Sandhill cranes fly in at sunset to roost on the shallow sandbars of the Platte River near Kearney.
Tom Koerner, USFWS / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Nebraska · Region

North Platte & the Great Platte River Road

Buffalo Bill's Scout's Rest, Bailey Yard from the Golden Spike Tower, Fort Kearny, a million cranes at Rowe, Stuhr's railroad town and the Genoa boarding school.

7 places to explore

For most travelers this is the I-80 corridor, and the Platte is the reason. Its broad, shallow valley gave the overland trails, the Union Pacific and then the interstate an easy grade west. The region divides at Grand Island. East of there the Loup joins the Platte at Columbus; west of it the valley runs on past Kearney to the forks at North Platte.

The valley is Pawnee homeland. Their earth-lodge villages stood along the Platte and the Loup, and in 1848 the Pawnee bands sold a strip of the valley near Grand Island for $2,000 in goods so the army could build Fort Kearny. Their last Nebraska reservation lay on the Loup at Genoa. Under pressure from Lakota attacks and settlers, they agreed in October 1874 to sell it and were gone to Indian Territory by October 1875. In 1884 the government opened a boarding school for Native children from other nations on the old agency land at Genoa and ran it for fifty years.

Two things belong only to this valley. From mid-February to mid-April more than a million sandhill cranes stop on the central Platte, roosting on bare sandbars at Rowe Sanctuary. And at North Platte, where Buffalo Bill staged the Old Glory Blowout in 1882, Union Pacific's Bailey Yard sorts freight cars over eight miles of track beside the Golden Spike Tower.

What to See in North Platte & the Great Platte River Road

7 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

Sandhill cranes fly over bare trees and gather in a field at the Rowe bird sanctuary in the early 1970s.

Rowe Sanctuary

Gibbon

Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

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Hikes & Trails

Lake McConaughy seen from the air, its white sand shoreline running to Kingsley Dam beside circles of irrigated fields.

Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam

Ogallala

Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.

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Historic Sites

The white Second Empire house at Scout's Rest, with green shutters and a cupola, stands behind flower beds in North Platte.

Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park

North Platte

Scout's Rest, the North Platte ranch house and barn of William F. Cody, in the town where his Old Glory Blowout of July 4, 1882 became the first act of the Wild West.

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The reconstructed log stockade at Fort Kearny State Historical Park stands on mown grass among tall trees.

Fort Kearny State Historical Park

Kearney

The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.

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The long two-story brick shop building of the former U.S. Indian School in Genoa, its name painted across the front.

Genoa U.S. Indian School Museum

Genoa

The surviving trades building of a federal boarding school that ran from 1884 to 1934 on the Pawnee Nation's last Nebraska land, where at least 86 children died and the cemetery is still lost.

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Towns & Gateways

The white colonnaded Stuhr Museum pavilion sits on its island inside a circular moat in Grand Island.

Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer

Grand Island

Edward Durell Stone's island pavilion in Grand Island and an 1890s railroad town of moved buildings, among them the cottage where Henry Fonda was born in 1905.

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Industry & Mining

The Golden Spike Tower rises behind a yellow Union Pacific passenger car beside Bailey Yard in North Platte.

Golden Spike Tower and Bailey Yard

North Platte

A tower with seventh- and eighth-floor decks over Union Pacific's Bailey Yard in North Platte, the world's largest railroad classification yard, in a town the railroad laid out and fed troops from.

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Scenic Drives through North Platte & the Great Platte River Road

Scenic Byway

NE-2: The Sandhills Journey, Grand Island to Alliance

About 277 miles on NE-2 from Grand Island to Alliance: the Stuhr Museum, Butcher's homesteader photographs at Broken Bow, the Middle Loup, the planted forest at Halsey, the Spade's town and the potash ruins at Antioch.

277 mi · 5 hrs

Stories from North Platte & the Great Platte River Road

Nature

The Birds of the Gravel Pits

The piping plover and the least tern once nested on the Platte's bare sandbars; on the central river they now nest almost entirely on sand and gravel mines and the beaches of a reservoir.

3 min read

North Platte & the Great Platte River Road rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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