Our quiet campsite

morning clean-up

our tiny campfire

Having pushed our luck driving through the Black Hills, and waiting too late to find a campground, we almost had to spend the night in a KOA. It looked like a smoky city packed in with buses, RVs, campers and giant wall-tents. In the center was a three-story building with floor-to-ceiling windows, through which we could see a giant chandelier. With prices to justify camping with a chandelier, we drove away prepared to sleep in the car. At the last moment before dark we found a small thickly wooded state campground with several vacancies left. We spent a beautiful dark night with a trickling stream just beyond our site.

Into the Black Hills

The Needles

a bison in Wind Cave National Park

The Needles Highway

As we drove north into South Dakota and threaded our way into the Black Hills via the Needles Highway, it was like a safari as we passed prairie dog towns, hawks, bison, mule deer, antelope, and bighorn sheep.

Museum of the Fur Trade

inside a trading post

traders' artifacts

museum "baidarka" model

fur traders' rifles

The Museum of the Fur Trade, a private museum outside Chadron, Nebraska, was a fun stop, though I'm sure not all the fun was the museum's intent. The displays, covering the fur trade throughout North America from the first Europeans to the multi-national Hudson's Bay Company, were pretty extensive and interesting. However, they could do without the introductory film which used historic reenactments that were shot in the 1930s and in which the Indians greeted the white men with "How!"

Agate Fossil Beds NM

the Niobrara River crossing the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

a daphoenodon pursuing a daeodon

mixed-grass prairie, Agate Fossil Beds National Monument

For a while growing up, a new book arrived in the mail once a month from a series by National Geographic. My favorite one was about the Age of Mammals. Somehow I could relate more to the bizarre looking giant boars and tiny horses on savannas than dinosaurs in jungles.

The Niobrara river valley in which the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument sits looks similar to how it did 20 million years ago. It's so easy to go outside here and, with your imagination, watch a nature show on the "plains of Africa" in in which these bone-crushing scavengers and beardogs scrambled for survival as their watering holes dried up.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #7: Cenozoic era fossils

The Cenozoic Era is the age of new life. During the Cenozoic, mammals diverged from a few small, simple, generalized forms into a diverse collection of terrestrial, marine, and flying animals, giving this period its other name, the Age of Mammals, despite the fact that birds still outnumbered mammals two to one. The Cenozoic is just as much the age of savannas, the age of co-dependent flowering plants and insects, and the age of birds. Grass also played a very important role in this epoch, shaping the evolution of the birds and mammals that fed on it.

Across western Nebraska

western Nebraska

rolling mixed-grass prairie

grain silos, Hemmingford, Nebraska

As we crossed western Nebraska, we stopped at a number of historic markers and roadside pull-offs. Most of them described the long distance cattle drives that used to cross these prairies in the brief period between when the ranchers came up from Texas and when barbed wire closed the open range -maybe 10 years.

Words like "open range" have such a capacity to stir the imagination, it's no wonder that such a long lasting culture, and a whole genre of movies and music could have come out of such a short period of time.

Stormy night at the Box Butte Reservoir

our campsite in the cottonwoods

banks of the Box Butte Reservoir

Jenifer sleeping in

Box Butte Reservoir

We decided to camp out where our map showed a lonely teepee symbol which turned out to be the Box Butte Reservoir. Built mainly for the irrigation of the area’s huge wheat farms, it is also a Recreation area for local boaters and fishermen. The woman at the next campsite stopped to chat in the evening where we learned that she lives in northwestern Nebraska (like most campers who come there) and was partying in a camper with her sisters for several days. She was proud of the area and excited to see people from out of state chose to stop and see what the area looked like.

All evening enormous thunderheads were chugging in from the west. The wind whipped up violently just as Jen and I climbed into our sleeping bags, and with no rain we tried to watch the storm with the tent door open until it felt like the wind would rip it apart from inside. During pauses in this noisy chaos we could hear the camper full of women drinking and laughing, which calmed my nerves. Then all hell broke loose. The lightning was immediate and rapid. With no escape, all we could do was lay there hoping our vulnerable, shaking little shelter would hold up. That was the last thing I remember before the birds woke me up to see the sun coming over the ridge to the east.

Carhenge

What is a road trip without stopping out there to see someone's strange dream realized, regardless of whether it's an intentional tourist trap or something far more sincere? The big empty parts of any map make an ideal setting for eccentric imaginations and their monuments, and the Great Plains do not disappoint.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #6: Carhenge

Carhenge is a replica of England's Stonehenge located near the city of Alliance, Nebraska on the High Plains. Instead of being built with large standing stones, as is the case with the original Stonehenge, Carhenge is formed from vintage American automobiles, all covered with gray spray paint. Built by Jim Reinders, it was dedicated at the June 1987 summer solstice. While living in England, he studied the structure of Stonehenge, which helped him to copy the structure's shape, proportions, and size.

-Wikipedia

Desert sea of grass

the Sand Hills of Nebraska

the Sand Hills of Nebraska

coal train running through the Sand Hills

"...a great desert of moving sand, where there is neither soil, timber or rock." -Scotsman James MacKay, 1795

"... this area may in time become as famous as the deserts of Africa." -Zebulon Pike, 1815

A forest from scratch

Nebraska National Forest

One of many strange experiments carried out across the Plains of North America can be found near Halsey, Nebraska, where in 1902 Charles Bessie tried to create a forest on 20,000 acres of the Sand Hills as a national timber reserve.

The National Forest operates a tree nursery there, supplying millions of seedlings a year, but much of the older, planted forest struggles.

Sand Hills

Antioch, Nebraska (ghost town)

Sand Hills

Sand Hills

At around 23,000 square miles, the Sand Hills are a unique region within the Great Plains. Almost exclusively sand dunes covered with grass, around 85% of it has never been plowed. Occasionally, blowouts occur in which the grass cover rips open by wind or truck tires, and the sand gets exposed. In order to stop a blowout from spreading, locals might throw tires in or drive an old car into one which somehow manages to stabilize the gash.

Lots of little ponds sit in the pits between the dunes, making the area good for livestock grazing but not much else, especially road building. So, one of the few state highways to cross this bizarre landscape follows the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line. We passed a few ghost towns on our way through this fascinatingly beautiful corridor.

Great Plains scavenger hunt item #6: Sand Hills

The Sand Hills is a region of mixed-grass prairie on grass-stabilized sand dunes in north-central Nebraska, covering just over one quarter of the state. Dunes in the Sand Hills may exceed 330 ft (100 m) in height.