Apache Junction Seekers

Al and Linda enjoy visiting new places and having new experiences. In 2006, we spent 4 months in Europe and originally created this blog to keep friends and family informed. After a long delay, I'm trying to catch up with what we've been doing since then and hope to carry on into the future.

Sunday, July 11, 2010


After being in small towns for so long, North Platte (pop. About 20,000) was incredibly busy and crowded. It’s apparently a major tourist stop for those heading off to or coming from the vastness of western Nebraska and the RV park was pretty much full up by the end of the evening. For us, North Platte itself was a destination, specifically the Golden Spike Tower, an observation tower built for viewing the UP Railroad’s Bailey Yard, the “largest rail classification yard in the world.”



Trains come in from all directions, the cars are disconnected and then reconnected into different consists depending on the ultimate destination for the cargo. This car goes to Chicago, this one goes to Atlanta, and so on. There is also a huge locomotive maintenance facility with the big diesels lined up in rows, each awaiting their turn. You need to be a real railfan to spend a lot of time watching this happen, kind of like grass growing, but it’s interesting to have seen.





It turns out that the Golden Spike Tower, eight stories high, is built on private land next to the railyard and the UPRR wasn’t too happy about it. In a field next to the tower, corn had been planted in a pattern to resemble a steam locomotive. It was too big to get in all at once with my camera, but in this shot you can make out that the loco was headed toward the left with the cowcatcher in the bottom left corner.












North Platte was also the town that fed soldiers that were being moved on troop trains during WWII. There is a nice little memorial with a plaque right next to the railroad on the site of the canteen.












In the city park, a Challenger steam locomotive is on display, possibly the only one in the country. It is so huge that it would dwarf a modern locomotive.













We made another foray into regional food which involved going to one of the Runza restaurants in North Platte. The quintessence of the region is contained in a Runza which seems to be available in all but the smallest towns in Nebraska. It turns out to be a bun-like object with a filling that features onions and cabbage along with ground meat. I ordered the Swiss and mushroom variation. It tasted like something my mother might have made—nice and gooey, with notes of salt and Swiss, so completely homogenized that any taste of onion or cabbage was totally submerged in the overall blandness of the creation. I did spot a slice of mushroom. So American, these foods with no texture, no natural flavor, but handy to eat while driving a car or at the office. The restaurant was doing a great business with cars lined up at the drive-thru window, another great American invention (or should I say, oil-company invention?)



Valentine, Nebraska, up near the border with South Dakota, is way too small to have a Runza restaurant but it boasts an amazing number of canoe outfitters. Canoeing on the Niobrara River was something that we had been dreaming about since we had driven through Valentine eight years before. Our timing then was unfortunate, because we were there the day after Labor Day and the canoe outfitters were all closed up for the season. This time, our timing was only mildly off, since we wanted a canoe for a Saturday, the busiest day of the week for the outfitters. Nevertheless, we were on the river by 9 am and floating serenely through the Niobrara Wildlife Refuge. There were a lot of folks at the put-in point but the river separates everyone out quickly. The Refuge was filled with birdsong although except for turkey vultures and crows, we didn’t see any from the river. The river was moving at something like 4 – 7 miles an hour, so a person didn’t have to do much paddling except to avoid obstructions. However, there are times when you wish the river wasn’t moving even that fast, like when you have to make a decision on how to navigate a rock garden and the river keeps pushing you closer and closer, decision or not. We scraped bottom a few times but didn’t bounce off any rocks. In most places the river is pretty shallow, although I’d just as soon not capsize anyway.


When we booked our trip, the young lady in the office emphasized that if we wanted to go through the Refuge, we could have no alcohol, no water balloons and no water guns. When we trooped out to the van that would deliver us along with our canoes to the put-in point, a large trailer was being filled with huge inner-tube style floats. After floating through the Refuge, we came to a put-in spot and understood both the restrictions and the floats. This was party city. Floats were being launched as fast as they could be put in the water at the narrow access. Since the river was so shallow, the partiers could just hop off and walk their vessel to wherever, and most of them were joining up in large rafts of ten to twelve floats, complete with special floats to accommodate coolers. Now we didn’t have to navigate through rocks and shoals, we had to avoid drunken floaters with water cannons. Everyone was good natured so early in the day and we only took one shot of friendly fire, but it was definitely not a place for old fogies in canoes. Unless they were dirty old men, because there was a lot of flesh on display. Definitely a cultural experience. I suspect that there were lots of young folks with massive hangovers and skins the color of lobsters the next day. Fortunately, this was at the end of the trip and we could enjoy the memories of the peaceful Refuge.




Several times on the trip so far we have encountered concentrations of dragonflies, but nothing like we saw in north-central Nebraska. These were huge creatures, their transparent wings tipped with black that made it easier to observe their wingbeat patterns. We sat out one evening and just watched them swarm around, filling the air. Knowing practically nothing about dragon flies, I assume they were catching something smaller than them in the air, especially since they would abruptly change directions, just like the swallows that were swarming at a higher elevation. It made me dizzy to watch them. Another kind of dragonfly we saw regularly looked like it had been dipped in gold, even the lace of its wings. A third kind had eyes like lumpy turquoise and a body that looked like it was constructed using teeny-tiny bamboo. Because they like to land on me, I often have a chance to observe them closely. At least they don’t bite like the mosquitoes who also like to land on me and which have been amazingly absent on this trip.

The next day, Al took a short ride on the Cowboy Trail, Nebraska’s answer to the Katy Trail in Missouri. Unfortunately, being in Nebraska, the Cowboy trail doesn’t have the nice shady sections to offer, but it does have a long high trestle over the Niobrara as you can see in the photos.
















We returned to the Niobrara Wildlife refuge to try to find the bison herd which had eluded us on our previous visit. As you can see in this photo, finding them was not a problem, although staying a safe distance was problematic. The little prairie dog sat across the road, warily watching both us and the bison.










0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home