The Place Of Desert

For the last year or so in American Voyages, I have been largely focused on eastern North America.  My long-time readers and those who dig further into the heap of posts will find that my emphasis started out in a completely different direction, that of the vast, diverse wild-lands that is the West (or in the case of Mexico, the North).  My travels out there were what ultimately inspired me to give a go at this blog, but heaven knows I did not start out loving such a place.  I grew up in the boreal forest, which remains to me the most primal, holy, and majestic landscape on the planet.  I viewed the southern pinelands as the next most incredible landscape, followed by a child's imaginary view of the evergreen forests of the western rainy reaches, and largely disliked that which was in between, the world of the deciduous forests and grasslands.  When it came time for me to take my first ground trip across the continent, I was dreading the flat, boring plains that I would be forced to endure.

Of course my image of them was made uglier by what I figured they would be, a continuation of the flat, artificial cornfield "prairies" of far southern Ontario, Ohio, and southern Michigan.  There was no life between the Appalachians and the Rockies, I had gathered.  But then I drove into central Illinois and saw the sky get bigger.  I crossed the Mississippi and found Iowa to be rolling, and in places where the farms had gone fallow, lush green lands dotted with the occasional Bur Oak (Quercus Macrocarpa) standing as a lone witness to another world.  August rains had come and blessed the land so that it looked as if it were something out of Hobbit country.  Again, I placed my conception of the world on top of the landscape as it truly existed and was perhaps even eager to be seen by my overly-focused eyes. 

Then came Nebraska, and some more corn, especially between Lincoln and where the Platte and I-80 meet for the first time heading west.  That river though, that shallow, silty, seemingly unimpressive river... it stole my heart and my attention.  Perhaps it was the trees that did this; tough-as-nails Cottonwoods (Populus Deltoides) forming gallery forests that made the trip so much more enjoyable for my stubborn sylvan-centric tourist agenda.  The funny thing is, though, my eyes started looking for the prairie.  I had long wondered what the transition between eastern forest and western void was like, and found instead that the corn, or at least my concern for it, had prevented me from finding this remarkable transition area.  Around North Platte, however, I saw it; hills of grass and what I presumed was only grass.  I-80 kept following the rivers, but I was headed for golden California, and the majestic mountains of Colorado.  I turned onto I-76 and into the High Plains, and much like viewing a religious icon, my mind was made quiet and my gaze indirect.  The immensity of all that was not human overtook my concentration; not for nothing have many religious experiences of some of the most intense contemplative types from western Christianity (Jesus, in fact, started to "find himself" in the desert) to the Lakota mystics who once ranged far and wide over that same northeastern Colorado grass included sharing that nature made them forget the self and connect with the infinite.

Doubtless I found such a place in the small, innocent world of childhood.  I remember the towering pines and ancient granite of the Canadian Shield transporting me far away from the worries of the present.  Then I grew up, indulged in material culture, formed a rigid world view like most other college students sharply liberal and conservative alike tend to do, and forgot about my and my world-view's insignificant place in the cosmos.  At some point I started realizing that this was at best silly and at worst insulting to myself, my place in history, and my purpose in the greater world.  Maybe I was looking for something else, or something more whole... but that trip to California plunged me into less of a tourist run and into more of a pilgrimage.  The High Plains cleared my mind and prepared me for the grandeur of the mountains to come, and more surprisingly so, the desert beyond.  I was amazed at the vista given by the Front Range, but the High Plains managed to keep me even more enthralled with my first ever glimpse of an honest-to-goodness western plant, the Sand Sagebrush (Aretmisia Filifolia).

This one was taken at Pipe Spring National Monument, on the other side of its range compared to where we first met on the Colorado High Plains.  I think this is where we fell in love. 

If you've never experience one, I would say that it alone is an excellent reason to go out west.  It feels and smells incredible, with the best olfactory performance coming after a rain.  Like so many White people before me, I always viewed sagebrush as an afterthought, even a weed.  I had encountered its northernmost version, Artemisia Frigida, back in my magical boreal youth.  Perhaps I was bred to hate prairie, however, because I found nothing likeable in that patch of meadow that constituted the "back yard" where I found my first specimen of this plant.  I have since apologized to what I assume is its children.  Back then, however, I was all about the pines, like so many people are.  No one can tolerate the fly-over states, and they seem to view anything even drier as either a wasteland, the backdrop for Vegas and sci-fi movies, or a good place to extract resources and produce more crap for us to throw away.  I certainly headed into my California voyage with a similar attitude.  Then I saw the open skies, and then I saw the sagebrush, and then I saw the yuccas... and then the cacti.  Nearly two years later, on a misty March day, I saw the saguaros, and a view of the desert that had gone from hard on life that had turned into otherworldly had then become something closer to ethereal.  The desert is a place teeming with life that has managed to not only make the best of the situation, but in many cases to positively thrive there. 

