Last day in Scottsbluff - this trip

Tonight's first photo is from yesterday's walk along the North Platte River just south of Scottsbluff. It looks west toward the eponymous bluff across the river. I found it strange that the banks are full to within inches of the floodplain and the current runs very fast across the whole river, yet there is almost no whitewater. Dorothy explained today that the river is almost totally controlled by dams for the benefit of agriculture. It never floods, and its current level is about as high as it gets.

Today, with Dorothy as my guide, I visited the top of Scott's Bluff, a national monument. The first of two views I selected for you tonight looks roughly north past a buttress of the bluff to the valley floor far below, the Union Pacific and BNSF rail lines carrying Wyoming coal to the east (you see an empty westbound train that later held us up for about 10 minutes as it crossed our path; here it is apparently holding to let a full train pass); and rising land to the north that is ranchland largely owned by Dorothy's daughter, several grandchildren, and their in-laws. The high land at the horizon is actually higher than the top of the bluff, though it doesn't feel that way.

Here's another view from the top of the bluff, looking west along the route of the old Oregon Trail from Scotts Bluff to Fort Laramie, where I stopped two days ago.

From there we headed north to another National Monument, the Agate Fossil Beds. This remnant of a 30-million-year-old watering hole was excavated from a pair of hilltop peaks from the 1880s to the 1920s, providing a large percentage of the plains mammal skeletons on display now in museums around the world. No fossils are now visible on the grounds but the site and the views are wonderful.

The biggest excitement of my two-mile hike was a prairie rattlesnake beside the trail near the top. Along with other hikers, I eased past it without difficulty and in the process took several photos of this beautiful animal. (As always, click on the photo for an enlarged view.)

Finally,  I couldn't resist a quick shot out Penny's bug-spattered windshield as we descended from the top of the gentle hill that forms the horizon of the second photo above. I think the bluff is the tiny bump on the horizon near the left edge of the photo. Everything else is open grassland, nearly treeless and often unfenced, home to beef cattle, hundreds of windmills that provide them with water in this semiarid country, and one oil well that may be the precursor of a new source of income for ranchers.