The Overland Directory
Guided trips and local guides for the places where knowing the ground matters: remote deserts, high passes, long river corridors and borders.
We’re working on adding the latest guides in Kansas here.
Guide trips for a living? Tell us where you run them.
Access is the reason, not difficulty. Almost all of Kansas is private, and someone who already knows a landowner opens ground no map will. A guide is also worth it for reading weather on the plains, where a storm you can see for 40 miles still arrives faster than you expect, and for the unsigned county roads into the Arikaree Breaks and the chalk badlands, where the survey itself says the roads may be impassable when wet.
A guide earns the fee in the places where the map runs out of detail. They know which wash flooded last week, which gate is locked, where the fuel is, and how long the hard section really takes with a group.
A guided trip usually brings
Ask the questions a land manager would.
Honesty about experience makes for a better trip.
Not for most travel. A guide earns the fee on routes that are remote, technical or hard to get permits for, and on first trips where you would rather learn than guess.
That is how most overland guiding works. The guide leads in their vehicle, you drive yours, and the trip sets minimum requirements for the vehicles that come.
From Manhattan at 1,023 feet to Mount Sunflower at 4,039. Altitude decides what your engine, your brakes and your lungs have to work with, and how late in the year the passes open.
Pass, road and summit elevations are the figures published by the agency that manages them. Town elevations are the town’s or county’s own figure where it publishes an exact one; the rest are from the U.S. Geological Survey (3D Elevation Program at the place’s official coordinates), retrieved September 18, 2026. Every source is listed at the foot of the page.
Reviewed September 19, 2026. Conditions, closures and rules change; check with the managing agency before you travel.