Mountains of the Prairie

The “fly-over” states of the central United States offer a different kind of landscape that is often associated with interesting landscape photography. Kansas, where I grew up, lacks the massive rock faces of Yosemite that Ansel Adams made famous, as an example and jokes about the region’s geological flatness abound. What does regularly pierce those underrated flat horizons are man-made mountains in the form of silos. Large and small, these structures spring up at frequent intervals. Smaller ones are often found for individual farms where as the larger silos were initially built so that the farms in the area could all bet their grain to market within a days travel time and were often associated with a rail line. More modern clusters of silos are more similar in bulk to sky-scrapers turned on their sides than the silos intended to hold the harvest from a family farm. These towering constructs have become easily approachable analogues for the natural wonders found in the mountain states.