Forget what you think you know about Nebraska. Yes, you can lose yourself in sprawling prairies and fields of tall, golden cornstalks, but that’s just the start. Unexpected scenery and adventures make a journey through Nebraska the most memorable kind—one that’s full of surprises. Along the way you’ll find a rich variety of outdoor opportunities—think mountain biking, wildlife viewing, kayaking, hiking, and stargazing. The best part? Most people don’t know a thing about them. If you’re looking for your next escape off the beaten path, welcome to the capital of unknown adventure.

Float a Boat

How good is the paddling in Nebraska? Some websites claim the state has more river miles than any other in the country. That’s not technically true, but whoever started the rumor can be forgiven. With nearly 80,000 miles of river—which includes mileage from major rivers like the Missouri, Platte, Niobrara, and Republican—Nebraska feels like it could take the prize. Where to go with so much to choose from? Two free-flowing sections of the mighty Missouri River are designated as part of the , while 76 free-flowing miles of the are included on the list of National Wild and Scenic Rivers. And in 2023, those 76 miles were designated as an International Quiet Trail by Quiet Parks International, it is the second in the world and the first in North America to receive this designation. These two rivers and their surrounding landscapes set the stage for awesome paddling, fishing, hiking, boating, camping, and tubing.

In addition to the state’s rivers, the largest reservoir in Nebraska, , serves up several types of outdoor fun. Lake McConaughy (a.k.a. Big Mac) is a whopping 30,000 acres, with crystal-clear waters and sugar-sand beaches. It’s a swimmer’s paradise—but it’s also a hot spot for windsurfers, waterskiers, and picnickers.

Witness a Great Migration

One of the world’s greatest wildlife spectacles occurs in Nebraska each spring, when nearly one million converge on the shallow waters of the Platte River. On this 80-mile stretch of river, the cranes feast, rest, and roost before continuing their journey. The and are two excellent places to witness this legendary migration while learning about the wetland ecosystem the birds rely on.

Discover Hidden Geology

Think all of Nebraska is flat? You just don’t know where to look. Across the state, you’ll find a surprising number of outdoor activities tied to unexpected elevation and fascinating geological features. First, check out , an otherworldly, rocky moonscape with hiking trails and fossil scouting. Then head to to observe even more fossil displays at a world-renowned dig site. If you’re there after dark, pause to watch the stars pop in the night sky.

Journey south to to take in views of dramatic buttes and the rugged landscape that glows at sunrise and sunset. Then roam farther east to see the iconic of Nebraska. The Sandhills are the best-preserved example of vegetative sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere. For a full tour of the Sandhills, take a road trip along the .Ìę

Tip: The Sandhills are home to an unexpected treat—several world-class .

See More Stars Than You Do at Home

What do you get when you combine vast skies and complete darkness? Stars. A lot of them. If you want to take a good look at the universe—who doesn’t?—Nebraska has some of the finest spots to choose from. A number of state parks and public lands are common astrotourism destinations, but none shine as brightly (sorry) as .ÌęHome to the annual , and now a certified , this state recreation area is a perfect place to watch the stars appear.

Hit the Trail

OK, some parts of Nebraska really are pretty flat, which is great for hikers and bikers who want to see a lot of scenery. Exhibit A: the 321-mile . This multiuse path is one of the longest rails-to-trails projects in the country, with a gentle grade and fine-gravel surface that make it accessible to all levels. The trail connects Norfolk to Valentine, with 221 bridges and plenty of geographic variety along the way. Want to be a pioneer? Check out the hiking opportunities along the , a work-in-progress path that connects existing and proposed trails and along a 2,200-mile route.

Tip: For the state’s best mountain biking, head to , set on 1,200 scenic acres of forest, ravines, and prairie.Ìę

is the Cornhusker State’s official tourism marketing arm and responsible for attracting visitors by offering travel-inspiring resources to those near and far. Request a to start planning your visit.

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“It’s just one of them things,” Mitch Glidden tells me. He’s smiling wide behind a thick horseshoe mustache. “You gotta get heads in beds.” When Glidden speaks, you listen; not only because he’s an inveterate storyteller, or because his eyes crackle like fireworks, or because he’s arguably the jolliest man in Hooker County, Nebraska, but also because he kneads together every syllable like a firm sourdough. You lean forward a little. You bend your ear. Come again?

It’s the night before the 14th annual Polar Bear Tank Race in the village of Mullen—a hiccup on Highway 2 in western Nebraska—and the community center is abuzz with volunteers. They’re stocking the bar. They’re shuffling papers. They’re stirring homemade soups in hand-me-down roasters. Behind us, a woman named Linda is wearing a dirndl and pigtails and carefully unpacking her landscape paintings: a rusty windmill, a snowy yucca, a preening egret. “Don’t forget me in your story,” she’ll later say, slipping me a brochure for as if it were a crisp Benjamin. (You’re welcome, Linda.)

For years now, I’ve maintained a cool distance from what Nebraskans call “tanking.” Not that I’m an especially seasoned paddler, but the notion of floating downriver in me as a little too on the nose. I’ve spent most of my career in journalism trying to complicate the popular perception of the Great Plains, especially my home state of Nebraska, and tanking seemed to reinforce just about every hayseed stereotype we’re associated with. Fill said cattle tank with six fat white dudes listening to Cornhusker football on a portable stereo while crushing a 30-pack of Busch Light and, bingo, we have ourselves a winner.

Regardless, no one has done more to popularize tanking than Glidden, and for good reason. He and his wife, Patty, now hunched beside him in a black jacket and blue jeans, bought the Sandhills Motel in 1993. Described by Google Maps as an “unassuming motel with a picnic area,” the Sandhills is the only lodge in Mullen, which is the only town in Hooker County, which boasts more than 23,000 cows but fewer than 750 people. Given the demographics, and the fact that Mullen—a dusty cow town settled in 1888—is at least four hours from the closest major airport, getting “heads in beds” requires more than clean sheets and satellite TV.

