Dave Kendall's Lost Spring along the Santa Fe Trail скачать в хорошем качестве

Dave Kendall's Lost Spring along the Santa Fe Trail

Dave Kendall has been sharing with us many of the segments of the documentary he is working on for the anniversary of the Santa Fe trail. Along with him on many of those treks is Rex Buchanan. Rex joins him today for a visit to Lost Springs. I think this is my favorite segment they have done so far because the story of the Springs and the water is so important and still is today. Let's take a look. [music] Dave Kendall: Continuing our journey along the Santa Fe trail, Rex Buchanan and I met up at a notable site on the western edge of the Kansas Flint Hills to talk about the importance of springs to those who traveled the trail. Rex Buchanan: This is actually a pretty good place to talk about that because you're right on the verge of a pretty major change in the topography and just the general setting that the trail is going through. The best known spring along the trail is one not very far east to here at Diamond Spring. That's a big spring. Even today, I don't remember what the flow rate is, but it's hundreds of gallons of water per minute. You could have a pretty fair number of people or a pretty fair number of animals show up at the same time. It's not really much of an issue. Just this far west, things have already started to change. This location, Lost Springs, well, there is a spring fenced off back behind me here and it's everybody's idea of a spring, which is water flowing out sufficient to form a channel, a few gallons per minute. It's not the only spring here. Just within eyesight here, there are two or three more that come out of that side of the bank that are delivering water as well. The original spring in this location, original for the spring that people used along the Santa Fe trail, is even further north of here. There are springs coming up all up and down this crick bank. The name, Lost Springs, is because sometimes people come out here and the spring wouldn't be here or they couldn't find it. Sometimes that's a function of this spring right here might not be flowing, but another one on up a ways would be or in a particularly really dry time, if you got two or three dry summers in a row, my guess is these springs dried up completely and they were lost completely. Now, you're beginning to see what you're up against. That's just sort of the beginning of how life is as you go from here to the west. Springs become really important as you get to the west of here in a dry year, sometimes they're not there at all. [music]