NENebraska Geography

Where the Missouri River leaves Nebraska in Richardson County, the ground is 840 feet above sea level. Drive roughly 430 miles west to Panorama Point in Kimball County and you stand at 5,424 feet, without ever having climbed anything that felt like a hill. Nebraska gains about ten feet of elevation per mile, steadily, across its entire width. That is the single fact the rest of the state's geography follows from: it looks flat through a windscreen and reads as a long mountain approach on a contour map.

A ramp, not a plain

Panorama Point is not a peak. It is a low swell in a private bison pasture a mile and a half from the Colorado line, marked by a stone and reachable in a passenger car. The ramp it sits on top of is the Ogallala Formation, an apron of sand and gravel that rivers dumped east out of the Rocky Mountains between roughly five and twenty million years ago, burying whatever landscape was there before.

Eastern Nebraska is covered by something else entirely: loess, windblown silt lifted off glacial outwash plains during the ice ages and stacked in places more than a hundred feet deep. It weathers into steep-sided bluffs and it holds water and nutrients well, which is why the row-crop country stops roughly where the loess does and the grazing country begins.

Every acre of Nebraska drains to the Missouri River, which forms the entire eastern boundary. No part of the state sends water anywhere else. The continental position shows in the temperature range: 118 degrees at Minden on 24 July 1936, and minus 47 degrees at Camp Clarke on 12 February 1899.

The largest dune field in the hemisphere

The Sand Hills cover about 19,600 square miles of north central Nebraska, close to a quarter of the state, and constitute the largest sand dune field in the Western Hemisphere. Individual dunes run up to 400 feet high and twenty miles long. They are not bare. A skin of mixed-grass prairie has held them still for several thousand years, broken only by blowouts where the cover fails and raw sand reappears.

Because the sand was never worth ploughing, the Sand Hills stayed in ranching and are now among the largest intact grasslands left in North America. Between the dunes the water table sits at or just below the surface, filling thousands of shallow lakes, some of them alkaline, and wet meadows that ranchers cut for hay.

Underneath sits the Ogallala Aquifer. Nebraska holds roughly 65 percent of its total water, more than Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Wyoming and South Dakota put together. The porous Sand Hills sand lets rainfall recharge the aquifer quickly, which is why water levels there have held steady while they have dropped sharply under the Texas and Kansas high plains.

A mile wide and an inch deep

The Platte River forms at the city of North Platte, where the North Platte and South Platte, both rising in the Rockies, finally meet. It then spreads across a sandy braided bed rather than cutting a channel, which produced the old traveller's line about a river a mile wide and an inch deep, too thick to drink and too thin to plough.

That shallowness is why the Big Bend reach between Grand Island and Kearney matters so much. Roughly half a million sandhill cranes, and in strong years closer to a million, roost on the Platte's sandbars through March before continuing north. It is the largest gathering of cranes anywhere on earth, and the small remaining population of whooping cranes uses the same corridor.

In the north, the Niobrara River runs through a valley where six plant communities overlap: eastern deciduous forest, northern boreal relicts, Rocky Mountain ponderosa pine, Sandhills prairie, tallgrass and mixed-grass prairie. Congress designated 76 miles of it a National Scenic River in 1991. More than two hundred waterfalls drop into the valley from spring-fed side channels, the tallest being Smith Falls at 63 feet.

Two clocks in one state

Nebraska is wide enough to be split between time zones. The Panhandle counties and a block of the southwest keep Mountain Time while the rest of the state keeps Central. The line is not straight. It follows county boundaries and cuts through Cherry County, which at nearly 6,000 square miles is the largest county in Nebraska, bigger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.

The far west has the state's most vertical scenery. Chimney Rock rises about 325 feet above the North Platte valley and is mentioned in more surviving overland trail diaries than any other landmark on the route. Scotts Bluff stands roughly 800 feet above the same river. Both are erosional remnants of the Brule and Gering formations, softer rock capped by harder layers that has survived while the surrounding plain wore away.

A boundary the river kept redrawing

Straight lines account for most of Nebraska's outline. The 40th parallel forms the Kansas boundary, the 43rd parallel the western part of the South Dakota boundary, and meridians close off the Panhandle to the west and Colorado to the south. The eastern edge is the exception, and it moves.

In 1877 the Missouri River abandoned a bend beside Omaha during a flood and cut a new channel to the east overnight, stranding roughly 2,000 acres of Iowa on the Nebraska side. That land is still Iowa. The town of Carter Lake is the only Iowa territory west of the Missouri River, and the Supreme Court settled the matter in Nebraska v. Iowa in 1892 with a rule still used across the country: a gradual shift of a river moves the boundary with it, but a sudden avulsion leaves the boundary where it was.

Common questions about Nebraska geography

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