Kansas

Kansas lies at the geographic center of the contiguous United States, a great rectangle of plains tilting almost imperceptibly upward from east to west. The eastern third holds the rolling Flint Hills, home to the largest surviving stretch of tallgrass prairie in North America, where the soil was too rocky to plow. Westward the land flattens and dries into the High Plains, wheat country reaching toward the Colorado Rockies. The whole state rises more than 3,000 feet across its width without ever seeming to climb.

This is the heart of Tornado Alley and the historic Dust Bowl, a place shaped by wind, drought, and the rhythm of dryland farming. The Ogallala Aquifer beneath the western plains makes irrigated agriculture possible, though its slow depletion shadows the region's future. Mount Sunflower, the high point at 4,039 feet (1,231 m), is little more than a gentle rise near the Colorado line. Wichita and the Kansas City suburbs hold most of the population in a state that remains, at its core, an ocean of grain and grass.