The Tulsa Skyline

I have to admit that the first time I made my way across the breadth of Oklahoma I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw.  I did not expect everything to be nothing but miles of flat farmland, but I was amazed at how vertical the relief got even just outside of Oklahoma City, and how densely forested everything is.  You can check out this post from three months ago to see more of what I mean.

The blur is the result of extreme humidity conspiring with heat.  Yes, it actually looked like this.

This, for example, is the western approach to Tucson as one descends into the Arkansas River valley on eastbound I-70.

Tulsa has a very interesting broken skyline, with no clearly defined downtown area until one is almost on top of the commercial center.  The city also features a rolling topography that accentuates the lone skyscrapers even more.  All in all, an usual cityscape.

City Skylines: Kansas City

Though usually trumped by nearby Independence, Missouri in terms of perceived historical importance, Kansas City won the population and commercial battles later on and is one of the larger cities of the Midwest.  As such, it has one of the larger skylines of most cities in the eastern Great Plains.

While nothing like the grand skylines of Chicago or St. Louis, this one does stick out of an otherwise very rural landscape dotted with cities much smaller in scale, such as Topeka and Omaha.

As you can see, the landscape is rolling and well-forested.  Kansas City sits on the confluence of two great rivers and the gentle valleys associated with them.