The North Platte Valley

You are rolling through one of the great corridor valleys of North America, the North Platte River Valley of western Nebraska. For thousands of years, this river carved a broad, flat highway between the High Plains and the Rocky Mountains, and every group that followed the sun west used it: Lakota Sioux hunters, fur trappers in buffalo-hide coats, then a biblical tide of emigrant wagons.

The valley is roughly thirty miles wide in places, hemmed on the south by bluffs and buttes of pale gray volcanic ash called Brule Clay, which formed roughly thirty million years ago when volcanic ash and sediment washed east off the Rockies. What they deposited hardened into stone, and then the wind and the North Platte spent millions of years sculpting it into the dramatic landmarks that rise all around you.

The river itself comes out of Wyoming and flows east, fed by snowmelt from the Medicine Bow Range. Early settlers learned quickly that the river could be deceptive: a shallow trickle in August, a muddy torrent in April. The first small irrigation ditch in the valley was dug near Gering in eighteen eighty-six, barely a mile and a half long, just enough to coax a parched millet field back to life. Within two decades, federal reclamation projects had turned that trickle into a sprawling network of canals that transformed semi-arid grassland into one of the most productive agricultural belts in the Great Plains.

Today the valley grows sugar beets, dry edible beans, and corn on fields that would have astounded the emigrants who passed through and thought this land too harsh for farming. The twin cities of Scottsbluff and Gering sit on opposite banks of the North Platte, the Panhandle's hub. They share a skyline defined not by towers but by the great sandstone bluff that looms above everything, hundreds of feet of ancient sediment turned to stone, the same landmark that guided two hundred fifty thousand emigrants west and now watches over a valley those emigrants could scarcely have imagined.