Nebraska’s landforms fall into two broad regions: the Dissected Till Plains, a belt of gently rolling, glacier-scoured hills in the east where Omaha and Lincoln sit, and the Great Plains, which cover most of the state and hold its most distinctive features. Those include the Sandhills, grass-stabilized dunes covering just over a quarter of the state; the braided Platte River valley; the buttes of the Wildcat Hills, among them Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff; the pine-covered Pine Ridge escarpment; and the canyon of the Niobrara River. The land climbs steadily from the Missouri River at the Kansas border, the lowest point at 256 m (840 ft), to Panorama Point in the far southwest, the highest at 1,654 m (5,424 ft) according to the USGS. Across its 200,330 km² (77,347 sq mi), Nebraska is far less flat than its reputation suggests.
The Sandhills: a quarter of Nebraska built from dunes
North-central Nebraska is covered by the Sandhills, a region of mixed-grass prairie growing on sand dunes that grass roots have pinned in place. Depending on where the boundary is drawn, the region covers between about 50,760 km² (19,600 sq mi) and 61,100 km² (23,600 sq mi), just over a quarter of the state. Individual dunes can stand more than 100 m (330 ft) high, and the general surface rises from about 550 m (1,800 ft) in the east to about 1,100 m (3,600 ft) in the west. The dunes were designated a National Natural Landmark in 1984.
The grass cover is recent in geological terms. Climate reconstructions show the dunes were probably active, blowing sand rather than grassland, as recently as the Medieval Warm Period, when much of the region was scrub desert. Today the sand sits on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, and where the water table meets the surface in the hollows between dunes it forms thousands of shallow lakes and wet meadows. The eastern and central Sandhills drain through tributaries of the Loup and Niobrara rivers, while much of the western Sandhills has no outlet at all and is made up of small interior drainage basins.
Because the soil is loose sand, the plough never took hold. Cattlemen began running Longhorns here in the 1870s, and the 1904 Kinkaid Act let homesteaders claim 640 acres (2.6 km²) rather than the 160 acres of the 1862 Homestead Act. "Kinkaiders" claimed nearly nine million acres (36,000 km²) between 1910 and 1917, but most attempts to farm the dunes failed. The result is that the World Wide Fund for Nature rates as much as 85% of the Sandhills ecoregion as intact natural habitat, the highest share anywhere on the Great Plains. For more on how dunes like these form and migrate, see our guide to what a sand dune is.
The Platte River’s braided channels and the crane stopover
The state takes its name from the Platte. Nebraska is an anglicised form of the Otoe and Omaha words for "flat water", and the French name, rivière platte, carries the same meaning. The river forms east of the city of North Platte where the North Platte and South Platte meet, and it runs about 500 km (310 mi) across the state to the Missouri River south of Omaha. For most of that distance it is a textbook braided stream: wide, shallow, sandy, split by islands and shifting bars. Pioneers joked that it was a mile wide at the mouth but only six inches deep, and forty-niners said it was too thick to drink and too thin to plough.
That shallow, open channel is what makes the central Platte, between roughly Kearney and Grand Island, one of the most important bird stopovers on the Central Flyway. Up to 450,000 lesser sandhill cranes pass through each spring, roosting on the sandbars at night and feeding in the surrounding fields by day, and fossil evidence suggests cranes have used this valley for over 10 million years. The same flat valley also carried the Oregon, California and Mormon trails west, and later the first transcontinental railroad; Grand Island, Kearney and North Platte all grew up beside the river. Our Platte River guide follows the river from its Rocky Mountain sources.
South of the river lies a landform that is easy to miss: the Rainwater Basin, an 11,000 km² (4,200 sq mi) loess plain that was once pocked with thousands of shallow playa wetlands. Most have been drained for corn and soybeans, but the survivors still feed and shelter millions of migratory birds in spring and autumn; about 90% of the original wetlands have disappeared since settlement.
Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff and the Wildcat Hills
In the western Panhandle, between the North Platte River and Pumpkin Creek, the old High Plains surface has been cut by wind and water into the Wildcat Hills, an escarpment of forested buttes, ridges and canyons standing 150 to 300 m (490 to 980 ft) above the surrounding land. Ponderosa pine is the dominant tree, bighorn sheep and elk live here, and the Wildcat Hills and the Pine Ridge are the only parts of Nebraska with a permanent breeding population of mountain lions.
Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff are outliers along the northern edge of these hills. Chimney Rock, in Morrill County, is a pillar of Brule clay interlayered with volcanic ash and capped by harder Arikaree sandstone; that caprock has protected the spire since it broke away from the retreating cliff line to the south. It rises roughly 90 m (300 ft) above the North Platte valley to a peak of 1,289 m (4,228 ft). Sketches, paintings and an 1897 photograph show it was once taller, before erosion and lightning trimmed it.
