MoDayTrips: Day 2, Sunday, July 6th - Hill City to Scott's Bluff

I left Hill City at 0655 this morning, heading north onUS-283 towards Norton. In Norton, I took a little side track in town, where this restored gas station is.

 

I crossed the north to the Solomon
River. There's cotton woods there and junipers. It looks like there
might be some oil in the area. Roads are good. The exposed rock is
kind of white. Going into Norton, I saw the Prairie Dog golf course.
I wonder if they have trouble with extra holes. I turned off onto
US-36 heading west towards Oberlin. A lot more of the same. The right
away was wide, so I wonder if that was a potential four lane on
highway or if it was just the old road was over there.   The highway
cuts showed a thick B soil horizon, with of kind of a yellowish soil
with a smaller black layer on top.

Oberlin is the site of the last Indian raid into Kansas - they have a museum for that. I turn north on US-83 and pass a feed lot, and the odor stuck with me for a while.

I cross into Nebraska at the 80 miles point for the day and head for McCook, Nebraska. Once I hit Nebraska, I see more curves in the first 10 miles than I did in 200 miles in Kansas. At McCook, I cross the Republican River again. The traffic lights in McCook, which is a decent sized town, are synced so I sailed right on through.

Now on US-6, which has quite a bit of traffic compared to what I was used to the first day. Now I'm driving through the Frenchman Creek bottoms. At the little hamlet of Hamlet, I see the Coyote Machine shop. Just north of that there's a 1940s car on top of an oil tank, both rusting away.

Now the time zones changed and I've gained an hour. This area is hilly. It has lots of sunflowers, lots of shelter breaks on both sides of the houses. At Imperial I turn north west on NE-61. I believe this is the divide between the Republican River and the Platte River. I make a short stop at Grant for a comfort break and to record this.

I continued north on Nebraska, 61 to Ogallala, where I stop for gas. The first station I went to didn't look like it was going to sell at the prices advertised, so I gassed up at Walmart. Now I'm on US-26 and I'm going to be seeing a lot of that the rest of the trip. Ahead of me, I see what looks some clouds, and I can't tell if there's rain shafts coming out of them. I can't tell if it's virga or rain. Eventually I got a couple of drops, so maybe it was some of both.

The road is busy. It's part of the Oregon Trail, and that part of it has lots of up and downs. From the high ground, you can see to the right down into the North Platte valley, and you can see the erosion that occurs along there. This is part of Kansas' Western Trails Scenic Byway. I passed something called Windlass Hill. I guess I guess I should have stopped there, but I think that's one of the places where they had to winch the wagons up or down a hill that was too steep for the animals to hold them.

Little further on, I saw a sign for the Chubby Rhino bar in Oshkosh. There wasn't much in Oshkosh.

Now I'm going down into the valley and a good but busy road. I'm running parallel to the Union Pacific. This is a coal train route. There are big coal trains, full ones headed east and empty ones headed west. I was able to count the engines on one that had two pullers, three helpers in the middle and one pusher at the end. That's a long, heavy train of coal cars.

I stop at Chimney Rock National Historic Site.

Also saw Courthouse and Jail rock, but didn't stop at those. I don't think you could anyway. I had a late lunch, chicken enchiladas, at a local restaurant in Gering.

Finally got to Scotts Bluff National Monument about 1:30 and spent quite a bit of time walking around that, getting overheated while enjoying photography.