Historic Lake Scott State Park

Crossing the plains on U.S. 83 you see no sign of this canyon until K-95 drops into it. Its bluffs are the Ogallala Formation, sand and gravel washed off the Rocky Mountains, lying on top of the Niobrara Chalk from the Cretaceous sea. Where the two meet, groundwater moving through the gravel hits the tighter chalk and comes out as springs, Big Spring among them. They feed a 100-acre lake, first called Lake McBride. At the south end of the park the Ogallala forms a long ridge called the Devil's Backbone.

That water is why people kept coming. Plains Apache people lived here, and Pueblo families from Taos and later Picuris, who had fled Spanish rule in New Mexico, built the stone pueblo called El Cuartelejo among them in the later 1600s and watered fields from the springs; its rebuilt foundation is on the west side of the lake. Herbert and Eliza Steele came in 1888, lived first in a dugout, and then built a four-room house of native sandstone, now a museum of early Scott County life. Civilian Conservation Corps crews built benches and bridges around 1934, and you can still find them.

The park covers about 1,020 acres, with camping, a swimming beach, fishing, and trails for hiking and riding. Battle Canyon, where Northern Cheyenne families held off pursuing soldiers on September 27, 1878, is a few miles south on Ladder Creek.