Your gifts through One Day. One KU. in 2024 will support enhancement and maintenance of the KU Field Station’s public trail system, a favorite hiking spot for KU students and the wider community. Your contribution helps us maintain the trail system for people of all ages and for the protection of the surrounding ecosystem.

Our research center has managed the KU Field Station, the University’s biological research station, since 1998. The first trail—the only one in place before 2000—was developed by KU Prof. Henry Fitch, who lived at the Field Station for more than 50 years. The full five-mile trail system, at the core research area just north of Lawrence, runs through the Fitch Natural History Reservation, the Rockefeller Native Prairie and adjacent wooded tracts.

Most trails are primitive, but the system includes the paved, wheelchair-accessible, half-mile out-and-back Rockefeller Prairie Trail, with a turnaround point at the Kaw Valley Overlook deck and a view across the valley toward the KU campus in the distance.

Trail amenities include shelters, drinking fountains, composting toilets, extensive interpretive signage and, at the Fitch Trailhead, an outdoor classroom with picnic tables. Students have designed and built bridges across small waterways. There is ample parking at the McColl Tract (across the road from the Fitch Reservation) and more parking at the Rockefeller Trailhead.

In addition to the trail system north of Lawrence, a new public trail is under development at the Rice Woodland tract of the Baldwin Woods Forest Preserve, southeast of Lawrence. This new trail will increase public access to the Preserve, which until now has been open only for guided tours.