Horsethief Canyon Trail
A rugged Kanopolis route through sandstone bluffs, narrow passages, creek crossings, prairie, and reservoir-edge terrain.
Places and wildlife — page 5
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Joslyn Art Museum
Three radically different buildings now carry more than 12,000 objects spanning roughly 5,000 years of creativity.
The Durham Museum
Omaha’s restored 1931 Union Station makes transportation history inseparable from the city that railroads helped build.
Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum
Strategic bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, missiles, and spacecraft turn Cold War technology into a walk-through study of deterrence and flight.
International Quilt Museum
The world’s largest publicly held quilt collection makes cloth a record of migration, labor, technology, commerce, family memory, and artistic invention across 69 countries.
University of Nebraska State Museum—Morrill Hall
Mammoths, ancient seas, biodiversity, anthropology, and a working university collection explain Nebraska on a much longer clock.
Museum of Nebraska Art
MONA defines Nebraska art expansively: work by artists born, raised, trained, active, or meaningfully connected to the state.
Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer
A reconstructed 1890s railroad town, prairie landscape, historic buildings, and large artifact collection make settlement history physically navigable.
Museum of American Speed
Lincoln’s racing museum is most revealing below the bodywork, where engines, carburetors, ignition, machining, tools, and rule-driven improvisation explain how American speed was manufactured.
Nebraska History Museum
Archaeological layers, community memory, and more than 125,000 collected objects make Nebraska history something to test against evidence rather than receive as one finished story.
The Archway
A museum spanning Interstate 80 interprets the Platte corridor as a repeatedly reused route rather than one isolated pioneer trail.
Harold Warp Pioneer Village
Thousands of objects, historic buildings, vehicles, tools, and domestic technologies form a collector-built argument about American change.
Agate Fossil Beds National Monument
World-important Miocene bonebeds share the landscape with the James H. Cook collection and enduring histories of Lakota friendship and exchange.
Scotts Bluff National Monument
A prominent bluff, layered geology, and multiple overland trails meet at one of western Nebraska’s most recognizable viewpoints.
Fort Robinson State Park
More than 22,000 acres of Pine Ridge terrain surround a former military post connected to Red Cloud Agency, Crazy Horse, the Cheyenne Breakout, remount operations, and a POW camp.
Smith Falls State Park
A spring-fed waterfall drops about 70 feet into a cool canyon beside one of the Niobrara’s busiest paddling reaches.
Indian Cave State Park
Wooded bluffs, river views, long trails, and a shallow sandstone shelter create one of southeastern Nebraska’s most topographically varied parks.
Chadron State Park
Ponderosa forest, Pine Ridge escarpments, trails, and Civilian Conservation Corps history define Nebraska’s first state park.
Ponca State Park
Wooded ridges overlook a relatively natural reach of the Missouri River near Nebraska’s northeastern corner.
Niobrara State Park
High ground above the Niobrara–Missouri confluence combines broad river views, prairie, woodland, and layered human history.
Niobrara National Scenic River
A nationally protected river corridor threads Sandhills prairie, wooded canyons, springs, waterfalls, cliffs, and private ranchlands.
Valentine National Wildlife Refuge
Shallow lakes, marshes, wet meadows, and grass-stabilized dunes protect a remarkably intact piece of the Nebraska Sandhills.
Nebraska Sandhills
One of the world’s largest grass-stabilized dune regions hides lakes, wetlands, spring-fed streams, ranchlands, and the Ogallala Aquifer beneath its apparent simplicity.
Chimney Rock
A narrow spire rising above the North Platte valley became one of the most frequently recorded landmarks in nineteenth-century emigrant journals.
Toadstool Geologic Park
Soft clay and harder caprock weather into a compact badlands maze that preserves evidence of mammals and environments roughly 30 million years old.
Ashfall Fossil Beds
Rhinoceroses, three-toed horses, camels, birds, and other animals lie where volcanic ash overwhelmed a Miocene waterhole about 12 million years ago.
Courthouse and Jail Rocks
Two erosional remnants south of the North Platte formed a memorable eastern approach to the more famous Chimney Rock.
Platte River Crane Migration
Each late winter and early spring, roughly a million sandhill cranes use the central Platte as a migration staging ground.
Cowboy Recreation and Nature Trail
A converted Chicago & North Western rail corridor links towns, farmland, prairie, river crossings, and Sandhills edges across northern Nebraska.
Saddle Rock Trail
A roughly 3-mile round-trip climb connects the Scotts Bluff visitor center with summit overlooks through changing geology and exposure.
Bison Trail
A remote one-way trail of roughly three miles links Hudson-Meng’s bison bonebed with Toadstool Geologic Park.
Red Cloud Buttes Trails
Fort Robinson’s backcountry routes climb through prairie, pine woodland, and eroded Pine Ridge formations far beyond the historic post.
Ponca Bluff Trails
Interlocking loops climb forested ridges and descend ravines above the Missouri River, with mileage that feels steeper than the map suggests.
Nebraska State Capitol
Bertram Goodhue’s tower, courtyards, mosaics, sculpture, inscriptions, and legislative rooms make the building a deliberately integrated work of civic art.
Homestead National Historical Park
One claim associated with the Homestead Act anchors a national story of land policy, migration, labor, citizenship, dispossession, and environmental change.
Fort Atkinson State Historical Park
A reconstructed 1820s military post reveals how the United States projected power, trade policy, agriculture, and settlement into the Missouri River region.
National Willa Cather Center
Archives, exhibitions, and a network of preserved Red Cloud buildings connect Willa Cather’s fiction to migration, landscape, community, and memory.
Neligh Mill State Historic Site
An 1874 Elkhorn River mill keeps waterworks, belts, elevators, sifters, and 1880s roller machinery together, allowing visitors to reconstruct flour as a vertical industrial process.
Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park
William F. Cody’s ranch connects family life, livestock operations, celebrity, performance, and the global manufacture of “Buffalo Bill.”
Genoa Indian School Interpretive Center
The surviving structures and archive interpret a federal off-reservation boarding school that separated Native children from families, languages, cultures, and homelands.
Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte Center
The restored hospital founded by Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte centers Indigenous medicine, public health, community leadership, and the first Native American woman to earn a medical degree.
Malcolm X Birthsite and Memorial
A memorial landscape marks Malcolm X’s 1925 Omaha birthplace and introduces the family, racial violence, organizing traditions, and transformations behind his later global influence.
Boys Town National Historic Landmark District
Father Edward Flanagan’s organization grew from a 1917 home for boys into a nationally influential child-care institution with its own Nebraska municipality.
Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park
Nine surviving concrete buildings preserve a small military post established amid settlement, bison destruction, and U.S. control of Indigenous homelands.
Hudson-Meng Bison Bonebed
Hundreds of extinct bison lie together beneath a shelter on the Oglala grassland, preserving an early-Holocene event whose cause remains a scientific argument rather than a solved murder scene.
Ash Hollow Cave
A sandstone shelter above an important North Platte passage preserves a long archaeological sequence extending far beyond overland-trail history.
Pike-Pawnee Village State Historic Site
Earth-lodge remains mark a Kitkehahki Pawnee village associated with an 1806 encounter between Pawnee leaders and Zebulon Pike’s United States expedition.
Lauritzen Gardens
More than 100 acres of themed gardens, native and ornamental collections, conservatories, model railroad landscapes, and seasonal displays reward choosing a route rather than chasing every flower.