Nebraska - STR-2021-8

Monday, 21 June

With our stay in Nebraska last night, Sprinty earned his 39th state camped in since being adopted by Kris and Darrell in February 2017. During the night, we had a thunderstorm roll through which we hoped would wash some of the dirt road dust off Sprinty.

Our stay last night was at Enders Lake Golf Course, a Harvest Host. An advantage of staying at a golf course the night before you plan to play golf is that you can be one of the first golfers out in the morning. After our typical morning routine, we moved Sprinty from the area where they had us park for the night to the golf course parking lot. Not only were we the first golfers out at about 7:30AM, we were the only golfers out. A downside was that they had the sprinklers going, and they were running the entire time we were playing. Several shots had to be done quickly, else you got a soaking. Kris seemed better able to time her shots and stayed dry - Darrell got soaked once.

The course was okay - it was obvious they were working hard at the course. The greens rolled very nice and you would not know they had a tournament yesterday other than the pin positions on the turtle-back greens. Most of the pin positions were nearly diabolical. Kris played well. Darrell who usually has a slight draw to almost hook golf shot was hitting shots straight most of the day. As a result, he was in the right rough more, and playing in and around trees. Kris earned honors on the day.

After golf played at our pace (except for the sprinkler system encouragements), we headed northeast to North Platte, NE. As we were backtracking a bit from our drive yesterday, we stopped to get a photo of the car on top of tanks by the highway we saw yesterday. We wondered how the car got up there, and why it was up there.

Our destination in North Platte was the Golden Spike Tower.

The Golden Spike Tower is an eight-story tower located on the south side of Union Pacific's Bailey yard and provides a panoramic view of the world's largest rail yard. As the brochure said, "more trains than you can keep track of."

Bailey Yard has 17 receiving and 16 departure tracks handling 14,000 rail cars every 24 hours.  3,000 cars are sorted daily in the yard's eastward and westward yards, nicknamed "hump" yards.

Using a mound cresting 34 feet for eastbound trains and 20 feet for those heading west, the hump yards allow four cars a minute to roll gently into any of 114 "bowl" tracks. Here they become part of trains headed for destinations in the East, West and Gulf Coasts of America, as well as the Canadian and Mexican borders.

An average of 139 trains per day are largely comprised of raw and finished goods, such as automobiles, coal, grain, corn, sugar, chemicals, and steel along with consumer goods, including electronics, apparel and other retail products. 36 full coal trains/day going east; 36 empty coal trains/day going west.

We watched a short video on the ground floor which provided a good description of the yard operations. Emily at the desk suggested we start with the 8th floor, which is an enclosed viewing deck with a number of descriptive exhibits.

On the 8th floor, there was a retired train worker on staff to answer any questions anyone had. He was helpful for us to take the video description and the exhibit photos and translate them to what we saw out in the rail yard: 2,850 acres, two "hump" sorting yards, 8 miles long, over 400 miles of track, 11,000 turn outs.

The rail yard also included a locomotive repair shop, a sand tower used to load sand in locomotives used to keep the wheels from slipping and hundreds of locomotives and rail cars.

The train operations and repair shops at Bailey Yard are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The fueling and service center processes more than 8,500 locomotives each month, using technology like overhead cranes and elevated work bays to maintain fluid operations.

We spent a long time on the 7th floor open air deck watching the operations - railroad cars being pushed over the hump and rolled onto the various tracks in the bowls, watching trains getting made up in preparation for heading east, etc. Very interesting, and being able to hear the sounds of locomotives and rail cars being connected made it more interesting. A visit would appeal to someone interested in trains; train operations; process design; engineering of such a large operation; or in large system design. Both of us found it very interesting.

After the tour, we turned west and started planning where we might stop for the night. After several long driving days in Kansas, we did not want to press it again today. We finally settled on the Lake Ogallala Campground located in the Lake McConaughy State Recreation Area (SRA), Ogallala, NE. We knew from ReserveAmerica that they had plenty of sites available for the night. Our concerns were raised when we saw two signs on the road to the SRA prominently stating that all camping in the SRA required reservations. We pressed on anyway.

Upon arrival, the camp host confirmed we needed a reservation and a daily vehicle pass. She said we could get the vehicle pass at the kiosk nearby. The lady at the kiosk could not reserve a campsite for us, and said that same-day reservations could be made on ReserveAmerica until 5PM. We had scoped out a site, reserved it through ReserveAmerica (we use it enough we should get Frequent Camper Points) right in the parking lot by the kiosk, and settled in for the evening.