What it does have, however, is water. “The best water,” Patty interjects: the Middle Loup River, just two miles north, and its trickster tributary, the Dismal, 13 miles south. Both slither through the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills——and because they’re fed almost exclusively by springs discharged from the Ogallala Aquifer beneath it, rather than from surface runoff, they’re two of the cleanest and most uniformly flowing streams in the world.

“You can plan a trip here three years from now,” Glidden says. “The water’s gonna be there.”

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What makes a queer person choose to live in an outdoorsy hot spot instead of an urban gayborhood? A spirited grassroots organization working to make its town a haven for LGBTQ+ nature lovers. Photographer Wyn Wiley, who moonlights as drag queen Pattie Gonia, was living in Nebraska and dreaming of making a move. The most obvious choice was a big city, where queer people often go find their community. But then a group called Out Central Oregon invited Wiley to Bend to host an event on Mount Bachelor called Winter Pride Fest. What they found in Bend was much more than a seasonal party: here was a place with a highly visible queer community. This, Wiley decided, is the place for me and my go-go boots.

This episode is brought to you by Hydro Flask, a company that believes every adventure starts with two simple words: let’s go! Shop Hydro Flask products for yourself or the outdoor lovers on your holiday list this season atÌę.

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Earlier this year, two men set out do something that seemed impossible. And also just dumb. They would squeeze together onto a minibike—a vehicle roughly the size of a children’s bicycle and powered by an engine that can barely run a lawn mower—and drive 400 miles from a cornfield in Nebraska to the mountain town of Aspen, Colorado. If that sounds familiar, it should: this is the iconic road trip that Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels took in the cult classic Farrelly Brothers film Dumb and Dumber. Except this time, it was for real. And it hurt.

This episode is brought to you by GoRVing. Don’t just go on a trip, go on a real vacation. To find out more about the incredible adventures waiting for you out on the road, visit .

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It’s the night of our second anniversary, and I’m clearingÌęsun-bleached cow pies from our tent site. My wife, Mel, sits in the canoeÌę30 feet away, arms crossed, wearing sunglassesÌęin the shade. She could be watching anything: the sinking sherbet sun, the serpentine current, the cow-calf pair mulling the water’s edge—but I know she’s watching me, silently, in solidarity with the cackling magpies and looming canyon walls. And in truth, I’m failing even this: the crusty upper halves of the pies land with a pathetic whisper on the riverbank, the rest at my feet, now bruised and blood-smeared after a grueling day on the Dismal River.

I had overshot the campground. Now we’re boondockingÌęin a cattle pasture on private property in the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills, at least 15 lonely miles from the nearest lonely town of Seneca, population 33. We’re tired. Sunburned. Hungry. Cell serviceÌęis a cute hypothetical, and despite our utter remoteness, I feel exposed, as if someone or something is stalking us from the hills above: a mountain lion reclaiming its ancient territory, or worse, the landowner.

A silver moon bobs on the water as we finally crawl into the tent. We split a can of baked beans, cooked on a fire of cow chips and cedar bark, washing it down with a box of cabernet as the crickets begin their serenade. Mel curls up next to me, cocooned in her sleeping bag. Slowly, we begin to unwind. Hardly the fresh start we were looking for, but getting closer by the minute. Before we drift off to sleep, she reveals the silver lining, as if she’d been stowing it away all along, saving it for just the right moment.

“It’ll be great for the story,” she says.

It had been a long year. We’d left a comfortable existence in Omaha for the prospect of another one in Chicago. Mel had taken a shiny new PR job in a skyscraper near the Loop. The money was great unless you factored in the time, the night sweats, the slow death by open-office plan. I had sold my first book, , just before the move, and, not yet privy to the arbitrary nature of my publisher’s timeline, was now sprinting marathons to hit one deadline after another, as if the contract would burst into flames a minute past midnight. Our dog, hypersensitive to the train growling beneath the streets, spent most of his days hiding under our bed, yearning for the grassy backyards he knew in Nebraska. He would have loved everything about this stretch of the Dismal, not least the bouquet of manure and prairie decay.

My deadlines kept coming. First the rough draft. Then the final. Then the copy edits and the fact check and the legal review. Once the text was done, a different anxiety crept in: Would anyone read a nonfiction book about a roadside zoo in rural Nebraska? Did I want them to? What if Kirkus pans it? What if Publishers Weekly calls it “a desperate first attempt by a wannabe Krakauer?” Mel admonished me to relax, to celebrate the win, to recognize that after ten years of reporting, I finally had a book. Her advice was sound, and I knew it, but none of the milestones felt the way I had always imagined they would. I didn’t feel like an author. I felt like I was playing the role of one.

In other words, we needed to reset.

Canoeing the Dismal wasn’t a new idea. I grew up on the edge of the Sandhills—nearly 20,000 square miles of grass-covered sand dunes in north-central Nebraska—and still cherished arcadian memories of the river: the springs gurgling from the banks, the lush green valleys, the white cliffs above, the tiny falls swamping our portly Boy Scout leader’s canoe, the whole troop howling with laughter.Ìę

I hadn’t run it since I was a kid, but every few years the itch would return, and when the daily ho-hum threatened to drownÌęus, I’d suggest to Mel that we undertake a Dismal adventure. Just me and her. An empty horizon. The sky.

But every time we discussed the trip, it would untether itself from reality. We would go to work instead. Recycle excuses. This time was different. Our lives were busier than ever, but the move to Chicago—despite our love for the city—seemed to trigger something in us both. If the stars wouldn’t align for a retreat on the Dismal, we would align them instead.

