23-Jul-2025 -- This was the second of five Kansas confluences today traveling eastward along the state’s northern border.

Arriving here involved dozens of miles of dirt road, many with “minimal maintenance” (signs’ words) so I was relieved to arrive at the border road north of the confluence, parking about 100 yards away at 11:33am. The temperature was 84°F and it was noticeably more humid than the previous point I visited to the west. I was reminded that 100°W has long been considered the dividing line between enough rainfall to the east and the necessity of irrigation to the west.

You can see on satellite imagery of this field that there’s a tongue of dark brown extending southward from the road through the crop, currently soy. This brown turned out to be a low-lying area in the field that apparently floods with minimal rain (0.21” in the last week here per CoCoRaHS data). While the middle of this depression was indeed standing water and dead stalks, the edges were hard mud. When I ventured over the the wetter portions of this hard mud, the flies hummed and the mosquitoes swarmed. So I ended up back where I started, erring on the side of pushing through the soy rather than over the mud, being careful not to topple any plants. There were no fences that I saw.

I zeroed out, took the requisite pictures, and was back to the car 15 minutes after leaving it. I discovered I had a fresh mosquito bite on my hand to contemplate as I hit the dirt roads again on the hunt for the next confluence eastward.