Nebraska

Nebraska is the Great Plains in full — a long rectangle tilting upward from the Missouri River in the east to the high country near Wyoming, gaining nearly a mile of elevation along the way. The eastern third is rolling farmland, dense corn and soybean country watered by adequate rain. Westward the rainfall thins and the land opens into ranching country, climaxing in the Sandhills, the largest sand dune field in the Western Hemisphere, now stabilized under a blanket of grass and grazed by cattle rather than plowed.

The Platte River runs the width of the state in a broad, shallow braid, a thread of water that guided the wagon trains west and still funnels a spectacular spring migration of sandhill cranes. Beneath the surface, the Ogallala Aquifer feeds the center-pivot irrigation that greens the western fields. Panorama Point, the high point at 5,424 feet (1,653 m), is a gentle swell near the Colorado-Wyoming corner. Omaha and Lincoln in the east hold most of the people in a state otherwise given over to grain and grass.