Tuesday, 22 June

With the change to Mountain Time, we are waking up way too early. But it does let us see the sun come up.

Today, we set a goal of taking a break of full days and having an easy day. That lasted all of a couple of hours. On our way to our first stop of the day, we crossed over 3,000 miles of driving since we left Maryland two weeks ago.

Our first stop of the day was Ash Hollow State Historical Park (http://outdoornebraska.gov/ashhollow/) in Lewellen, NE, about 35 minutes from our campground. Sweet spring water made Ash Hollow a major stopover on the Oregon and California trails and prompted prehistoric Indians to use it, too. Ruts etched by west-bound wagons are still visible on the bluffs.

As we neared Ash Hollow, we saw another fence with boots on top of the metal fence posts. So we looked it up. We found a number of explanations (https://www.nebraskalife.com/blog/post/if-the-boot-fits), including:

"A meaningful tradition for some is that when a family member, or hired hand passes away, his or her boots are 'posted' as a memorial. A rancher might even put his own boots on the post when a favorite horse gallops into the wild blue yonder."

We started by going to Windlass Hill, which is located about two miles south of the main park.

At the base of the hill, the exhibit said the use of a windlass to let the wagons down the grade was folklore.

As we walked up the trail, the bridge over the ravine had an exhibit stating that the ravine started as a set of wagon ruts cut through the grass and soil by the wagon wheels. Subsequent erosion resulted in the ravine.

Photo of ravine looking uphill

Photo of ravine looking downhill

We measured the incline of the hill in this vicinity at 14% grade.

Near the top of the hill, we found the marker for the Oregon Trail. We can say that we walked the entire width of the Oregon Trail today.

At the top of windlass hill, it was easy to identify the likely path of the wagons based on the shallow ravine at the top.

Here is a marked up version of the same photo:

The altimeters on our watches indicated the top of the hill was over 150 feet above the parking lot.

After returning to the parking area, we stopped to see if we could access the pioneer homestead site. We couldn't as it was located on the other side of a barbed wire fence.

We then headed for the main part of Ash Hollow State Historical Park as it was getting close the the visitor center opening time per the web site.

We stopped to check out the stone schoolhouse built in 1903.

At the main parking lot, there was only one car in the parking lot just after 9AM. We found the visitor center locked, so we had to be satisfied with the sign in the parking lot.

We decided not to hang around in the hope that the visitor center might open in a few minutes. As we continued west on US 26, we stopped to view a Historical Marker alongside the road which explained that we were traveling along the Mormon Pioneer Trail.

Also stopped there were four motorcyclists traveling from Missouri to Montana. They saw my retired Navy license plate frame and struck up a conversation. All four were veterans - one Navy, two Army and one Marine Corps.

Our next stop was outside the city of Alliance - the famous Carhenge (https://carhenge.com). Just north of Alliance, Nebraska, along Highway 87, stands a replication of Stonehenge, England's ancient mystical alignment of stones that chart the sun and moon phases.

Carhenge was created by Jim Reinder's desire to have a Stonehenge replica, a "Stonehenge West", for his hometown of Alliance, Nebraska. With no giant slabs of stone present in the area, he decided to use a new medium - cars

The Fourd Seasons

As we were wandering Carhenge, we noticed a white Winnebago Travato pull in behind Sprinty. It particularly caught our eye as it was white - a white Travato is pretty rare. As we were returning to Sprinty, the owners, Gary and Sue, struck up a conversation. They had bought their Travato only a few weeks ago and were in their first extended trip. They were so excited and full of questions.

We continued north to visit the Fort Robinson Museum and History Center in Crawford, NE. We purchased the daily park pass required to visit the state park, then went to the visitor center to plan our visit. The lady behind the desk also shared that the mammoths on display in the Trailside Museum were found on her family's ranch near Toadstool Geological Park. The mammoths were found in 1962 by a couple of soil conservation people who saw one of the tusks exposed by erosion. So of course, we had to check out the North American mammoths.

We started with the Trailside Museum of Natural History, and on the main floor was one of the mammoths found on the lady's ranch.

What made this find unusual was that two mammoths were engaged in battle and died together most likely because one of them fell while entangled and dragged the other one down. Unable to disengage, they died together.

