North Platte

On our return trip in 2015, we had stayed in North Platte, but the viewing tower had been closed when I drove out early the next morning. And without the tower, it's very difficult to get a sense of the scale of what goes on here.

Union Pacific bills the Bailey Yard as the world's largest classification yard. It's a huge operation with two large humps to handle eastbound and westbound traffic. Hump yards refer to the way that freight cars are pushed one by one over an artificial hill, and then allowed to coast precisely onto any of a large number of classification tracks in the bowl from which new trains are built. I was mainly impressed by the number of big diesel locomotives moving around. Something like 130 trains a day pass through here.

M and I got together in part because of a shared interest in trains (at least it was one of our first conversation topics), but she just liked riding them. Little did she realize what an obsession trains were in my family! Of course, I don't even think of myself as a very serious train nut, but that's because I know just how much nuttier some folks can get. If the 8-mile complex was accurately modeled in HO (1:87), the resulting layout would need to be more than 500' long. In N-scale (1:160) it would still need to be almost as a long as a football field. In case you wondered!

Lincoln

Lincoln, Nebraska, is roughly half way between Wisconsin and the mountains, so it was where we stayed on our two-day leg from Madison to Colorado Springs.

On the way, we stopped and hiked around Ledges State Park in Iowa, which gave us some much needed exercise and a break from farm fields. I had visited a couple of years ago and enjoyed it: Boone 2012). We had dinner at the Loess Moose - a bar/burger joint north of Council Bluffs, then drove quickly around Omaha and into the sunset toward Lincoln.

Our hotel was in the renovated Haymarket District - a rejuvenated version of early Lincoln and the area around the old Union train station. We still had a little time to wander around - though it would have been nice to have a little more.

I rode my bike the next morning, a nice mix of bike paths along stream corridors and old rail lines -- but I also rode through downtown and checked out the state capitol. Of my ten early morning bike rides on this trip, this one was perhaps the least interesting, but it was still very pleasant - which I guess says something about how wonderful all of those bike rides were!

Panorama Point

Our trip west was pretty simple. Madison to Des Moines. And then Interstate 80 pretty much the whole way to the Bay Bridge. One of the few places we left it was on the west edge of Nebraska, where we took a series of zigzagging gravel farm roads to Panorama Point.

Panorama Point (5424') lies just a short hop from the corner where Nebraska runs up against Wyoming and Colorado. Nebraska, like Kansas, slopes gradually upward so its highest point inevitably lies near its western border.

The monument marking Nebraska's high point is a bit more conventional than the one on top of Mt. Sunflower, but both lie on private land atop broad hills that would be hard to mistake for mountains. This marker was placed by the Kimball Chamber of Commerce, apparently allowing them to refer to their town as the high point of Nebraska! (Although Kimball itself lies in a valley 25 miles away). The thing that looks like a grill is actually an old metal drafting table with the summit register tucked inside.

We could make out the snow-capped front range of Colorado in the distance below the clouds. I hadn't been sure whether we'd actually be able to see the mountains from Nebraska or not, although I recalled that they were visible from Pawnee Buttes just south of here in Colorado (one of which I had climbed back in either 1980 or 1983).

The sign warned of ranging bison, but they were nowhere to be seen. We did pass the old schoolhouse, several miles away, but it didn't look like it had been used in a very long time.

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.