And so we found ourselves on the eve of our second anniversary in my parents’ tiny rental house in Broken Bow, Nebraska, two hours east of the put-in, stuffing our gear into drybags and debating how much alcohol was necessary for a two-day canoe trip. I recited a checklist out loud. “Water shoes?” Check. “Life jackets?” Check. “Tent?” Check. “Swimsuits?” Swimsuits? On that one, MelÌęraised both arms in protest.

“Our entire trip is predicated on water!” I said.

“You told me the water was cold! You said we wouldn’t be swimming!”

Fifteen minutes later, after everyone (especially my mother) agreed that I had failed to properly communicate the realities of the trip to my indubitably perfect wife, Mel and I found ourselves shuffling through the clearance rack outside Dollar General, the only store in town that maybe sold a swimsuit. Good news: itÌędid. They were all the same style, a hot pink tankini with the phrase “Summer Vibes” splashed across the chest, the font so bold it offended us both. They were all too big. She bought one anyway.

By five the next morning, we were cruising west down Highway 2, our dented and decades-old aluminum canoe, a 16-foot , strapped to my father’s Suburban. Eager to help, my parents had agreed to drive us to our put-in. A steady rain peppered the headlights like television static, a reality each of us chose, independently, to ignore. Before cutting south for the last 12 miles, we stopped in Mullen, population 463, where the owners of the only campground on our planned route run a small motel. We rang the office doorbell three times before an older woman, torn from slumber, trudged to the door. She took our check. She trudged away.

The clouds parted as we continued south, the sun licking pools from the asphalt. A meadowlark resting on a mile marker recited a Ted Kooser poem from memory—Scout’s honor. The Sandhills beg for poetry. “It is without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States,” the late Jim Harrison once wrote in The New York Times. “
 The vastness and waving of the hilly grasslands in the wind make you smell salt.” More cows than people. A loneliness endemic to this terrain, one of the largest grassland ecosystems in North America. Staring out the back window, I could feel the adventure creeping in, my chest tightening as the hills slalomed toward infinity. I hoped Mel, still groggy, could feel it, too.

Cresting a minor summit, we finally spotted the river, cedar trees crowding the valley, a latchkey willow tagging along. Long known to the Lakota and other tribes who utilized the Sandhills, the Dismal wasn’t truly explored by Euro-Americans until 1870, when Yale’s O.C. Marsh, the first paleontology professor in the country, led his students up the river on a fossil-hunting expedition. Before all that, poet Ron Block claims in Dismal River, his book-length narrative poem, there “came a frontier giant who / despaired at the sight and let his stick drag / got drunk on the distance and pissed himself a river.”

In reality, the Dismal—just 80 miles long—rises from the Ogallala Aquifer and flows east toward the village of Dunning, where it merges first with the Middle Loup, then the Loup, then into the Platte, and finally flushes into the Missouri. The entire stretch slithers through private ranchland, except for a short drag flanking the Nebraska National Forest, near Halsey. So while the water belongs to the people, the riverbed does not, and ranchers can, and frequently do, run barbwire across the water. Combined with a surfeit of natural strainers, mostly dead cedar trees, the Dismal has earned itself a nickname: Divorce River.

In the days leading up to our trip, I’d joined a Facebook group called , inquiring about the current state of the Dismal. I’d been warned that it was getting harder to navigate, that fallen trees were far more numerous, that landowners were less accommodating, that the river ran high this year. A local EMT wrote: “Believe me when I say we can’t easily get ourselves anywhere near you, even if you CAN notify us of an injury. It could be a long hike in and a long hike out to reach you.” Doing the river in full takes three days; most paddlers bow out after just one. The Facebook crew said day two was especially challenging, that few had tried it this year. One user called it a “flat out rodeo.” And yet enthusiasm for the experience ran high. All the good-natured exclamation points put me at ease.

“The Dismal will beat you up a little,” one user said, “but it’s a great adventure!”

We soon pulled off into a muddy cul-de-sac, unstrapped the canoe, and dragged it through the trees until the trail disappeared. Twenty feet below, a dead garter snake lie bloated in a mud bath, attracting flies in a macabre welcome.

Using a knotted rope that some Good Samaritan left behind, I rappelled down the cliff and sank knee-deep in mud. My dad lowered the canoe, and Mel joined me in the muck, arms loaded with gear. We waved goodbye, thrust ourselves into the current, and with the sun still ahead of us, got underway.

Not 30 yards from the start, we hit our first barbwire challenge. Some fences—like the one before us—hang so low that you can simply glide over the top, while others are so high that you can limbo beneathÌęor so slack that you can raise them with a paddle. But many others force you out of the canoe entirely, one person parting the wires, the other guiding the boat between them.

Within an hour, we’d found our rhythm: Mel as bowman up front, scouting obstacles, barking commandsÌę(“Stay left,” she would shout. “Other left!”). Me as grunt man in the back, steering the canoe, playing tour guide on a river I barely remembered. We maneuvered our aluminum tank with aplomb, anticipating the oxbows, how the current seemed to rush and fold around every bend, where to expect strainers or sandbars. Confidence blooming, we began to appreciate our surroundings: sunflowers dappling the shore, secret brooks resounding across the water, cliffs sheared away like a museum exhibit, a perfect cross section, every sandy layer on display. Ducks and doves and red-tailed hawks. Blue jays and bitterns and black-billed magpies.

The campground at the Seneca Bridge was around 12 miles downstream from the put-in, a roughly six-hour float. Halfway there, we hit our first landmark: the boiling sand spring. Thanks to the small herd of black cattle we flushed from the banks, their awkward frenzy wafting a cloud of dust across the water, we nearly missed it. There are no markers. No informational placards. Just a paw-shaped hole eroded from the bank, maybe 20 feet wide, filled with a pool of shifting sand. We tied the canoe to a shock of bunchgrass and hopped out. A film of gin-clear water rides atop the sand, large bubbles burping to the top—a true Sandhills fountain. I tested the spring’s depth with my paddle, couldn’t hit bottom, let go, and watched it spring back into my arms.

