Hawkeye Point

Hawkeye Point, the highest point in the state of Iowa (1670'), is a spectacular summit just south of the Minnesota border.  It's surrounded my corn fields and is marked by flags, a monument, and the grain silo of the Sterler Farm (the Sterlers allowed access previously, but with their passing, the site is now publicly-owned).

I've been gradually building my high point collection.  Some like Denali (AK), I'll never climb, but at least I've seen from from close up.  Similarly with Mount Rainier and Mount Hood.  Mt Whitney (CA) and Mt. Elbert (CO) I climbed the summer after high school.  Mt Katahdin (ME) and Mount Washington (NH) I climbed earlier, although the latter I've come back to many times, including by car.  Devon and I reached Brasstown Bald (GA), Mount Mitchell (NC), and Black Mountain (KY) on a road trip a few years ago.  We all drove up to Mount Greylock (MA) two years ago.

Hawkeye Point was an easy climb - but far less crowded than some of the others.

Niobrara River

The Niobrara flows eastward across northern Nebraska, snaking its way through the Sandhills in a steep-sided valley with forested sides and bottom.  It's not out of place in Nebraska, just very different than what someone who had only seen I-80 might expect.  The Wild and Scenic stretch below Valentine gets plenty of rafts, canoes, and kayaks -- although my timing precluded me from spending the day doing the latter.  Maybe next time.

The river is crossed by many bridges - from the long railroad trestle outside of Valentine to a series of small one-lane bridges downstream.

Smith Falls pours out of the aquifer on the south side of the valley, falling 60' feet to make Nebraska's highest waterfall.  The main river tumbles over a few minor rapids in this stretch, but only a couple that require portaging.  Downstream it widens and probably gets tough to navigate through all the sandbars.

Alliance

My circuitous route into the Sandhills left me with few choices for the night and I wound up at a ridiculously over-priced Holiday Inn Express in Alliance.  Alliance has become a major transportation hub, what with all those coal trains getting re-shuffled, re-crewed, and re-dispatched.

But the real transportation hub in Alliance is a few miles north and best seen as the June sun is rising in the eastern sky.  Carhenge is a testament to the american worship of cars and of idiosyncratic roadside attractions (Cadillac Ranch, in Texas, is another fine example).  It's also for sale, so if you want to mow the grass around the sculptures and restore the souvenir shop at America's Second Wackiest Attraction (TripAdvisor), this your chance.

Sandhills

I've been across western Nebraska by various routes over the decades, but I still have powerful memories of a north-south drive through the Sandhills sometime late in college (which was in New Hampshire, so how I wound up driving N-S in Nebraska says something of how I spent my time off).  This trip I drove a large rectangular loop - in both the evening and the early morning - when the light was low and perfect.

The Sandhills are a very large stabilized (for now) dune field that sits shallowly on the Ogallala Aquifer, which occasionally peaks through to form lakes and extensive wetlands.  It's mainly grassland - grazed, but only locally plowed or irrigated.  It may actually look something like it did 200 years ago - something one can't say for a vast majority of the Great Plains.

Toadstool Park

Toadstool Geologic Park is not exactly on the way to and from anywhere, unless you're a coal train headed from Gillette to Atlanta.  It's about as far to the top left as you can go in Nebraska without being in either South Dakota or Wyoming.  I didn't spend much time there, and didn't seek out fossils or Eocene footprints (of which there are supposed to be many), but I did wander the short loop that wanders through the bizarre eroded formations and badlands that define this long topographic break across the high plains.

Black Thunder Mine

Long before the issue of coal exports raised its head in Washington this past year, I had wanted to spend some time around Gillette checking out the mines and the trains.  Reading John McPhee's account of a coal train in Uncommon Carriers was one impulse, but there were others.  Including my long-time fascination with energy, geology, and railroads.

My first introduction to the Black Thunder Mine was in 1981.  I had been offered a job with Schlumberger and the first thing they did was to fly me up from Denver to Gillette to go out on a logging job - probably the idea was to either whet the appetite of new engineers or to convince them to find another line of work.  I was checked in at the Holidome? and late that night my host engineer called to say a job was ready south of town.  I remember being amazed as we drove past the lights and equipment of Black Thunder sometime after midnight, on our way out to the rig site (which was somewhere farther east).  Something about the dragline at night looked like a scene out of science fiction.  The oil rigs turned out to be pretty cool at night, too.

