Flint Hills Sunrise

During Winter, the Kansas Flint Hills are bathed in an orange-red cast of the prairie grasses' Fall color, a bright, rich bronze, burnished by the sun and wind, yet subdued by muting shadows produced by the outcrops of rock, undulations of ground and jutting vegetation. On a clear Winter morning, as the sun begins to rise over the Flint Hills, the demarcation between land and sky begins to glow faintly, reflecting the same orange-red color. As the sun's rim first appears above the eastern skyline, the sky immediately above the horizon glows like a ripe peach in all directions, abating as it rises above the hilltops, blending into a pastel green, and moving upward, into a light blue with a gray cast, a ghostly reminder of the displaced darkness. Unless you looked Southeast toward the point of the sun's appearance, from the reflected glow of the bronze hills that tints the lower edge of the morning sky, you could not be sure where the sun will come up, such is the beauty of the ring of warm light along the horizon. Once the sun has fully risen, the faint peach colored sky along the horizon transforms into a band of pastel green between the ochre ground and the cerulean blue sky for the remainder of the day. It's quite a sight to behold, the early morning light in the Flint Hills.