How often does one experience a natural phenomenon like this? No rules for observation. No walkways or ropes. No crowds or selfie sticks or admission fees. It was a common refrainÌęfor us throughout the trip: How truly wild the Dismal still is. How rare the experience. Back in Chicago, our river literally runs backward, the whole thing reengineered to flush sewage away from the lake. But the Dismal is virtually untouched: no levees, no dams, no electric skyline, no million-dollar condos peering down from above. How pettyÌęit seemedÌęto protest a little barbwire, when you get all this in return.

Twenty minutes past the spring, we pulled the canoe up to a grassy island. We reclined on our life jackets, split a Shiner, popped some blueberries, forgot about the book, the job, the city, our stupid millennial expectations. I turned to Mel, her arms spread wide to catch the sun. She was smiling.

“Summer vibes,” I said.

“Summer vibes,” she agreed.

Less than an hour later, we spotted a weathered stop sign littered with buckshot and nailed to a tree on the bank. This meant little to us until we hit some mild rapids and noticed the falls up ahead. To call them “falls” is perhaps a stretch, though everyone out here does: the river narrows, churns into a frenzy, drops several feet from a sandstone ledge, and rushes forth through a longÌęchute. But if you don’t hit it right, if you approach it crooked or careless or blind, it can easily flip a canoe. Many simply portage around it.

We forged ahead. Adrenaline pumping now, we hit the falls perfectly, barely dropping in the canoe, then quickly lost the streamline and lodged ourselves in the chute. A minor hiccup, all things considered. We were still upright. Our gear was dry.

I swung my legs from the canoe, ready to stand on the bottom and push us free, but my feet never landed. I sank like a brick, all the way under, then burst to the surface, coughing and gasping for air. The cold shocked me, a spring-fed 68 degrees at the tail end of summer. My glasses bobbed in the water. I put them back on, aligned us parallel to the chute, and hopped in. I acted casual about the misstep, laughed it away, but for a minute my heart raced, my jaw locked. It was my first reminder of the Dismal’s trickster ways.

Nebraska boasts nearly 80,000 river miles, and the majority are shallow and sandy and fit for the laziest among us. I don’t condone getting drunk on a river, but if it happens, Nebraska is an ideal place to be. The Elkhorn, the Platte, the Republican, the Loup, the Calamus, most of the Niobrara—they’re all consideredÌęeasyÌęon the , Class I, lethargic as a retired cow dog. It’s why you’re more likely to find a Nebraskan riding an inner tube or—God save us—a cattle tank: for the most part, paddles are more accessory than necessity here.

But the Dismal is something else. Wide and slow one minute,Ìęnarrow and perilously swift the next. It cuts left when you’re veering right, pivots instantly from sand to stone. The bed plummets when you need the footing. It pulls the rug out beneath you. Block’s poem reinforces the river’s menace at every turn, couched deceptively in the Sandhills’ mellow curves:

For one hundred years, the Dismal clawed
at the cedar-bluffs like a man half-buried,
his heart quick with panic, digging with
the dull knife lightning lost in the water.

The valley deepened like an open grave,
and now the river searches back and forth
like a blood dog with its nose to the ground,
the moon pumping up, swollen, panting in the heat.

The water relaxed again after the falls, but soon we hit another fence,Ìęnot barbwire this timeÌębut a wall of steel mesh ten feet high. A sign said: “WARNING. State regulated fence. Please do not vandalize. Violators will be prosecuted.” Somewhere out here, I’d been told, a former NFL player had established a big-game ranch: bison, elk, deer. Surely this was it. A single rusty staircase rose up and over the barrier. Below it, a warped wooden box and another sign that read: “For Portage.” We climbed the stairs, shoved the canoe through the box and continued on our way. No problem.

Two miles later, we hit another fence. Same style. Same ladder. But the portage flap wouldn’t budge, and even if it had, the box was too narrow. We finally succeeded in lifting the canoe up and over the staircase, but not before two failed attempts that left us panting in the grass—two jaded SisyphusesÌęand our boulder of a canoe. Had either of us been alone, we’d have spent the rest of the trip backpacking to the nearest ranch house, our canoe marooned on the banks.

When we finally passed beneath the Seneca Bridge a few hours later, we scanned the banks for a pullout, a sign, something to indicate we’d hit the campground. “It must be around the bend,” I told Mel. Then, ten minutes later: “It must be around the bend.” And before we knew it, we had floated another two miles downstream.

“You said there’d be signs,” she said.

“I thought there’d be signs.”

Now I lieÌęawake beside her, the walls of our nylon tent aglow with moonlight. I feel guilty, will for days, though I know she’s quick to forgive. A lone coyote yips in the distance. Now another, and another, and soon the whole valley is a primal symphony. Mel sleeps right through it, her breathing deep and slow. TomorrowÌęshe’ll tell me it was the best sleep she’s had in months.

The next morning we’re on the water by 7:45, the grass still heavy with dew. Our first day had been challenging, but aside from the fencing, the lost campground, and the trespassing, it mostly aligned with my expectations. Abundant wildlife. A quick thrill at the falls. Plenty of sun and sand.

Day two feels different already. Dangerous somehow.

Rounding the first bend, the hills shoot up around us, dark and densely forested, casting a shadow across the water, more Black Hills than Sandhills. We put on our rainjackets for the warmth; we keep them on for the protection, the obstacles multiplying with every turn, the room to maneuver quickly disappearing, the canoe plowing through fallen cedars, sticks and spiders raining down from above, orb weavers and daddy longlegs scurrying around in the canoe, beneath our collars, our hats, our shoes.