I write this because far too often we dismiss the desert as an unwelcome, useless intrusion into our idealized view of the world.  We like it lush and green, happy and managed/cultivated.  Our vision of the world, even the wild portions of it, are often frowned upon if they do not conform to our place in it.  This attitude exists in persons as different as lobbyists for the Koch brothers or ecological restorers concerned with the dwindling wolf populations on Isle Royale.  Those religious types I mentioned would probably tell the rest of us to focus instead on greater things than our immediacy.  I write this because today I read a piece related to this post, written by an "activist" living in the Mojave, an atheist no less.  I wanted to share his piece here, with all of you, and give a brief description of my own of why I think it is important.  Please, take the time to read it, because I'm shutting up now.

https://www.beaconreader.com/chris-clarke/the-desert-is-not-your-blank-canvas

Sunday Afternoon Post: "Fly Over"

Or even "drive through".  Such is how Oklahoma through Saskatchewan get labelled by people who think there is no life outside of large cities with water or mountain views.  If you focus on the manicured farmland (which does, by the way, feed us) and preconceptions, then sure, it's all a bit like this:

Kansas, heading north on Kansas 177 somewhere between Council Grove and I-70.

I have to admit, the first time I headed west I was intending to zoom through boring old I-80 as fast as possible.  Along the way though, I started wondering just what I was zooming through.  The prairies, it turns out, are not pancake flat for the most part, and were never a uniform sea of grass.  Nebraska features cliffs, forests, and incredible river valleys.  Kansas, seen here, ranges from forests to near desert like conditions in its extreme southwest.  The sound of the wind is incredible, the storms are quite the sight, and the flowers... let's just say try to find a natural "meadow" around where you live and get back to me on how boring grasslands are. 

In our next post, we shall explore misconceptions about location!

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.

Yes, There are Trees in Kansas and Nebraska

People sometimes ask how anyone can stomach driving across the plains through boring "fly-over" states such as Kansas or Nebraska.  They envision long, straight, flat stretches of land with nothing but corn extending into the horizon, perhaps at sometime replaced by open grass range.  While I could humorously make the claim that they are missing the forest for the trees and ignoring the majesty of the open grasslands and incredibly huge sky, such places are often better defended by stating that trees actually do exist in nearly all of non-tundra North America.  No, they might not be towering cathedral pillars as they can get to be in the northwestern or eastern forests, but they are hardly shrubs either.
 

This and below were taken at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Council Grove, Kansas.

Each of the plains states and provinces, in fact, have arboreal symbols, some of which tend to surprise people.  Oklahoma's state tree is the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis), while chilly, open North Dakota's is the American Elm (Ulmus Americana), a tree of great size and commonly a beloved landscape plant throughout eastern North America.  Kansas and Nebraska offer the more common Eastern Cottonwood (Populus Deltoides) which can be found anywhere on the Great Plains that enough water has been provided for the plant to get its start.  Many historic routes and modern highways, in fact, are never far from the reassuring marching line of cottonwoods rising above the grasses and willows as signs of readily available water running along with them.

While the Trans-Canada highway, I-90, 70, and 40 make a clear shot across the grasslands, I-80 stays with the cottonwoods in much of Nebraska as it strikes west along the Platte River.  (See: "Green Is My Platte Valley").  Most towns spring up on the horizon with more trees than buildings in site, even on the high plains.  The truth is that there is enough groundwater and precipitation here that a planted tree can thrive quite well.  Nebraska, in fact, has quite national forests enough to green up the map as much as the eastern states can get painted over.  Grasses are the reason such trees can usually thrive in the first place, their roots being excellent retention agents for water and responsible for making the soil of the plains so workable to begin with.

