Great Western Road Trip: The Roads and Scenery from Idaho to Nebraska

The final leg of our trip covered a great stretch of road through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. These roads provided some great scenery and some great stops. This is what you can expect.

As you leave Spokane, Washington heading east on Interstate 90, the landscape is low-lying, mostly-forested hills at a distance from the road, a mix of yellow-green grasses and dark-green trees (mostly evergreens). This continues through the first part of Idaho's northern tip. Then, the evergreens and steep hills come back in abundance as well as some really nice lakes and rivers along the roadside. This makes for some very lush and beautiful scenery. The hills and lakes hug the road pretty closely through Idaho and the first part of Montana.

As you get a ways into Montana on Interstate 90, the prairie grasses come back and are once again interspersed with evergreens. Also, the large hills once again move further off into the distance. Even though the vegetation is much like southern Utah, it's still somehow quite a bit greener.

The landscape in this portion of Montana actually seems to go through a cycle with hills further off and prairie vegetation to hills hugging the roadside and mostly evergreens. The constant variety in the landscape makes this portion of Interstate 90 very enjoyable. Personally, I think it might be best when the rolling plains are between you and the large hills are at a distance. It's a very wide-open country and it's very scenic. There are also quite a few creeks and rivers running by or beneath the road fairly often.

When you get to Butte, Montana, the road takes you up some really steep-graded hills to the top of a small butte. The road zig-zags through some tall and very interesting rock formations covered with a variety of different-colored evergreens, mostly cedar and pine. The colors of the trees range from dark green to light green to red and orange, reminding me of a scene in the early fall with deciduous trees. I'm not sure what causes this with the evergreen trees on this butte, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the relative rainfall each tree has a chance to take in.

The landscape continues to rotate between close-up forest-covered hills and far off hills with prairies in-between until you head down Interstate 89 towards Yellowstone National Park. As you head down to Yellowstone, a massive, often snow-capped mountain range rises up to the east and follows along that side of the road for the first 30 minutes or so. Everything else is like the rest of the Montana landscape - low rolling hills with prairie vegetation and occasional evergreens, but the addition of this mountain range really makes it fantastic.

After about 30 minutes, you go through several curves and the mountains to the east disappear and are replaced with mountain ranges to the south (directly ahead). Driving through Yellowstone requires paying the park fee and will quickly take you into northwestern Wyoming. Yellowstone National Park's western half doesn't actually have too much scenic beauty - it's mainly rolling hills with endless lodgepole pines (half of which are dead or dying) and only occasional nice meadows and creeks. However, the eastern side of Yellowstone National Park is much nicer with lush forests, plentiful rivers and creeks, and the massive Yellowstone Lake.

For a short and worthy detour out the southern entrance of Yellowstone National Park (Interstate 89), you can drive through the Grand Teton National Park without having to pay a fee. Grand Teton National Park provides fabulous views throughout. It's full of lush forests, several very nice lakes and its namesake - the massive Teton mountain range. The flat areas (not immediately bordering a lake or river) of the Teton valley floor are still the prairie-type/sagebrush stuff but they provide the perfect contrast for the Tetons to rise straight up next to them.

When you leave Yellowstone to the east on Wyoming's Highway 16, you drive out of well-forested mountains into a landscape of desert/prairie mesas that still maintain a healthy mix of trees. Unfortunately, the trees don't remain for long and the landscape quickly becomes a standard mix of prairie/desert sagebrush and mesas, very reminiscent of Southern Utah - an uninspiring palette of gray-yellow and brown. The one good thing that breaks up the drab landscape is the fairly frequent green farm or other cultivated field.

As you go further East on Highway 16 (near Cody, Wyoming) even most of the sagebrush and mesas disappear and there is a 30 minute stretch that is mainly just piles of hardened dirt, kind of like the Painted Desert, but without the nice color or anything else to add more perspective. It's very barren, desolate, and mostly unenjoyable. Thankfully, at the end of this, you loop around a nice looking lake and start to go up through a range of very steep mountain that are hard on your car but pretty nice to see. We actually saw an interesting herd of cattle walking single file between the edge of the highway and the precipice of the cliff. I'm not sure what they were doing there, but it was pretty funny.

Once you're through these mountains, the hills become less sharp and craggy, but just as high and covered with evergreen forests. This also lasts quite a while. When you finally come out of the mountains into Buffalo and head on east on Interstate 90, the sharp hills and endless desert landscape disappear to be replaced with much more grassy (and correspondingly green) smooth rolling hills with only occasional sagebrushes to remind you that you're still in a very dry area. Pleasantly, there are even frequent patches of wildflowers amidst the rolling hills. The added green, matched with the reddish roads and blue skies makes this section of the trip the most pleasant since leaving Yellowstone.

But, like all good things, it doesn't last forever and soon the hills flatten out quite a bit to become rolling plains and the green grass becomes very pale yellow and much more frequented by sagebrush. Nonetheless, there are occasional trees and the landscape still maintains more green than other prairie areas.

Once you get close to the South Dakota border, the land becomes much more fertile with more consistently green grasses and quite a few evergreen trees. The landscape rises a bit more again with more rolling hills and occasional bare spots of red clay dirt. Once you get near Custer, South Dakota, you're in the Black Hills area. This is a very exceptional area of landscape with nice frequent patches of forest (mostly evergreen) and crags of granite frequently rising up at appealing angles. There are occasional prairies with lots of prairie dogs in the area. You can easily drive by Mt. Rushmore and the uncompleted Crazy Horse monument and both are interesting and huge works of art. There are also quite a few networks of caves in the area if you want to stop and explore.

North of Custer, South Dakota and the Black Hills, you can get back on Interstate 90 heading east from Rapid City, South Dakota. Shortly after heading east from Rapid City, the road takes you past the Badlands. Badlands National Park requires an entrance fee and it is a very interesting piece of landscape that is basically made up of prairie grasses and eroded hills and valleys very reminiscent of the Painted Desert, but on a larger scale and with a greater range of colors.

Very near Badlands National Park is an old Minuteman Missile. This is a nuclear warhead from the cold-war era that was designed to reach its target anywhere worldwide in less than 30 minutes. You can find it by turning south on exit 116 off of Interstate 90. A few short minutes off the main road make this largely-visible piece of history and technology well worth the stop.

Back on Interstate 90 heading east, after you get past the last few remnants of the Badlands, South Dakota's landscape flattens out into very dull (but still fairly green) plains and farmlands, mile after mile. At one point, the flat plains changes to rolling hills (still just covered in grasses, but only suitable for cattle grazing) for a brief moment and then returns to the dull flat landscape it was before. The further east you go, the more frequently you see patches of trees, though they're by no means forests. If they had quite a bit more trees in the landscape, it would be almost identical to Oklahoma scenery.

Heading south on Interstate 29 near Sioux Falls is basically just the same, except that here, there are now enough trees added to the landscape that it looks exactly like our usual Oklahoma scenery. As you go south, the mostly flat landscape continues to look just like Oklahoma (but with more corn fields rather than other crops) and the only helpful addition is quite a few roadside wildflowers. From here through Omaha, Eastern Nebraska, and Eastern Kansas, all the way down to Oklahoma, the landscape really doesn't change at all.

There are several highlights on this stretch of road between the northern tip of Idaho and the return to Oklahoma, but overall the fascinating portions of the northern Midwest aren't near as packed as those in the Southwest. Though the last day of travel on our road trip was a bit dull and monotonous, we were glad to be home after 5 weeks on the road.