We're in virgin territory. We're traveling the northern plains and the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. This is home to the fabled Wild West and the great Indian tribes of the Sioux, Pawnee and Cheyenne. It's also home to the legends of Wild Bill Hickcock, Calamity Jane, General George Custer and Buffalo Bill. And, it's the landscape of the tuneful "Give me a home where the Buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play". I'll become my own Buffalo Bill as I explore one of the great landscapes of the world.
On the east coast our world is framed by the environment. The urban and suburban developments, the trees and forests. We have to look up to see the sky. That framing is flipped on it's head out west. The Great Plains are framed by the sky. Everything else is subservient.
Traveling on the plains our existence shrinks to ant-like proportions. We revel in the solitude. We're captured in euphoric gaze at the stratospheric billowing clouds painting the heavens. We're in awe of the pioneers and the travelers of the Oregon Trail. On every ridge I expect to see a line of Sioux sitting majestic on their painted ponies surveying us as friend or foe. I think of two of my favorite movies, Dances With Wolves and Pow Wow Highway and love that I have entered their landscapes.
Cutting through the plains are gully's, gulches washouts and mini-canyons. Striations of sediment stripe the exposed earth and give color to the golden grasslands. Occasionally in western Nebraska buttes & bluffs rise from nowhere. These were significant landmarks for the great western migrations of the Oregon and Mormon Trails. I think of Bonanza and every cowboy movie I've ever seen as grass, sage and prickly pear cactus roll away from a gulch back towards a distant towering butte.
At desperately empty crossroads on the oceans of prairie we find abandoned cars patina'd to desirable finishes and ghosted homesteads standing as monuments to a past generations life's work.
It's not void of life out here though. There are a few homesteads, huge cultivated farms and even larger grazing lands with Texas Longhorns and Black Angus. Freight trains too cut across the landscape, their orange engines cutting a striking figure against the deep blue sky.
We flew into Denver from Boston and spent our first night in Boulder Colorado. In the morning we headed east, the Rockies receding and diminishing in our review mirror. Our goal was to get out on the plains. We head north through the Pawnee National Grasslands ...on a dirt road. Very cool and adventurous. We collected bugs on our windshield and streamed a billowing plume of dust as we broke the silence of the nothingness.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere we find our road washed out. What do we do? We go for it!
Further on we inconspicuously entered western Nebraska. We had no idea where we were but as long as I kept the sun on my left I knew we were heading north and we'd eventually run into Rt 80. We did, and continued to head north to the Oregon Trail landmark of Scott's Bluff where we took a slight detour east. We passed Courthouse Rock and Chimney Rock on our way to the town of Alliance to see the infamous Carhenge, a recreation of Stonehenge made out of cars!
With the sun arcing downward on the western horizon and satisfied with our first day's explorations we make haste for South Dakota. We know we're getting close when we hear the strains of Lakota tribal chanting on a radio station broadcasting from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Welcome to South Dakota.
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