A gift from the deep
Touring the county’s springs, the largest concentration in the state
Staff writer
Geologist Rex Buchanan could have talked technical hydrology and geology to describe the natural springs I wanted to see in Marion County, which has the highest concentration of them in Kansas.
Instead, the scientist steered into the poetic to describe the “mesmerism” of water that quietly issues from the earth.
“There’s a joy of finding something that you know is afoot, but you can’t find it at first,” he said, paraphrasing a favorite line from historian and travel writer William Least Heat-Moon’s description of natural springs in “PrairyErth.”
“People have written about them and sung about them for years and years and years,” said Buchanan, director emeritus of Kansas Geological Survey and co-author of “Roadside Kansas.”
Native Americans considered them spiritual “because springs come from places we can’t see,” Buchanan said. “They come from underground, and then, all of a sudden, there they are. They have a certain mystery as a result.”
He was tweaking something of the childhood explorer left in me.
So, in the spirit of “getting lost is half the adventure,” I took a daylong bushwacking tour of five county springs and discovered that these natural outpourings — much talked about but less visited — are possibly Marion County’s most unique tourism offering.
The springs are a triple ticket. There’s history: Think arrowheads and pioneer wagon ruts. There’s nature: I came face to face with a tawny doe standing in the shallows near the vent of one spring and dodged an army of leaping frogs at another. And there’s simple recreation: hiking as short or long as you like, swimming if you don’t mind dark 56-degree water, and peaceful sitting. And the only people I came across at any springs I visited were two landowners and a couple who had a dead car battery.
I didn’t get “lost” in the truest sense. If you know the alphabet and can count, how lost can you get on a rural grid?
Because springs issue forth, creating or falling into waterways that follow gravity not the compass, you can “lose” them if you can’t triangulate between GPS, word of mouth, written directions, and your internal true north, which, for me, has atrophied with mobile phone navigation.
I was told springs don’t freeze in the winter, and steam rises from them in very cold weather — which is a possible tell-tale sign when exploring in winter.
Springs don’t typically have an exact address. But after consulting written directions and more than once circling a section near Florence, transected by US-77, I stopped to ask a man laboring atop a large trailer.
He’d never heard of Allison Springs. So, I called Les Allison to beg his home address, which turned out to be less than a mile away on a spur of Xavier Rd. — 1071 Xavier Rd., to be exact.
A narrow dirt road tunneled through six-foot corn fields, imperceptibly descending to the bottom of an Edenic grotto of trees. There, the artesian Allison Spring has, without pause over at least the past 150 years, powerfully vented 1,000 gallons a minute from the base of a massive 100-foot-high, 50-yard-wide limestone and flint cliff.
It is a hidden microclimate of its own — several degrees cooler than the highway a half mile back.
Allison, who said he doesn’t mind visitors “who come out to say, ‘hi,’” lives in the original stone house built by his ancestors in 1873. The porch of a log cabin addition Allison built looks out over the springs and cliff. Over time, the Allison family dammed the pool where water enters Spring Creek and built a spring house to refrigerate food and a paddle wheel to deliver water to the house.
The native Kaw were still using the spring — and “allowed us to be here” — when his family pioneered the surrounding land, Allison said. The small price to pay them was the occasional spare calf, he said.
Allison has a collection of spear tips and arrowheads chiseled from flint in the cliff that he’s amassed between puttering, swimming, and farming on the property over the years. And, he said, he’s willing to show it “to anyone who asks.”
My next stop was Coyne Spring. It’s unmarked. So, I was feeling my way, listening out the window for any clues as I turned south off US-50 onto Wagon Wheel Rd. A few hundred yards past the railroad tracks, the roar of rushing water coming from a grove of trees on the right was a sure giveaway.
Hidden behind a weedy pull-off on Wagon Wheel Rd. just south of US-50, Coyne Spring rushed over a rudimentary dam into Doyle Creek. Fifty yards from a cattle gate that warned not to trespass, it was visible, audible, and tempting in that mesmerizing way Buchanan described. Climbing the four-foot gate wouldn’t require much; however, I kept it a look-but-don’t-touch experience.
Similarly, no signs got me to the ballyhooed 99.96% pure source of Florence’s drinking water. It was just several helpful cues from locals listing landmarks (a white house, two bridges) that got me to Crystal Spring, where I discovered the magic words that would have generated a clear GPS route: Historic Florence Spring House.
Buchanan had billed this place as the most unusual spring.
”If somebody put you in a helicopter and plopped you down along the edge of it and didn’t tell you where you were, Kansas would probably not be your first guess because it’s almost mountainlike compared to the kind of sluggish, muddy streams you’re used to around here,” he said.
It’s true: the water coming out of the hillside spring house that harnesses the flow burbles, sparkling clear over a gravel bed. I could actually see my feet soaking; something not possible at any of the other springs I visited.
Crystal Spring has an ample shaded parking area that was empty, save for a couple lounging in their open car waiting for a relative to jump their dead battery. I could think of worse places to be stuck on a hot summer day.
Since ancient times, springs in the county have been gathering spots — concentrations of certain unique vegetation, watering spots for animals, sacred places for indigenous people, and transit hubs for European settlers.
Lost Spring is perhaps the best example of that: It was a station on the Santa Fe Trail. The shifting or disappearance of the spring at different times is the reason for the name, but Lost Spring is not lost at all.
Other than the spring in Marion’s Central Park, it is probably the easiest one to find because the National Park Service memorializes Lost Spring Station with a historic marker on the north side of 340th Rd., 2.5 miles west of the town of Lost Springs.
A sign on the south side of the road points to a field where there are visible ruts of 19th century covered wagon traffic.
A red iron gate with a chain on it near the parking lot didn’t scream accessibility, but as I neared it, I saw the chain was just looped loosely, not locked.
So, with raucous birdsong in the trees above, I followed fresh cow pies 50 yards down a grassy trail to what is clearly a cattle watering hole at Cress Creek.
Buchanan noted that edible watercress is often found in Kansas spring runs like Cress Creek; it’s a perennial that descends from plants sown by pioneers. My untrained eye saw none.
Lost Spring itself flowed from the side of a bank that was sloppily fenced off with wire. I was less impressed with the spring than the historic context.
Spring Creek spring gushes up at about 50 gallons a minute from a more domesticated shelter Mel Flaming constructed behind his home near the corner of 80th and Mustang Rds.
It creates a crystal-clear flow — animated by streaks of olive-colored frogs leaping and stroking — down a small channel that disappears into muddy Spring Creek.
The spring’s clearing in a rich grove of cottonwood, elm, and walnut trees looks like a perfect picnic party setting. Indeed, it was the site of a 1920s-era private hunting and shooting club. When he built his house in 2012, Flaming had to dig through the strata of clay pigeon debris.
To Flaming, it’s a place to “sit and listen to the noise on a hot afternoon.” But, in fact, he said, it often is “an opportunity to fuss” and clear brush and logjams and pull weeds. He jokes that when visitors come, he sees only “things I need to do .”
I could find no listing that claims to describe every spring in Marion County, but there are probably close to a dozen mentioned in scattered online searches for them.
They include former Marion Spring in Central Park, Summerville Spring, Chingawasa Spring, Lee Spring, Robinson Spring, and Elm Spring and waterfall.
Just knowing they’re afoot across the silo-scape of Marion County can be enchanting.