Gering Nebraska

Every winter, bald eagles transform Nebraska’s rivers and reservoirs into staging grounds for one of the Great Plains’ most dramatic natural events: the return of the bald eagles.

Western Nebraska’s Pine Ridge country looks quiet today. Rugged buttes rise over the White River valley, cottonwoods trace the water’s bends, and pronghorn graze across the open hills. But beneath the calm lies a history every bit as dramatic as the land itself. This is Fort Robinson, one of the most storied military posts of the Northern Plains.

Tucked into the Southern Black Hills, Hot Springs, South Dakota, wears two coats at once: spa town and science hub. On one side of town, naturally warm, mineral-rich water still bubbles up as it has for millennia, the reason nineteenth-century visitors flocked here to “take the waters.”