Watch the Flint Hills awaken this spring in Kansas

On March 12 I was set to drive to Fort Worth to cover Wichita State in the American Athletic Conference basketball tournament. It’s a rite of spring that goes back many years for this news photographer.

Just before I was about to leave Wichita, the tournament was canceled.

The next day, a national emergency was declared.

Two days later, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta recommended that Americans not gather in groups larger than 50.

By March 19, I’d had enough.

So on the first day of spring, feeling overwhelmed by a fast-rising tide of bad news and unknowns, I jumped in my car and did the only thing I could think of to alleviate the stress of a world around me that was becoming more unfamiliar by the minute.

I drove someplace where the change of seasons goes on regardless of pandemics and the pace of life is unaffected by lockdowns and mandates. And someplace where being socially distant was unavoidable.

The Flint Hills of Kansas.

I’ve always looked at the Flint Hills as a playground of sorts. For this non-native, it’s the place where I learned that the beauty of Kansas — that its oceans of bluestem grass and sweeping skies can stand equal to just about any place on Earth.

So on that day, I drove northeast toward Cedar Point, to an old, abandoned house that sits in the middle of a pasture, unobstructed by overgrowth or trees. Since 1878, this limestone house has withstood every harsh winter and every brutal summer Kansas has given it. Every time I crest the hill to the west and it comes into view, I always fear it will have collapsed. But it’s always there, and I’ve photographed it dozens of times. Its strength and its quiet isolation say so much to me about our state.

On that day, the first day of spring, puffy clouds filled the sky and raced by overhead with the help of a trademark south wind. It was an impossible feeling to capture in a single photograph. So instead, I took over a thousand — 1,538 photos, to be exact. One every second until the clouds had passed.

I decided that day I would keep coming back. All spring. Because I knew in the coming months there would be other days when I’d need that place of refuge.

I shot nearly 33,000 individual photos for this project. All done using various cameras on tripods, with the cameras set to trigger automatically on repeat . Each scene was imported into video editing software, and played back quickly, creating a time-lapse effect.

There’s no bad time to see the Flint Hills, but to see it in its true glory is to see it in the spring. Prescribed fires burn off the old growth and colossal thunderstorms bring with them a perfect carpet of vivid green grass. It’s like watching the Earth shed its skin and emerge anew.

I knew that many people, staying at home to protect themselves and their families, wouldn’t get the chance to see these things I was seeing. I can’t share the sound of a singing meadowlark or re-create the smell of the prairie after a thunderstorm has passed, but I hope that by sharing these photos, I can share a bit of the peace that I felt while shooting them.

Enjoy.

This story was originally published July 9, 2020 at 3:35 PM.