North American interior, finally disappearing for good at the end of the Cretaceous, about 70 million years ago. (All these figures are obviously very rough estimates.). Sedimentation, continental uplift and mountain building led to the waters' demise.

Sedimentation occurred as the Ancestral Rocky Mountains stopped growing and began slowly, over millions of years, eroding away into the sea. Study of ancient rocks show that the Ancestral Rockies were created from the late Mississippian to early Permian (320 - 270 million years ago). These ancient structures run northwest to southeast and are most abundant in Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, for example, the Quartz and Wichita Mountains (both relatively small granite protuberances) are believed to be remnants of this once much taller mountain chain.

As the Ancestral Rockies eroded a few centimeters per year, their detritus fell downward into the sea, burying plant life along the shore and marine deposits below the water. When the sea rose, the process started again. And again. Over millions of years, the sediment accumulated, gradually filling the basin. Though it is doubtful that sediment alone led to the disappearance of the waters, the volume certainly reduced the depth of the seaway, making it shallower and less extensive.

The second factor leading to the disappearance of the seaway was continental uplift. Estimates of sea level changes suggest a late Cretaceous sea level elevation of about 200 meters above present sea level. If correct, all areas that were covered by the late Cretaceous sea and that now lie above 200 meters have been uplifted since the Cretaceous. This would include the entire area of the Interior Western Seaway. The origin of uplift in the Western Interior is still the subject of much study and debate, but there is some belief that the sediment falling off the Ancestral Rockies piled so high along the edge of the mountains that the ground subsided under the weight, causing the land to the east to be pushed upward, much as when you push down the mud in a small bog, the surface rises in other parts. The combination of piled sediment in the west and rising land in the east, so the thinking goes, led in part to the disappearance of the seaway.

The third member of this triad is mountain building. After the Ancestral Rockies eroded down, the land along the waters' edge and the waters themselves lay relatively tranquil for millions of years, though the inland sea was significantly smaller due to sediment from the mountains and continental uplift.

Then in the Late Cretaceous to Paleocene (80 to 55 million years ago), a new set of Rocky Mountains began to form in what geologists have come to call the Laramide Orogeny. We know roughly when the mountains were created. But here is a mystery. We don't know how they were created.

The Laramide orogeny is believed to post-date the Jurassic and late Early Cretaceous accretion of terranes that make up much of the North American Cordillera, the various mountain ranges and basins west of the High Plains. Much of these mountains are theorized to have been created by tectonic plate collisions along the western edge of North America, which sutured accreted land masses onto the western continent, creating mountains along the way as the land was pushed upwards by the collisions (over millions and millions of years).

Because the Rocky Mountains appear to have been created far later, plate collision has generally been ruled out as the causative factor. And no alternative theory has been accepted to explain what happened. (For a complete discussion of this mystery, see http://neotectonics.seismo.unr.edu/0_COURSES/Geo730-2020/EnglishLaramide2004.pdf.)

Sundown in the Flint Hills.

Westbound grain.

Another January moonrise.

As the Rockies climbed skyward, the plains to the east also elevated. Today, for example, the High Plains of eastern Colorado are in some cases above 5,000 feet, though the mountains are still many miles away. As the land rose, the sea drained away to the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay, leaving behind a former sea bed that eventually became home to North American Bisons and the Native Americans who followed them with the seasons.

Eastbound.

Westbound.

So now that you know more about the Western Interior Seaway than you ever wanted to know, we can return to the Flint Hills of the 21st century. Today the railroad follows the path chosen by the original locating engineers of the Belen Cut-off, the Santa Fe's construction project of the early 20th century to avoid the three percent grades of Glorieta and Raton Passes. With the exception of a realignment project in the 1940's which straightened a stretch of torturous curves near Matfield Green, the railroad has not changed course in over 100 years.

When the original Santa Fe line west out of Kansas City reached Emporia, the tracks followed the valley of the Cottonwood River west as far as Florence, Kansas, before climbing into relatively flat terrain on the way to Newton and westward into Colorado and Raton Pass. The Belen Cut-off began at Ellinor Junction (about 10 miles west of Emporia) and followed the South Fork of the Cottonwood River into the heart of the Flint Hills.

At Matfield Green, a tiny settlement with today less than 100 souls, the original alignment stayed in the river valley, with several tight curves and a small grade south of town for westbounds, then followed a narrow channel (dry most of the year) to the flatlands further south at Cassoday. The realigned tracks, on the other hand, changed course north of Matfield Green and slowly climbed south out of the river valley to run along the western hills on a series of sweeping curves that today allow full speed running to Cassoday.

South of Cassoday, the line transits northeast to southwest to a second realignment necessitated by the construction of El Dorado Lake. At the town of the same name, the railroad leaves the Flint Hills behind on its way to the Wild West.

Eastbound in the valley of the South Fork of the Cottonwood River.

Stacks at Ellinor.

At one time, Ellinor was a triple-track junction, but when the line through the Flint Hills was double-tracked, the third track was removed beginning at the east signal, a rearrangement that did not in any way slow down the flood of traffic through one of the busiest junctions on BNSF's network. In sunshine and rain, this railroad crawls with trains -- even in heavy snow. I know, because finally, in my decrepitude, I was able to photograph the Flint Hills in the white stuff.

First Dark.

Dark.

To see my other posts, go to waltersrail.com.

To see my photographs on Flickr, go to https://www.flickr.com/photos/jpwalters/.

WaltersRail

Monday, May 19, 2025

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FLINT HILLS IN SNOW

The Author