When you reach the area there are two paths you may take. Take the one to the right, it will lead you to a plateau over looking Castle Rock. Here it is far in the distance.
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A closer look from above.
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From a lower elevation, but still a ways away.
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From the mesa you can see what I think is an even more impressive area of Castle Rock - the "maze". These are a series of weathered cliffs that have created chalk and limestone canyons that form a type of maze. The above shot gives you a pretty good view.
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From the ground, these rocks take on different shapes and are really very spectacular for being in the middle of Kansas. The black stuff on the tops of the rocks is the result of weathering on the limestone (kind of like tooth decay). You will see the same kind of weathering on limestone buildings. To prevent this decay limestone buildings need to be cleaned periodically to prevent decay.
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The maze area is very large, but there is a path that goes right by it. There are also rougher paths that follow to take you into some of teh canyons further back. I don't know how wise that is in a car, as you can see from this photo many of the rocks have severe cracks in them, and I would hate for you to be the victim of time and gravity.
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80 million years of erosion have created some very impressive free standing structures.
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Millions of years ago, all of this used to be at the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure there are some great fossils around this area, but I didn't venture too far off the path.
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Just to prove that you can visit this location in a car. There were a couple of scary points, especially when ruts in the path were deeper than the wheels of my vehicle.
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After driving the path for a while, you come to Castle Rock itself. This formation is approximately 300 to 500 yards away from the maze formation. It used to stand much higher, but gravity and wind have knocked down the tallest spire of the castle. There is an archive photo at the end of this page to show you what it used to look like back in 1999.
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I though I was going to be the only person to visit this site on the hottest day of the year. Turns out there was someone else visiting (look at the SUV on the right side of the image). As I was leaving, two more vans were driving up to the site. Four car loads of people in an hour, this site probably gets more visitors than you think.
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Finally, here are two panoramic shots I took with my camera. Click each image to see full size. The true large images are very spectacular, but because of compression for this website, the larger images are not as impressive.
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In case you don't believe that Castle Rock is in the middle of no where, this is what the surrounding country side looks like. No wonder people used Castle Rock as a marker along the trail, you can see it for miles!
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I did not take this photo, but it does show what Castle Rock looked like before a portion of it fell.
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