The next three hours grow worse with every stroke. We can’t outwit the current. Our communication fails. The flow quickens as the banks squeeze in. Soon we’re pinballing back and forth, ramming through one skeleton cedar after another. Mel tries to hold the branches for me as we pass, but they rifle back twice as hard, pummeling me over and over again.

Unbeknownst to us, we’ve entered a section that regulars call the chutes.ÌęTrees stitch out the sky. The shore disappears. The riverbed sinks and turns to stone, and a motley beard of roots shrouds the banks. Suddenly, we’re yelling over the current, so strong now it’s drowning heavy logs, trees bobbing and struggling for breath.

“From now on,” I shout, “the question isn’t, can we make it, but should we even try?ÌęI’d rather jump out and guide us than swamp the canoe.”

Over the next two hours, I jump from the canoe at least a dozen times, slamming my legs and feet against invisible sandstone, trying my best not to wince. I’m soaked and freezing, which helps numb my swollen kneesÌębut does little to calm our nerves. We keep pushing forward, but slower now, cautiously, zigzagging through the labyrinth, using our paddles to shield the blows. The chute grows darker; up ahead, a quick succession of downed trees hangÌęover the water, first to the right, then the left. “We can’t make it!” Mel shouts, and even from the stern, I can tell she’s right. The physics don’t play. The river’s too narrow, our canoe too long, the current too swift.

I roll out, slam my knee on the rocks. I can’t find bottomÌębut somehow manage to wrestle us around the first tree. Mel shoots forward, grabs a mess of roots, and pulls the canoe tight against the left bank. I float past, still unmoored, but catch an overhanging branch and reel myself in. A narrow sandstone shelf lies at the foot of the bank, just below water. I climb on top, my left knee throbbing. I pivot toward Mel, still in the canoe ten yards upstream. She steps out, shivering, and at my command sends the canoe my way. I tie it to a branch overhead and shuffle back to join her.

There’s another wall of trees ahead, a tight window on the far side, beyond which everything is obscured, a rat’s nest of clacking timber. If I can make it to the other side, I think, testing the current. It kicks my legs out, sweeping me downstream and pinning me against the canoe, my chin locked on the gunwale, my feet bouncing like a rag doll beneath the hull. It takes all my strength to scale back to solid ground. Shadows flitter across the water. For the first time in a long while, I’m genuinely scared. This isn’t the Dismal I remember. I have no fucking clue what’s ahead, and the EMT’s warning comes rushing back: “We can’t easily get ourselves anywhere near you.” We’re utterly alone.

I boost Mel up into the trees to get a better look. I boost Mel into the woods above. She hikes downriver; I can’t hear a thing.ÌęI can’t hear a thing. My mind races. She’s been gone only minutes, but it feels like an hour. When she finally returns, she brings good news: the river is clear ahead. If there’s any way to push through, we’ll have an easy run. I ask her to wait for me downstream, to call my name every 30 seconds. I tell her I have a plan. I don’t have a plan.

She trudges off, then returns seconds later.

“I love you,” she says. She’s crying.

When she disappears again, I plant my feet, aim for the window, and send the canoe ahead, holding tight to the rope. The keel lodges in the crook of a gnarled cedar trunk. Mel shouts: “Carson!” I reel it back, try it again, but I can’t find the strength, or the angle, or the leverage. “Carson!” Finally, I test the trunk itself. From a distance, it looked like it was floating, but it hardly moves when I step on top. I inch my way out across the river, ass in the air, feeling the water rush beneath me. “Carson!” I crouch down, kick the boat loose, and slowly redirect it through the window. I jump back in to ride the rest of the way out, my body locked, as if I’ve been flinching for hours.

When I hit the clearing, I return the call. “Mel!” She’s standing in the sun, high atop the hill, her legs feathered in bluestem. She waves and yells my name, and though we’ve only been separated a few minutes, I’ve never been so glad to see her.

We still have hours to go before the end of our journey, but we’ve cleared the chutes at last. The river widensÌęand the trees thin and the hills return to the soft, hogback moguls I’ve always known. We stop in a lush, green inlet a few miles downstream, split another beer, spread our gear out to dry. A blue heron lifts from the water’s edge, its pale belly gliding overhead, wings outstretched. Soon enough we’ll be complaining about the heat and the wind—now we’re too exposed—the shallow water, the sandbars, the telephone poles and county roads teasing us with civilization long before we’ve made it. But for the moment, we’re content to sit here in the sun, our bodies slowly unwinding from a flat-out rodeo.

“Summer vibes?” I try again.

She’s trying not to smile.

“Let’s finish this,” I say.

We follow the heron.

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By all measures, 37-year-old Laura HattanÌęis the mountain version of a supermom: She owns the , the gateway town for Wyoming’s storied Wind River Range. She hikes, cycles, skis, runs, climbs, and fly-fishes in the mountains, often accompanied by her 15-year-old daughter, Sierra. She foundedÌęand directsÌęthe , which combines an adventure race and music festival.ÌęIt’s the life she always wanted—but getting it meant prying herself away from her lifeÌęas a stay-at-home mom in the cityÌęand starting anew in a tourist economy. Here’s how Hattan took the plunge.

The Trigger to Change

I was born and raised in Nebraska, but my husband and I spent most of our weekends making trips to Colorado or up to Minnesota to go rock climbing. Then my daughter, Sierra, was born, and I felt like we had to make a change.

I’d read this book calledÌę, which talked about how, these days, most kids’ radius for exploration stops at the end of their driveway. That was just shocking to me. In Nebraska, I grew up in the country, but not on a farm. Until I went to college, I never realized that other kids didn’t grow up exploring river bottoms and wandering all around. I wanted that for my daughter—I wanted her to know what the outdoors was like.