While the trees do diminish naturally the farther west one goes, to the point of almost negligible forest cover in the rain-shadow of the Rockies, river courses and even slight sharp rises (such as bluffs) will feature some sort of tree cover.  In something of a parley of the trees, east and west invisibly meet in this great division point of North American botany.  Cottonwoods, willows, elms, and cedars follow river courses while they are seemingly watched by western pines and junipers atop river bluffs.

Taking the Alternate Route

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, one can now travel across the country from coast to coast without actually seeing anything."  -Charles Kuralt

How right this man was.  Express highways have transformed not only our travel experiences, but an entire culture.  I had been meaning to write about the concept for some time, especially after I had an experience this summer of seeing the Toronto-North Bay corridor in Ontario pretty much reduced to a rapid transit pathway.  Where before there had been delightful little towns with great roadside restaurants and maple sugar candy shops, 2012 had shown itself to be the year of excessively mowed down forests (to make room for hundreds of yards of clearance on either side of the glorious new double-landed divided highway) and signs that point off an exit toward towns that now exist to travelers only in name.  This, of course, is old news back in the United States, where the transition from interesting federal highways to streamlined interstate took place more than half a century ago.  There, little towns faded out of existence in some cases, along with grand urban cores that diminished as people could now more easily live in distant suburbs and commute further away from, in less time (the brake lights say otherwise), downtown areas.

Fortunately, nostalgia and tourism can often combine in an effective marriage.

In Springfield, Illinois.

US Highway 66, now largely supplanted by I-55, 44, 40, and 15, is one such child of this nuptial blessing, and rightly so the most famous of buried highways.  When the interstates replaced her long, glorious road from Lake Michigan to the Pacific Ocean, many roadside attractions, businesses, and entire communities suffered greatly.  Still, many have survived, enough so that taking the business loop on the modern freeways is definitely a worthwhile experience, if for no other reason than to see the namesake of song lyrics.

Yes, you really can stand on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, but you have to exit I-40 in order to do so.

Tourist traps and affordable hotels aside, heading down the older highways is often the only way to get to travel some of the former great travel paths of the continent.  Much of the emigrant trails of the 19th century have not been replaced by modern interstates, where technological advances in engineering allowed for more direct routes to be carved and blasted through formerly difficult terrain.  Those wishing to get to California or Oregon the more traditional way need to say goodbye to I-80 at Ogallala, Nebraska.  Sure, you don't get to speed along in your car at 80mph or more, but a solid 60 is not horrible, and you can pass by things like, well, this:

Chimney Rock, at Bayard, Nebraska.  US 26 can take you there!

You know, just as people used to, because it was an easier, more pleasant route, and because you could actually see a thing or two on your way out there.  Sometimes the first part does not always hold true, as is the case with US-6 going over, rather than tunneling under, the continental divide, but the second part usually benefits from this.  I doubt I will ever want to drive I-15 in Utah again, not after the fun and dangerous route I got to drive on Utah 2.  The views alone were worth the extra gas.  That said, I actually think I used less gas, because I was not driving like a rabid dog barreling down the interstate.  Something can be said for the old 55mph limit.

Green Is My Platte Valley

A week ago we traveled to the Platte River and saw this exotic waterway give life and passage among some otherwise open and dry prairies.  We had a nice image of the sandy river banks being well-vegetated, but what is the view like for travelers "sticking to the trail" on modern I-80?

Sorry for the blur.  Blame the windows on the Archway.

Green and deceptive.  This view takes in a western horizon of the straight and level I-80 from atop the Archway Monument at Kearney, Nebraska, which is a bridge that crosses the interstate and has a museum dedicated to the western trails and development of the highways that would run through the valley.  I-80 is the modern version of these routes, and it stays within or at the limits of the upper floodplain of the Platte through most of central and western Nebraska.  Straight on, you can see forests of ashes, willows, cottonwoods, Eastern Redcedars (Juniperus Virginiana) and some oaks.  On the left of the image, you can see the land dip down into the river itself, and the right of the image is vegetated by another stretch of moist soil along a nearby creek.  If one were to look to the north or south of this vantage, however, they would find a lot of open farmland and stretches of prairie beyond the fields.

Still, the half mile on either side of the river is forested these days, and probably was before it was nearly clear cut during the days of the pioneer trails.  The effect is that of one long oasis of woodlands stretching across the Great Plains.

