i genuinely cannot imagine such a large piece of land being 2% forest, i would lose my mind travelling through that
It’s even stranger than that.
There are a fair few trees here. But most of them aren’t natural, they were planted. Planted in perfectly straight, compass-axis lines that run for about a kilometer each, slicing the plain into a giant square checker pattern.
in my mind that’s still forest, it’s not like most of europe’s forests are in any way natural at this point, any time you see a forest here in sweden that has a suspicious amount of oaks of the same age that’s probably a forest intended to provide lumber for ships a couple hundred years ago.
I could be wrong, but it sounds like the trees form lines on a grid with no trees in the middle. Kinda like if you went insane and put trees every 10 lines in cities skylines. I wouldn’t consider that a park, much less a forest.
picture a 60 mph / 100 kmph road with one lane on each side winding between endless hills covered with medium height yellow grass and dotted with the occasional grazing cow, elk, etc.
That’s what most of the state looks like in my experience. Pretty beautiful.
sure it’s beautiful, the ocean is beautiful too, but that much open space would make me so uncomfortable. Denmark is bad enough.
My family drove through Kansas once when I was a kid, and yep, the Great Plains are kinda rough on the head if you aren’t used to open grasslands. It’s like being on the ocean but grassland instead of water. Just grass and land as far as the eye can see
I grew up there, it’s a tundra/prairie biome. I grew up in the he’ll creek formation area though so lots of buttes. Any trees were largely planted by settlers.
It’s quite beautiful in its own right. Just avoid the eastern part of the state, that bits flat as a board and about as boring.