So, when Sierra was six months old, we took a big road trip across the Mountain WestÌęto check out where we might want to live. Wyoming really appealed to us. We liked the quiet, and we liked the people. Then, in May 2005, we saw a job posting for an outdoor gear shop in Pinedale that was looking for managers. We interviewed with the owners over the phoneÌęand moved out here two weeks later.

The Cash Crunch

In Nebraska, my husband had been working as a computer programmer, and the job at the Great Outdoor Shop paid half as much. Meanwhile, our rent leaped from $500 a month to $1,500 for a two-bedroom townhouse. Living in the apartment above the gear shop was a key perk, because it helped us make that transition. It worked out so well with Sierra.

Plus, we liked the job. My husband and I worked the same shifts. Then, in 2014, we bought the business from the owners, who were looking to step back and had been mentors to us. Last year, my husband and I also bought , a fly-fishing shop and guide service just one block down from the Great Outdoor Shop.

My husband and I still make sacrifices to live here. We have to live really frugallyÌęand classify needs versus wants. To this day, I still have, like, three pieces of furniture—but there areÌęonly three of us, so we only need one couch. We don’t go out for smoothies, because Pinedale is expensive. It may not be on par with Jackson, but compared to Lincoln, prices here are shocking. Pinedale has virtually no growing season, so everything is trucked in from the interstate, 100 miles away. Everything costs more.

But it’s so worth it. The Wind River Range is incredible, a unique gem. Visitors come through and ask where our Tetons T-shirts are, and I think, no! This range is three times the size of the Tetons! It’s got the largest glacier in the Rockies! We don’t have a TV, but we go outside and play—that’s why we moved here.

The Outdoor Payoff

Backpacking is my favorite.ÌęI love to put on a pack and get some really long days in, so for me, the Wind Rivers are perfect. I also ride road and mountain bikes, and I run—although I’m like a slow, fat beagle.ÌęI’ll fish if I’m catching fish, but I won’t stand there for four hours if I’m not catching anything. In winter, I skiÌęand snowboardÌęand Nordic ski.

The benefits of being here are hedonistic: I love playing in the mountains. But there’s also a greater benefit in watching my daughter grow up in the mountains,Ìęin an environment that’s almost endangered in this country.

Raising a kid in a small mountain town is the best. Sierra started going to the local ski hill on her own when she was six. For her tenth birthday, she asked to climb Fremont Peak, which was an 18-mile day—the longest she’d ever done. Having a tiny person with you and watching them experience the joy of something like thatÌęis pretty incredible. I like to say we’re late locals. We weren’t born and raised in Wyoming, but we got here as soon as we could.

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On the in South Dakota, you hear it again and again: “There will never be another Hermis Tall.”

Hermis was the greatest Indian relay rider of his generation, a natural horseman who led a team of Oglala Lakota to three consecutive championships at the sport’s marquee event, held every summer in Sheridan, Wyoming. The sight of him thundering bareback across the finish line—astride a 1,200-pound thoroughbred, shirtless, his chiseled physique glistening with sweat—will forever be ingrained in the minds of his teammates, friends, and rivals. His team, known as the (a nod to the last name of their captain, Stan Brewer), racked up a remarkable 19 wins during the summer of 2015 alone, making them Indian relay’s dominant force, the subject of envy and occasional resentment over Hermis’s aggressive riding tactics.

There’s no reason to resent Hermis Tall anymore. His picture is now attached to a wooden cross, marking his grave site on a lonely, windswept reservation bluff. He lies next to his brother Earl, not far from the overcrowded family trailer where he grew up and lived for most of his life, much of which he spent on horseback.

Hermis may be gone, but the story he started isn’t over. It’s the story of the team he left behind, of their struggle to overcome heartbreak and adversity on and off the track, and of their attempt to once again find glory in the powerful union of man and horse.

Steals the Thunder, a brown and white paint horse, and his 25-year-old rider, Brian Beetem, are a blur as the jockey whips around the far turn at the county fairgrounds in Sheridan. The horse’s muscles glisten in the rising sun as Brian, an Oglala Lakota who’s riding bareback, crosses the finish line, slowing to a trot under the gaze of Stan Brewer.

On this mid-July morning in 2018, with the jutting into scattered clouds beyond the western grandstands, Brian is exercising horses that the Brew Crew brought here from Pine Ridge. The riders are getting ready to compete in the Indian relay championship in Sheridan—a race widely regarded as the sport’s world championship—which starts tonight as part of a major western event, the Sheridan WYO Rodeo.

Stan, 28, is a Lakota tribe member who’s been riding for nearly as long as he could walk. He’s joined in Sheridan by his wife, Ella, and their two boys—his “road warriors”—Parker, three, and Kye, seven months.

Records of Indian relay racing can be found in early-20th-century western newspapers, though Native American tradition suggests that the sport goes back much further. At the start, jockeys stand beside the first of three horses that they’ll mount and ride for one lap each. Generally, five teams compete at the same time, which means there can be a wild jumble of horses and men on the track. (Three teammates are responsible for controlling the waiting relay horses and helping with the often frantic dismounts.) At one point during this week, an announcer will try to describe the anarchic quality of the races over the rodeo’s PA system. “Nothing is certain in Indian relay,” he’ll say in a Wyoming drawl. “The only thing certain is that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west.”

Teams can earn up to $10,000 for winning, but these races offer something more valuable. For the Brew Crew, and for most of the 20 Native American teams that travel to Sheridan from reservations all over the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, the events provide an escape from the stress of reservation life. “You race for the love and hope to break even,” Stan says.