A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep

One of the great waterways of the continent is the Platte River, which flows through and drains the area seen below:

Permission is granted to copy this image under the GNU free documentation license.  This map is by Shannon1, a prolific photographer and cataloger of rivers in North American and around the world.

While not among the largest drainage basins out there, the Platte is significant in that it has long served as something of a natural oasis of water and tree cover on the otherwise open prairies of the Great Plains.  Cranes and other waterbirds would take shelter and rest here during their great annual migrations north and south along the Central Flyway, a bird travel route that largely follows the guiding north-south geographical features of the Rockies, the eastern coast of Mexico, and the Plains themselves.  

The term oasis can be a bit of a misnomer, however, as the Platte is not your typically palatable river for human use.  She carries quite a lot of sediment with her, both from the Rockies and the surrounding Plains, especially in parts of Wyoming and Nebraska that are a bit sandier and slightly more arid that the rest of the central Plains.  The Arkansas to the south also carries a similar load of sediment, but owing the a larger drainage basin and the fact that it is probably a bit older than the Platte (which probably really only got underway as the melting, thicker Rockies glaciers of the last ice age helped it out), it tends to have a bit more volume and thus water quality to it.  The title of this post is a tribute, in fact, to the running joke that past Americans have long made about the very shallow and braided river. 

Looking downstream from eastbound I-80 on the Platte near Ashland, Nebraska.  Though braided, the spring rush will actually fill the river enough to make it look a bit deeper.  When it's like this, though, you can walk across it!

 Still, the water is not exactly terrible either.  The birds enjoy it, the cottonwoods, ashes, and willows grow in abundance along its banks, and it once boasted an extremely healthy population of brook trout which thrived in the cool waters in the narrower channels and along the margins shaded by the dense forests.  The river, in this condition, actually served as an inviting passage for migrants seeking to get to the lands of California, Oregon, and Utah.  Given the choice between the vast, somewhat mysterious Plains and the familiar waters and forests that made up the Platte oasis, travelers from the eastern United States tended to follow the river. They fished from it, let their animals drink from it, and used the trees for fuel, so much so that the place became something of an exposed wasteland in a matter of mere years.  

The trout declined, the forests disappeared, and the river further eroded the nearby land and became even more of what the running joke mocked it as.  Native oral traditions and the written records of French traders do not leave us much of history of what the Platte was once like, but the presence of brook trout, which normally like clear or tannin stained waters, tend to convince me that it was once a bit different.  It probably was still braided, especially near its mouth at the Missouri, but it might also have been a bit more stabilized and purified by an abundance of shoreline vegetation.  Some of the crossings of I-80, for example, have spans which cross several channels nearly on top of each other, all of which are now covered in thick vegetation.  Research into former wildfire patterns indicates that this is not necessarily the result of modern prevention of fires, but because the forests did not experience significant burns in comparison to the surrounding grasslands.  The forests might only have seen significant burns a century or so apart, which would have been more than enough time for cottonwoods to keep a good cover over stabilized braid islands, which is what those crossings of I-80 pretty much are.  This could mean that we are seeing some of this river habitat fully restored.  Hopefully I can get a good shot of this sort of thing the next time I am there.

In any event, I-80 follows the Platte in what is one of the more verdant crossings of the Plains.  If all one does is look straight on to the road, in fact, one might not even guess they have entered the great grasslands until well into Nebraska.  Looking out to the sides, however, a traveler can see the great vistas open up in rolling hills at the edge of the Platte valley edges, often many miles distant.  The edges close in more the further west one goes, and the Plains take on the appearance of small mountains, having been well eroded over the centuries.  Grass can hold soil in place, but it is no substitute for trees.

Eventually the ashes and willows start to give way, and even the cottonwoods start getting a bit stunted up on the High Plains in Wyoming.  The river gets a bit more of a "mountain glacier green" to its waters by the time it gets to Ft. Laramie:

Taken in May of 2010 at Fort Laramie National Historic Site.

By this point it has long since divided into two main tributaries, both of which are named Platte, both of which live up to this French name meaning "flat".  Both tributaries emerge from the Front Range of the Rockies and take on a less than flat appearance as they pour out of the Continental Spine.  Here they leave behind the cottonwoods and eastern survivors and meet the forests of the west.  In both nature and history, the Platte has long served as a bridge between two different worlds, sort of like a North American Nile (which connected tropical Africa to the Mediterranean world).