About 32 km (20 mi) to the northwest, Scotts Bluff National Monument protects two bluffs, Scotts Bluff and South Bluff, with outcrops named Dome, Crown, Sentinel, Eagle and Saddle Rock. More than 250,000 emigrants passed the bluff between 1843 and 1869, and from 1851 the Oregon and California trails squeezed through Mitchell Pass, the gap between the two bluffs. Chimney Rock became a National Historic Site in 1956 and appears on Nebraska’s 2006 state quarter. Both are classic buttes, isolated hills whose width is less than their height; our explainer on what a butte is covers how they form.
The Pine Ridge and the badlands of Toadstool Geologic Park
In the far northwest, between the Niobrara and White rivers, the Pine Ridge escarpment marks the northern edge of the High Plains tableland. Erosion has broken it into forested buttes, ridges and canyons whose ecology resembles the Black Hills, about 80 km (50 mi) to the north, more than anywhere else in Nebraska. Ponderosa pine dominates, and much of the ridge is protected in Chadron State Park, Fort Robinson State Park, the Nebraska National Forest and the Soldier Creek Wilderness. Fort Robinson, where Crazy Horse was killed in 1877, lies in the ridge country 3.2 km (2 mi) west of Crawford.
North of Crawford, in the Oglala National Grassland, the land breaks into bare clay and sandstone badlands at Toadstool Geologic Park. The park takes its name from pedestal rocks whose harder sandstone caps sit on narrower stems of softer clay, the same principle that shaped Chimney Rock at a smaller scale. Fossils of entelodonts and hyaenodons have been found along its 1-mile (1.6 km) loop trail.
The Niobrara canyon and 19-metre Smith Falls
Along the northern edge of the Sandhills, the Niobrara River has cut a narrow canyon on its roughly 914 km (568 mi) course from the High Plains of Wyoming to the Missouri. About 70% of its water is seepage from the Ogallala Aquifer, which gives it a steadier flow than most Plains rivers. A 122 km (76 mi) stretch from Valentine east to Nebraska Highway 137 has been the Niobrara National Scenic River since 1991.
Spring-fed side streams plunge into this canyon, and the tallest is Smith Falls, which drops 19 m (63 ft) into a small gorge on the south bank about 19 km (12 mi) east-northeast of Valentine. It is the highest waterfall in Nebraska. The shaded side canyons stay cooler than the surrounding grassland, which lets paper birch and aspen survive there as relics of the boreal forest that covered north-central Nebraska during the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.
Further east, in Antelope County, the Ashfall Fossil Beds preserve rhinos, horses and camels that died around a waterhole about 12 million years ago under drifting ash from the Bruneau-Jarbidge eruption in present-day Idaho, nearly 1,600 km (1,000 mi) away. Across the region the ash fell about 30 cm (1 ft) deep, but it drifted to 2.4 to 3 m (8 to 10 ft) in the waterhole’s hollow.
Panorama Point to the Missouri: a 1,400-metre tilt
Underneath these features, the whole state is a tilted slab. Panorama Point, in southwestern Kimball County near the corner where Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming meet, is Nebraska’s highest point, yet it is only a low rise on the High Plains, reached by a ranch road through a bison pasture. From there the land descends almost 1,400 m eastward to the Missouri River in Richardson County, where the river leaves the state at 256 m (840 ft). The mean elevation is about 790 m (2,600 ft).
That slope explains the pattern of rivers. The Niobrara in the north, the Platte in the centre and the Republican in the south all rise in the west and run east across the state, the first two straight into the Missouri and the Republican by way of Kansas. The Missouri itself forms the state’s eastern border with Iowa and Missouri. The eastern end of the slope is different country. Ice Age glaciers scoured the far east, and when they retreated they left the Dissected Till Plains, rolling hills of glacial till cut by streams. Nebraska’s two largest cities, Omaha and Lincoln, both sit in this region, and so do most of its people.
The climate follows the same gradient. Rainfall across the Sandhills alone drops from about 580 mm (23 in) in the east to under 430 mm (17 in) in the west, and statewide the humid continental climate of the east gives way to the semi-arid west, where trees grow only on escarpments like the Pine Ridge and Wildcat Hills. Nebraska’s old tourism slogan, "Where the West Begins", was argued over for good reason: depending on who you ask, the West starts at the Missouri, at the 100th meridian or at Chimney Rock. Following the Platte upstream from the till plains to the Wildcat Hills is the clearest way to see each of those candidate lines for yourself.