The day before, Stan loaded his family, three teammates, and five horses into a truck and trailer for the five-hour drive from Pine Ridge to Sheridan. Stan’s kids were well-behaved as they traversed the lonely Powder River Basin, though Parker’s demands to listen to John Cena’s WWE entrance theme on repeat nearly drove Ella crazy. “I am so over that song,” she says with a laugh. Still, it was an easy commute by the standards of Indian relay, where ten-hour drives are common.

Once the teams hit Sheridan, a familiar weekend ritual began, with horse trailers pulled by large pickups rumbling onto the backstretch of the fairground. The better teams typically have better trucks; some of the second-tier participants arrive dragging rickety trailers that somehow made it all the way from reservations scattered across the Dakotas, Montana, and Washington.

During the race, Stan will stay with his family at the no-frills Bramble Motel. But most of the male competitors will sleep on cots in horse trailers lined up along the track’s backstretch. As the sun arcs down, the scene is like a football tailgate, the smell of grilling burgers and hot dogs wafting through the twilight air.

Gilbert Ecoffey, burly and with a booming voice, goes by the name G.W. He’s a lifelong friend of Stan’s and arguably the most successful horse trainer on Pine Ridge. (Over the summer, he’ll clear $50,000 in Wyoming and Nebraska from conventional racing—the more familiar events in which horses and jockeys are loaded into a fixed starting gate.) G.W. embraces the demanding routines of caring for his dozen or so horses, in part because not long ago his life was a downward spiral of substance abuse. He bottomed out in 2015, when he was sentenced to 15 months at the Rapid City Community Work Center on a drug-possession charge.

“If I didn’t have a horse to wake up to every day, who knows where I would be,” he says. “Horses heal people—they are my sobriety. They understand and communicate with you, even if they can’t talk.” G.W.’s work back home starts before dawn, when he makes his way down a muddy hill from his trailer to the stable. “I could be having the worst day ever, but when I get in the barn the worries go away,” he says.

There’s no shortage of worry on Pine Ridge, home to sweeping plains, rugged beauty, and crushing poverty. Covering an area roughly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, Pine Ridge is beset by high unemployment (80 percent, according to some estimates), rampant substance abuse, periodic waves of child suicide, and a life expectancy in the sixties. Calls to 911, which sometimes take an hour to respond to because of the vast distances, pile up on top of each other as the undermanned tribal police race from one emergency to the next.

The Brew Crew haven’t been immune. Stan tells me about the loss of two riders to suicide and another to prison. G.W. says Stan “has had a bad go with riders,” which to him is ironic, since Stan is “the most sober guy I know.” G.W., 30, considers him a role model, even though Stan is younger.

Stan is a full-time rancher, juggling the responsibility for 200 head of cattle of his own with the work he does on a larger reservation spread, all before he can “sneak in some relay training at the end of the day.” Horsemanship is in his genes, going back to a time when the Lakota roamed free, as legendary hunters and warriors dominating a vast region from the Badlands in the east to the Bighorn Mountains in the west.

Stan takes pride in continuing this legacy, and he finds peace in traditional Lakota practices like visiting a sweat lodge and participating in the Sun Dance every summer. Stan didn’t want to discuss the specifics of the Sun Dance, partly because it’s considered sacred, but the ritual reportedly involves fasting, intense prayer, daily sweats, and excruciating barbed piercings of the chest. Stan says it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done but adds that the ordeal is a small sacrifice compared with people “who experience pain every day when they wake up.”

Horse races are another connection to these traditional ways, but Indian relay isn’t just a quaint nod to history, like Civil War reenactment. It’s also an exciting competition. Stan’s father, Stan Sr., puts it best: “They should show Indian relay on TV before the Kentucky Derby, so people could see how fucking boring that is compared to this.”

The 20 teams in Sheridan will compete in four qualifying heats, featuring five teams each, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night. Their combined times will be used to determine who races in the championship and consolation heats on Saturday.

The Brew Crew arrived in a bit of turmoil. A few weeks ago, Sylvan Brown, the team’s best rider, quit after Stan yelled at him for participating in a dangerous local backcountry race despite being told not to. Stan replaced him with Brian Beetem, who has the short stature and wiry build of a gate-race jockey, which can be a handicap in relay. Taller riders have an easier time mounting horses, and bigger, stronger riders can more easily bring their horses to a stop during exchanges.

Still, the Brew Crew have a solid first night in Sheridan. With Brian riding—and with Stan and two of his teammates, Tre Goings and Will Brewer, holding and “mugging,” or catching the horse while the rider dismounts—the team finishes behind River Road, from the Crow Agency, and is in fourth place overall.

The next day, Stan and G.W. get their teams going early. There’s something enchanting about dawn at the track, with the smell of manure almost sweet in the fresh morning breeze. Stan is always eager to be among the first to run the horses, but especially so today, because he’s looking forward to taking Ella, Parker, and Kye to a water park, to escape the afternoon heat before the evening’s races.

After the morning chores are done, the backstretch grows quiet as some nap and others head for town. By afternoon the track is buzzing again, with the teams and their families converging on the horse barns. While the day moves toward twilight, William “Shorty” Brewer—Stan’s uncle and an elder Pine Ridge horseman—sits in his lawn chair beside his pickup truck, holding court as people come by to chat. Kids from Pine Ridge walk up to say hello.

Shorty is known for organizing multi-day memorial trail rides to sites of historical significance to the Lakota. He tries to provide any interested kids with horses and logistical support free of charge. Many of those stopping by recently participated in his Little Bighorn ride, during which dozens of children and adults rode nearly 70 miles from Ashland, Montana, to Little Bighorn, the site of Custer’s Last Stand. After a day in the saddle, they gathered around a campfire while elders discussed what they’d seen.