The Trailside Museum was a great primer for our trip to Toadstool Geological Park later in the afternoon.

Next we visited the Fort Robinson History Center. Exhibits in the 1905 post headquarters building traced the history from the post's role guarding the Red Cloud Agency (1874-77) through the housing of World War II German PWs (1943-46).

The exhibits portrayed some of the people whose lives intersected with Fort Robinson - Native Americans, Indian agents, African-American Buffalo Soldiers, the K-9 Corps, German Prisoners of War.

Looking at the arrangement of the buildings, it appeared that Fort Robinson was not built as a defensive fort, rather a garrison fort. The arrangement of buildings around a large central parade ground was similar to Fort McNair in Washington, DC, and Fort Belvoir in Virginia - to name just a couple of Army posts.

We looked at one of the adobe officer quarters, constructed in 1887, which was restored to look like it might have when it was occupied in the late 1800s.

Having visited several other forts recently, we elected to pass on looking at all the buildings which were pretty spread out.

With a few hours left in the day (a day that started with a gol of being an easy day), we drove 25 miles north, 13 miles on washboarded dirt roads to Toadstool Geological Park. Some sections were so rough that Sprinty could only tolerate driving about 8-10mph.

When we first looked at the site from the parking lot, we weren't sure it was going to be worth the drive out.

There are three trails from the parking lot - a 1.1 mile loop trail, a 3 mile trail and a 5 mile trail. As it was over 90 degrees, we settled on the 1 mile loop trail. We are glad we did. The trail ventured further into the badlands rock formations and we enjoyed navigating the diverse landscape.

The exhibits at the parking lot were helpful to understand the landscape and grasslands.

While the Toadstool Geological Park had six primitive campsites, we chose to spend the night back at Fort Robinson State Park Campground. We retraced our route of 13 miles of washboarded roads, picked out a shady campsite in the Soldiers Creek Campground, and settled in for the night.

Wednesday, 23 June

Despite sleeping very well, we were both up at first light. We decided to take advantage of the state park lodge restaurant for breakfast. We arrived before they opened at 6:30AM and placed an order to go. We enjoyed the breakfast in Sprinty.

Waking up early resulted in an early start. As we traveled south of Harrison, NE to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, we stopped at the Historical Marker along the road who told the story of how For Robinson came to be.

We arrived at Agate Fossil Beds National Monument at about 7:30AM.

We hiked the 1.1 mile Daemonelix Trail first. This trail went by rock formations from 19 to 22 million years ago and the fossilized burrows of prehistoric animals and evidence of ancient grasslands.

We arrived at the visitor center just before they opened. We walked a portion of the Fossil Hills Trail, then went to the Visitor Center. We got a native escort for part of the walk down the sidewalk - a Bullsnake. Critter sighting number one.

The visitor center video and exhibits told the story of the fossils discovered in the late 1800s. The fossil bed was quite significant in the number and types of animals found on James Cook's ranch. The museum also included the Cook Collection - native American artifacts the Cook family received in the late 1800s and early 1900s from close family friends like Red Cloud, chief of Ogallala Lakota. The items were in remarkable condition for their age. Fascinating.

We then continued south to Scott's Bluff National Monument in Gering, Nebraska, which rises 800 feet above the river. We had researched the monument and learned that the drive to the top of Scott's Bluff was a narrow road with three tunnels. Vehicles longer than 25 feet and/or higher than 11 feet 7 inches are prohibited. The Ranger at the entry station reminded us of that restriction. Sprinty is 9 feet 10 inches tall, and 24 feet 1 inch long (not counting the bike rack). So off we went up the Summit Road. Once at the top, we hiked the South Overlook Trail and the North Overlook Trail.

As we looked down from the overlooks, we imagined the thousands of settlers making their way on the Oregon Trail that used Scott's Bluff as a landmark.

The roads named "Old Canyon Trail" that we used to get to the visitor center continued on through Mitchell Pass. Originally, Mitchell Pass was not passable due to the terrain on the other side. Even after it was opened for use, it was still the more challenging route than the Robidoux Pass further south (also further from the North Platte River, a key source of water for the settlers).

We enjoyed the video and exhibits at the visitor center. We headed for our first choice of where to stay for the night, Robidoux RV Park, Gering, NE. We arrived with no reservations and were able to get a site with electricity for the night.