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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

There are places in Kansas where you can turn 360 degrees and see not a hill, tree, structure, or any landmarks at all (other than the road). You see the curve of the earth. It looks like a golden ocean.

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Parts of Iowa and Illinois are much flatter than any parts of Kansas I’ve ever been to. Incredibly so.

People romanticize this idea that Kansas is a flat nothing-land, luckily most of them also stay away. Kansas is only the 7th flattest state, even https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/flattest-st...

I think the big reason for KS's flat reputation vs places like Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Delaware is trees (or lack thereof). In SW Kansas (the flattest part of the state) you can drive for miles and miles of endless flatness without hardly seeing a single tree. There is just nothing that disrupts your view of the horizon. It is a bit of a different experience then being in a flat forest/swamp.

(Also, the terrain of eastern/central KS is very different from the west. So if your only experience of KS is Wichita/Kansas City/Topeka, then you don't know how truly flat the other half of the state actually is...)

> (Also, the terrain of eastern/central KS is very different from the west. So if your only experience of KS is Wichita/Kansas City/Topeka, then you don't know how truly flat the other half of the state actually is...)

People say that, and every time I make a trip somewhere out west I haven't been previously I brace myself for the boredom. So far I've always been "disappointed" and have yet to find this boring and barren landscape I've been promised.

People don't like to believe it and that's ok, less people to share the landscape with.

Have you driven specifically through KS? I remember a 5 hour stretch going from MN to CA (yeah, I took the long way) where it was like driving in a matte painting, nothing changed.

Have lived here for a couple decades.

Kansas is certainly not the best drive you'll ever see, but there are many that are worse.

The east/west drive across Nebraska is a lot worse - even less geography around the interstates. Kansas at least has some geographic change as you come through the high plains in the west toward the hills in the east.

For that matter - going north/south on the western side of Iowa is crazy boring too. Road runs right along the river so there is no perceptible elevation change for an eternity. East/west across Illinois is the same way - completely and totally flat highways for hours and hours.

The Sand Hills is a very pretty drive in an east/west drive across Nebraska.

The Symphony in the Flint Hills (eastern Ks) is pretty cool if you ever get to attend.

https://symphonyintheflinthills.org/

That makes sense. I think it’s also due to contrast, specifically due to Kansas neighboring Colorado with its very not flat mountains.

Of course, the eastern half of Colorado is just as flat as Kansas. You really can’t tell the difference driving west until you get to the front range and that is in the middle of Colorado.

It's pretty weird to see Nevada rank so highly. It does have a lot of extremely flat valleys (Nevada is under geological tension, literally stretching out the flat parts) but you'd have a hard time finding part of Nevada without mountains on the horizon. If anything, it shows how difficult it is to define 'overall flatness'. But, as a Floridian, I knew we would win easily regardless of metric.

Yeah I'm not sure what metric is best. Would be easy to pull up a DEM and try a few things... (standard deviation of height, fraction of points differing from neighbors by more than the DEM uncertainty, mean norm of the Hessian...).

Thanks for the link, I was going to say how much flatter Florida is, but didn't have proof. From east to west across the state, elevation only changes like 80ft. Whereas Kansas is in the thousands.

However, because of all the development everywhere you look, I can see visibility being much better in the plains states.

Living in Ohio I was surprised to see that we are less flat than North Carolina and the tiniest bit flatter than Nebraska. Thanks for sharing!

Would love a good google street-view link too that.

[edit add] had a google, nowt special jumping out beyond some rather good jokes of which one I feel sums things up nicely "Kansas is so flat you can watch your dog run away for two weeks".

I found this, Hwy 96: (38.4823316, -100.6892430)

https://goo.gl/maps/iRajjCbBDJQMz5ud7

> You see the curve of the earth

I was under the impression that this is an optical illusion. You can't actually see the curvature of the earth until you get to a certain elevation above its surface.

Was I misinformed?

I've always liked that about Kansas.

An optimist senses it as an "unbounding": a freedom to travel, adventure, explore in any direction.

A cynic feels: anywhere but here.

I've felt both during my time in Kansas.

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