Pawnee Buttes

Driving driving through the unending nothingness of northeastern Colorado. It feels like a movable stereotype of the wrong place... shouldn't this be Kansas, not Colorado? A rolling hill in the distance traversed by three pronghorn, lazily eating their way to birthing grounds or homes or safety. The ripple of grass and grain, crispy and brittle and brown from the dry winter, waiting for the torrential downpours of the plains that never come. The wind picks up and dies down and dies out, and is reborn again to tear across the grasslands with an intense directive: make this place as desolate as possible.

It's lonely out here, without a windmill or a barn or a cow for company, only a dirty and dirt road to nowhere, to nothing, to Nebraska.

You don't even feel the hills, see the hills, notice the hills, until you come up over a ridge, camouflaged within the monotony of burnt yellow waves, and the world drops away in front of you, giving way to a mini-Badlands and two imposing yet unassuming buttes, the Pawnee Buttes, rising from the weathered and worn plains. They stand out from the landscape by several hundred feet, yet you can only see them, wrap your mind around them, when you rare close enough that you can actually reach out and touch them. They stay hidden in the emptiness of the Colorado Plains.

The Pawnee Buttes from the car

Jonmikel exploring our very own mini-slot canyon

A windfarm from the Buttes

The buttes are made from mud, not rock, and every time it rains, new little trails of water are created in the soft exterior

Can you see the nothingness???