Richfield

Richfield is a small farming town with lots of old barns and sheds falling to pieces. There are a few homes, though not many in good repair. The town has a school and a Methodist church with no pastor. It feels like a dying place.

Cimarron National Grasslands

This is an remarkable natural grass preserve surrounded by cattle fields. The wind is fierce and relentless. There are some trails through the grasslands that can be accessed by gravel roads, which are often blocked by cows. There's also an observation point called Point of Rocks that affords a wonderful view of the surrounding countryside.

Elkhart

Out here, the land is less like prairie and more like desert, with windswept, sandy soil and scrub brush. To get to Elkhart, we drove through the Cimarron National Grassland, about which more later.

Elhkhart had a nice, broad sidewalk that stretched a long distance -- probably at least half a mile. The historical museum was great, with many artifacts outside and some very informative signs describing them. Unfortunately, it was closed Saturday - Monday, so we never had a chance to go inside.

The town also had some restaurants, gas stations, a quilt shop, a park with some nice basketball courts, and a Lions community building. The town is the home of the Morton County Civic Center, and there's a remarkable variety of houses here: Some charming, even stately homes interspersed with some older, less nice ones. 

Rolla

Rolla was the first town we visited in Morton County on our long weekend of exploring southwest Kansas. It had a lot of cute, well-tended homes and gardens. As we've seen in many small towns, this one has a few downtown buildings that are no longer businesses. It seemed like a lot of the folks in this town were Hispanic agricultural workers.

We saw a church, a grain elevator, a cemetery, a park at the school, and a railroad.