Navigating by Natural Landmarks

Back in the day when many people could not read and thus wasted little time with things like maps, travel was guided either by familiarity or directions that involved making a journey from one landmark to the next.  In cities, this could be done by referencing buildings and works of civil engineering.  In rural areas and the wilderness, however, travelers looked for things like massive trees, rock formations, bodies of water, and if they got really desperate, animal tracks and scats.  The native peoples of North America were amazing experts at the science of natural navigation, and they passed on this knowledge to mountain men and army scouts who in turn led settlers on to far away destinations.  In turn, some of the settlers would write to relatives looking to follow them, informing them of things they had seen along the way to guide them.

Others would go so far as to write and sell guide books with illustrations, supplemented by maps, of notable landmarks like Chimney Rock that could set the reader on the course to Oregon or California.  This became especially important out on the Great Plains where bluffs and rocks could keep travelers from wandering too far off the beaten path.  The rolling, easy expanses of grassland looked inviting compared to the cottonwood and ash thickets along the Platte River, an invitation that could easily lead to getting lost and out of site of the trail.  On the plains, one could easily backtrack, but further in along the mountains, landmarks that could serve as a mark of reassurance would prevent worse confusion that might find travelers confused in canyons, valleys, and thirsty deserts.  Even if the way back to the trail was made clear, valuable time would be lost wandering off course, which might result in becoming trapped in the higher elevations as winter snows overtook unwary travelers.

Scotts Bluff, western Nebraska, a famous landmark for travelers on the emigrant trails.

These days, despite the depressing lack of geographical knowledge retained by or even taught to most school students, people navigate by signage and reassurance shields posted along roads and highways.

Some people rely on a safe world of numbers even more by not being found on the road without their GPS devices, but I usually remind such people that it never hurts to have a basic knowledge of where you are and where you plan on heading.  Knowing the general lay of the land, including vegetation cover, possibilities in protruding geology, general directions of water drainage, and even typical patterns of climate need not be the sole province of editors at National Geographic.  People of previous centuries, with far less information at their fingertips, knew where they were based on something as seemingly mundane as a single boulder in the middle of a mountain valley.

A mere rock compared to the neighboring cliffs near El Morro, in New Mexico, but actually one of many landmarks guiding travelers heading toward the Arizona uplands.

Granted, people also moved a lot slower back then.  A day's travel might be reckoned in two dozen miles rather than the hundreds we have become accustomed to these days.  The significance of navigating by landmarks takes on a new meaning when this comes to mind, at any rate.  Compared to the majesty of the Grand Canyon or the Rocky Mountains, we might be more understood for overlooking something like the natural monuments along the Platte in Nebraska which end up being rest stops on the way to see the bigger and more impressive features, though we should hardly be excused.  The truth is, the entire journey becomes far more interesting in paying attention to the details encountered along the way.  Nature often rewards those willing to take a second look at the familiar and seemingly mundane, though it does little credit to us to consider our continent mundane, especially when our predecessors were so enthralled by the many things they saw as they explored more of their home.

Chimney Rock

In western Nebraska along the North Platte about 80 miles from Wyoming stands Chimney Rock.  The California, Oregon, and Mormon trails all passed this landmark, which was one of the first natural signs that emigrants were making progress on their journey from the east.  Chimney Rock was a refreshing sight to see, as the monotony of six weeks of travel on the plains started to wear into the travelers.  While the Platte valley is not exactly as dull as most envision it to be (trees grow along the river itself, the plains are quite austerely lovely, and distant bluffs wall in the valley), the rock does tend to stand out among the landscape quite a bit.  

The Lakota had a more colorful descriptive name for it.

Emigrants would stay along the river, about a mile from the rock, perhaps for a day or so.  Some would try to climb to the top, others would just use it as a lovely backdrop for a break and some celebration; the trail was about a third over at this point.  The land would also get a bit more rugged from here on out, as the great uplift of the Rockies actually begins around here.  The result is the rock, as well as the bluffs and mesas that follow it in the miles to the west.  As the Platte carved out a valley for itself through the risen ground, softer layers of rock underneath a hard cap of sandstone eroded away.  Chimney Rock was one of the places where the underlying layers survived, though it continues to erode noticeably even within human lifespans.  For now, it remains one of the outstanding features of a dramatic, windswept, and wild high plains region.