This past weekend found us traveling south to Kansas to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with my family.  Looking for a way to enjoy the unseasonably warm and sunny weather, we ventured west from the Kansas City area to Manhattan, Kansas.  After driving into the Flint Hills we came upon the Konza Prairie, a preserve of The Nature Conservancy that is managed as a biological station by Kansas State University.  The late fall colors were golden across the 8600 acres of the prairie.    It was a joy to hike through this area surrounded by a sea of grasses blowing in the wind, as they must have done when the early settlers came through this same land hundreds of years ago.