The Sandhills, the Pine Ridge and the Platte in 5 Days

Start downtown at the Durham Museum, Omaha's Union Station of 1931, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific. Its waiting room, 160 feet long under a sixty-foot ceiling, handled up to 10,000 passengers a day, and a Pullman car and a steam engine still stand on the track level. Take I-80 southwest across the Platte to the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum near Ashland, where a B-36, an RB-52 and an SR-71 stand indoors among about forty aircraft of the command that ran the nation's nuclear force from Offutt. Lincoln is thirty miles on. At the Nebraska State Capitol, Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower with a sower on top, free tours leave from the north entrance daily, and the west chamber holds the only one-house legislature in the country. From Lincoln it is about ninety-five miles west on I-80 to Grand Island.

Spend the morning at the Stuhr Museum on the south side of Grand Island: Edward Durell Stone's pavilion on its round island, and beyond it Railroad Town, an 1890s village of buildings moved in from around the region, with the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905. Then pick up NE-2, the Sandhills Journey, northwest through Broken Bow. Past Anselmo the grass closes in, and the Middle Loup keeps the road company to Halsey and the Nebraska National Forest, pine planted by hand on the dunes from 1902 to prove a botanist right and still recovering from the Bovee Fire of 2022. The Bessey Recreation Complex has trails and river access. Go on through Thedford to Mullen for the night, gaining an hour at the time-zone line just east of Seneca.

Highway 2 runs on west through Hyannis, past Ellsworth, the Spade ranch's town, and the concrete ruins of the First World War potash plants near Antioch, to Alliance. North of town stands Carhenge, Jim Reinders's copy of Stonehenge in nearly forty gray cars, built at a family reunion as a memorial to his father and dedicated at the summer solstice of 1987. Take US-385 north to Chadron and go east of town to the Museum of the Fur Trade, on the site of James Bordeaux's trading post on Bordeaux Creek, where the oldest known point blanket, from 1775, is among the goods both sides traded and made their own. Then go west on US-20 along the Pine Ridge escarpment, through Crawford to Fort Robinson, the post that guarded the Red Cloud Agency. Crazy Horse surrendered here in May 1877 and was bayoneted at the guardhouse door that September; a marker stands at the place. Sleep in the fort's old quarters.

Start at the fort's history center, which opens at 9, for the breakout of January 9, 1879, when Morning Star's Northern Cheyenne, denied food, fuel and then water, broke from the barracks into the snow rather than be sent back south, and sixty-four of them were killed. Then go north from Crawford on NE-2 and NE-71 and out the gravel Toadstool Road to Toadstool Geologic Park in the Oglala National Grassland, where a one-mile loop winds among clay pedestals capped with sandstone and tracks cross rock some thirty million years old. Come back through Crawford and west on US-20 to Harrison, then south on NE-29 to Agate Fossil Beds. Before the quarries, see the room that keeps what Red Cloud and his family gave James Cook: Red Cloud's shirt, pipe bags from three generations and a painted hide of the fight at the Greasy Grass. Follow NE-29 south to the North Platte and drive the Summit Road at Scotts Bluff through its three tunnels, then look down on Mitchell Pass, a gap one wagon wide.

Go east on NE-92 to Chimney Rock, the spire the trains watched for, which travelers measured again and again as it wore away; the Abbott Visitor Center looks across at it. A few miles on, south of Bridgeport, a path leads to the base of Courthouse and Jail Rocks. Then follow US-26 down the river to Ash Hollow, the trail's spring below Windlass Hill. Six miles northwest, on September 3, 1855, Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six people in Little Thunder's Sicangu Lakota camp on Blue Water Creek, and in September 2025 sixty-nine belongings taken from the camp came home to the park's visitor center. Cross Kingsley Dam at Lake McConaughy, built for farms far downstream, and drive on to North Platte. The house at Buffalo Bill Ranch, Cody's Scout's Rest, closes at 4:30; if the day runs long, save it for the morning. End on the decks of the Golden Spike Tower, open until 7 in summer, above Bailey Yard.