I suppose a large fraction of the electricity generated in the U.S. is "mined" within a few tens of miles of Gillette.  And then shipped all over the country in conveyor belts that look a lot like long railroad trains with a big loop of track at each end - one at the mine, one at the power plant.  The rail system developed to service the mines in the swath that extends south from Gillette is pretty impressive.

The mines are a very real presence in this area, as are the oil pumps and rigs, the rail yards, and miles of industrial service and supply warehouses.  Personally, I have far more trouble with the commercial strips and the boom-bust character of the towns and the social problems that go with the young, transient population than I do with the coal mines and the oil wells themselves!  Maybe it's what I took away from several years in places like Williston, Dickinson, and Fort Morgan.

Thunder Basin

The Powder River Basin lies between the Black Hills and the Big Horn Mountains.  Some of it lies within the Thunder Basin Grassland, although I'm not sure what that management designation does or does not represent.  There are cattle and bison, prong horn and sage brush, crude oil and bituminous coal.

The sky is huge, the floor is olive gray, and the horizon is a continuous circle.  Mesas and buttes and rolling prairie and occasional sandy river bottoms compete for space.  I zigzagged my way from Casper north and east to Gillette and then southeast to Newcastle - I think I was trying to get a better sense of the wide-open multi-use landscape.  And just lots of chances to observe antelope, drag lines, oil rigs, and trains, along with lots and lots of sage brush and short-grass prairie and the American Steppe.

Independence Rock

I think despite all my driving across Wyoming, I never drove this section between Muddy Gap and Casper.  And never visited Independence Rock - one of numerous geologic landmarks along the old trails (Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluff, Pompey's Pillar, City of Rocks, Register Cliff, etc) - that lent themselves to carving initials and graffiti.

Independence Rock was so-called because travelers on the Oregon Trail typically reached this area in early July and may have often celebrated Independence Day here.  This would have been an amazing place to watch the wagon trains go through during the 1850s and 1860s.

I guess this qualifies as a granitic inselberg or a bornhardt, although it's not as large or as isolated as many better examples. It is an easy clamber to the top - just beware nooks and crannies hiding poisonous snakes.  And no need to add initials - the originals are interesting, the recent ones are not.

Jeffrey City

I remember driving through here frequently in the late 1970s and early 1980s - it's the main route between Laramie in the SE part of Wyoming and the Wind Rivers and Yellowstone in the NW part.

The west is full of towns like this along desert and high plains highways - I can picture several in the Mojave to add to those in Wyoming and Montana.  They are the archetypal "wide spots in the road."  What makes this one is unique is not its up and down history - that's a common theme - but it's association with uranium and its emergence as a commodity in the second half the 20th century.

Castle Gardens

I discovered Castle Gardens by accident when planning the trip - maybe a google search on Wyoming Petroglyphs - and only later recognized the connection with McPhee's book (see below).  It's not exactly on the main road.  And the BLM doesn't advertise it heavily, in part to protect some stunning native american artwork with a history of vandalism. But both the geologic landscape and the rock art are well worth the trip - as long the the road is dry. I suspect these roads would be impassable after a rain storm.


I re-read John McPhee's Rising from the Plains this spring in anticipation of this trip. It's partly about the geology and the landscape of Wyoming, but it's built around the geologist David Love, whose family's homestead and ranch was just a couple of miles west of here.

Oregon Buttes

The Great Basin is the largest interior drainage basin in the U.S., but not the only one.  The Great Divide Basin in central Wyoming is another place where drainage can go nowhere.  Of course, there's no water to have to drain in the first place.  I crossed the Continental Divide Trail (I should have been looking for it, although I doubt it gets the traffic that the Appalachian and the Pacific Crest get) and dropped over the rim, finding a perfect little spot for the tent in a little copse of alders.  The next morning - early, since the sun discovered my east-facing site quickly - I headed down into the basin and then eventually north through Oregon Buttes towards South Pass.

Oregon Buttes is so named because it was a landmark just south of the Oregon Trail where it crosses South Pass, the most anti-climatic (and therefore practical) crossing of the Rockies anywhere.  I rejoined the highway and had a late breakfast at MacDonalds in Lander.