Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area

South of Gering the land climbs into the Wildcat Hills, an escarpment between the North Platte and Pumpkin Creek that wind and water have cut into buttes, ridges and canyons standing five hundred to a thousand feet above the plain. Ponderosa pine is the dominant tree, and the emigrant road once crossed the northern hills at Robidoux Pass.

The hills are a place where animals came back. Audubon's bighorn sheep were gone from western Nebraska by the early 1900s. Game and Parks began restoring them in 1981 with a release at Fort Robinson, and later releases in 1988, 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2012 established herds here and in the Pine Ridge. Mountain lions, wiped out around 1900, returned by themselves in the early 1990s, and the Wildcat Hills and the Pine Ridge hold the state's only permanent breeding population. Elk live here too.

The state bought the land in pieces between 1929 and 1980, and the recreation area now covers 1,094 acres, with a 230-acre wildlife management area beside it open to hunting. Civilian Conservation Corps and WPA crews built three picnic shelters from stone quarried nearby during the Depression; they are still first come, first served, and the largest holds about forty people. The nature center, opened in 1995, serves as park headquarters, with a half-mile boardwalk outside and a 27-foot artificial ponderosa pine rising through its two floors.