West by Southwest 2025: Week 1

The big picture

My brain likes exercise way more than my body does. Fortunately, this trip is providing plenty for both. In addition to the beautiful hikes we are taking every day – often multiple times a day – we have had ample opportunities to learn new things. We've learned history: we traveled through reservations in Oklahoma where Indians from across the Eastern U.S. were relocated in the 19th Century; visited the town of Nicodemus, founded by African Americans fleeing white violence in Kentucky in 1877; drove along the old Oregon Trail and read exerpts from journals written by women who made the journey west; and seen some of the amazing artwork of Plains Indians from South Dakota and Nebraska. We drove through forests blackened by fire and visited fossil beds and fascinating geological formations to learn how volcanic activity, glacial movement, drought, and erosion have changed the landscape – and those who live on it – over time.

We live in an amazing world, and it's a gift to explore it at leisure. One of the best things about the kind of travel we do in our campervan is that we don't have to get anywhere in time for a reservation or event, so we can change our route at any time and stop wherever we want to. As our first week of travel in the West comes to an end, we look forward to another six weeks of learning and adventure. 

The Garden of Eden - a bizarre folk art installation in Lucas, Kansas. Pictured are the powers of domination that keep the working man (center) down: clergy, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. 

The Nicodemus, KS, Township Hall

A display at the Nebraska Prairie Museum in Holdrege, NE - both a fascinating collection of prairie life and a great parking lot to park the van for the night.

Marker along the Oregon Trail

Nebraska National Forest hideaway for wild camping

Chimney Rock, NE, known in indigenous languages as Elk Penis

Hikers, beware!

Scotts Bluff, NE

Views from atop Scotts Bluff

Agate Springs Ranch, Harrison, NE

An ancient rhino-like mammal whose bones were found in the Agate fossil beds

Western Nebraska byway - what you get when you set Maps to "avoid highways". That's how we roll.

Wild camping near Steamboat Springs, CO

The details (so we don't forget)

Joe and granddog Nash were at the Oklahoma City airport, waiting, when I arrived from Virginia last Saturday afternoon. We headed north to Guthrie, where we slept in a vacant festival grounds and plugged in so we could run our air conditioning – it was 94°! On Sunday, we visited Enid, the town my Charlottesville friend George is from. There we met his friend Cheri, one of a handful of progressives in town and director of its nonprofit human services agency. She also runs a little art colony and is a former member of the Enid City Council. It was a great visit. 

From Enid, we went northwest (through the town of Nash!) and up into Kansas. The highlight of our Kansas sojourn was the Aftrican-American town of Nicodemus, founded after white violence on free Blacks in Kentucky insipred an exodus into the free state of Kansas in 1877 to form a new community. Little remains of the town, which slowly dwindled in population after the railroad (intentionally) passed it by, but some descendants still live there and every year family members gather from across the country for a homecoming weekend. It's now a National Historic Site, and we hope the rangers there won't be forced to whitewash its history. 

Nebraska is a huge state! We came across the southern boundary about halfway across its length and headed for the Agate Fossil Beds National Monument in the northeast corner, through endless miles of flat wheat fields and grazing land, followed by the beautiful Sand Hills (of sandhill crane fame), and Nebraska National Forest and Grassland (great wild camping). 

My great grandfather, from Redfield, South Dakota, was friends with Agate Springs rancher Captain Cook, who owned what is now the Agate Fossil Beds. Both men befriended and protected Oglala Sioux bands when they traveled off the reservation, and visited one another when they could. In 1904, Cook's son discoivered what came to be the one of the largest collection of fossilized mammal bones in the world, about 23 million years old, and invited paleontologists to explore the site. The family later donated part of their ranch to become the National Monument, where you can explore the badlands formations and see some of the fossilized remains. When I was a little girl, my grandmother used to take me to the ranch to visit, and Mr. Cook's grandson (I think – he was my grandmother's age) took me out riding hoseback, looking for agates and fossils. Intense memories of those rides came back to me as we hiked around the area. 

Then it was south through Cheyenne, Wyoming, into Colorado. When I posted on Facebook that we were spending the night in Cheyenne, a high school friend, Carol Voorhis, invited us to breakfast with her in nearby Fort Collins, Colorado. Home to Colorado State University, Fort Collins is a very nice place – walkable and bikeable and politically progressive. It's not near the highway, and we would never have known it was there if she hadn't invited us. Carol's a realtor, and after breakfast, she took us (incluiding Nash) on a driving tour of the foothills beyond the city and the reservoir area where she and her family hike and kayak. 

We left Fort Collins on Friday via the beautiful Route 14 west through the Rockies and along the Cache de Poudre River, named for the French caches of ammunition stored there in the early 1800s. It was a very winding road and took us through a pass at 10,000 feet before opening on to a high woodland and plain where moose are plentiful (or so we were told; we didn't see any). We left the road just before Steamboat Springs to wild camp in the Arapaho National Forest on an abandoned Forest Service Road. We're going to stay here a couple days, letting Nash run free and taking the opportunity to do some writing and housecleaning.