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The Flint Hills Trail runs 92 miles across east-central Kansas from Osawatomie to Council Grove on the crushed-limestone bed of the old Missouri Pacific line. It is the finished core of Flint Hills Trail State Park, the longest trail in the state. From Osawatomie the trail follows the Marais des Cygnes River under wooded bluffs to Ottawa, where it meets the Prairie Spirit Trail, then crosses open farm country through Pomona, Vassar, and Osage City. West of Admire the ground rises into the Flint Hills, and the last miles pass the Kaw Nation's Allegawaho Heritage Memorial Park into Council Grove. The grade is rail flat. Riding it means open sky, small towns, and long views.
Flint Hills Trail
Your comfort. Prognosticated.
-Cory
In a typical year the Flint Hills Trail has about 97 to 153 days of excellent weather for popular activities such as hiking, dog walking, running, e-biking, biking, walking, and birding, with April, October, and November the best months.
Hourly comfort scores for the next 15 days of weather, tuned to your activity and your own thresholds.
Plan your visit to this trail. Get the best windows for a comfortable outing.
Enjoy the Flint Hills Trail!
There is too little deciduous tree cover along the Flint Hills Trail to measure a peak color window. The trail has 9% deciduous coverage, with the majority being hackberry, Osage-orange, black walnut, American elm, and chinkapin oak.
On August 10, 1825, three United States commissioners met Osage leaders under a large oak at Council Grove and bought safe passage for the Santa Fe Trail. The mile-wide grove gave wagon crews shelter and repair timber through the trail years, 1821 to 1866. In 1860 one trader counted 1,532 wagons through town. By 1848 the Kaw people had been pushed onto a reservation of twenty miles square near Council Grove. In 1873 the government removed 533 of them to Indian Territory. Their last village sites lie in Allegawaho Heritage Memorial Park, which the trail passes today. The railroad followed the same corridor. The Council Grove, Osage City and Ottawa Railway was completed in 1886. It soon became part of the Missouri Pacific, whose Kansas City to Pueblo line reached Colorado by December 1887. MoPac ran the line for about a century. Service ended in the 1980s, and the road was abandoned in stages between 1993 and 1995. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy railbanked the corridor in 1995 and deeded it to the Kanza Rail-Trails Conservancy. With private donations and volunteer labor, Kanza opened the first miles at Osawatomie in 2003. A 17 mile section to Ottawa followed in 2005. The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks began partnering with Kanza in 2013. In 2018 the legislature made the corridor Flint Hills Trail State Park. A 24.8 million dollar federal RAISE grant in 2022 now funds surfacing and bridge work, and in 2025 the trail entered the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy Hall of Fame.
Prairie Spirit TrailAmerican Discovery TrailKanza Heritage Trail