“Shorty would give the shirt off his back to help kids,” Stan says, and he knows what he’s talking about. For most of Stan’s youth, his father was in jail, and Shorty stepped in as a parental figure, patiently agreeing to take Stan on rides almost every time he asked. Shorty knows the challenges and temptations the kids will need to overcome, having seen it all on the front lines of tribal law enforcement. He decided more than 20 years ago that his own life would work much better without alcohol.

Sheridan is onlyÌęabout an hour down Interstate 90 from the Little Bighorn site, and memory of the 1876 battle is felt throughout rodeo weekend. The Indian Wars seem surprisingly relevant when direct descendants of the adversaries are gathered on formerly contested land.

The contrast between the portion of the backstretch near the stables, where Native American relay teams gather, and the interior of the track, where the predominantly white rodeo participants park their ­trailers, is stark. The infield is full of fancy RVs, along with new pickups that pull shimmering trailers. While many rodeo riders wear crisply pressed shirts plastered with sponsors, the Native Americans wear a random assortment of T-shirts and jeans before changing into the tribal regalia that they’re encouraged by event ­organizers to wear during races, complete with headdresses and face paint.

One section of bleachers stands out from the rest: the , where men in expensive boots and creased jeans mingle with attractive women in sundresses. These are the moneyed descendants of the people who won the West, and they inhabit a different world than the Native Americans. Free drinks flow without pause from a well-stocked bar; wads of twenties change hands as club members bet on the relay riders, shouting encouragement to their favorites.

Shortly before Stan and the Brew Crew head off to get their horses for tonight’s racing, Stan ducks into his trailer and emerges holding a coffee mug filled with sage. He lights it and quietly moves to each of the horse stalls, guiding the smoke toward the horses, his rider, and the rest of the team. He mouths a few words of prayer.

Brian’s goal this time out is to improve his exchanges, getting off one horse and onto the next at a speedier clip. As always he’s worried about his size. “I am a little guy, and I have to stop these fuckers,” he says amiably. But real worry marks his voice. He walks off to do some stretching.

The heat of the afternoon is giving way to a cool, breezy evening. The grandstands fill with men in boots and jeans, some of them accompanied by their wives and little boys in cowboy garb. Teenagers screech as they ride the Kamikaze at the nearby carnival, the sun setting over the Bighorns to the west, the smell of Polish sausage filling the air.

Prerace festivities begin with a display of horsemanship featuring active-duty members of the U.S. Army First Infantry Division’s Mounted Color Guard dressed as 19th-century cavalrymen. The captain of the Lakota Warpath relay team, 36-year-old Don “Cubby” Ghost Bear, served combat duty with this division in Iraq, and now he’s trading war stories with the color guard’s first sergeant. Later, back at his stall, Ghost Bear carefully paints his horses with the initials U.S.—the label once branded on the sides of military horses—to honor his ancestors, who “were the only ones able to steal horses from the cavalry.”

Eyes turn skyward when Toby Keith’s “Beer for My Horses” transitions to the Lee Greenwood chestnut “God Bless the U.S.A.” A double-amputee Army veteran descends from a cloudless sky under an enormous red and white parachute, a huge American flag trailing behind him. The ceremonies conclude with a prayer, and the crowd erupts as the first heat of five teams gets underway.

The Brew Crew enter the second night of racing in good shape; another strong performance will keep the team in line for a spot in Saturday’s championship. But this time, Brian’s size finally trips him up.

He gets off to a strong start, smoothly mounting the thoroughbred Fried Rice and rocketing off the line before some of the other riders have even gotten on their horses. The plan is to have him ride the temperamental but powerful Steals the Thunder for the second lap.

Everything seems to be going well as Fried Rice explodes down the backstretch, building a sizeable lead. When Brian guides him around the tight turn into the homestretch, there are no other horses in sight. Will, the mugger, jumps up and down, signaling horse and rider to pull off into the team’s box for the first exchange.

But Fried Rice never breaks stride, ignoring Brian’s reins and shooting down the homestretch as if gunning for the finish line. The crowd gasps, and with good reason: the failed exchange just ended the Brew Crew’s chance for a spot in the championship. It means automatic relegation to the bottom of the standings.

Stan is stunned. Fried Rice has never bolted like this before, and Stan wonders if perhaps he “smelled the finish line and thought it was a gate race.” He can’t mask his frustration. “That’s relay,” he says. “But of all the fucking places.”

A breakdown of the weekend’s earnings shows that no one is getting rich in this sport. Stan spent roughly $500 on fuel, $375 for his family’s motel room, $500 for the entry fee, $400 for grain, and $750 for the team’s food. The team as a whole would receive about $1,500 in payouts. After giving roughly $500 to his rider and the other two team members, Stan is left with only $1,000 to help defray his own expenses.

There are two small circular pins—with smiling young faces on them—attached to the driver-side visor in Stan’s pickup truck. “Can’t talk to them no more,” Stan says when he sees me looking. It’s an August day not long after the Sheridan race, and we’re riding around Pine Ridge. The pins show the faces of two of his best friends, riders Lawrence Harvey and Hermis Tall.

There are the usual explanations for why these talented athletes chose to kill themselves: broken families, poverty, alcohol. There may be another reason, though. Like soldiers who get addicted to the intoxicating adrenaline that comes from combat, some relay riders thrive when they’re on the road competing but become dangerously vulnerable to purposelessness when they’re back on the reservation.

G.W. later tries to explain, sounding resigned. “You could win everything clear across the U.S., but back here it’s always the same feeling,” he says. “It’s a sad place and always has been,” noting that just down the road is Wounded Knee, where hundreds of Lakota, including women and children, were massacred in 1890.

Winters are rough on Pine Ridge and can increase the sense of desolation. Powerful winds roar through from the west; ominous signs on Interstate 25 warn of gusts topping 60 miles per hour. The blizzards are especially dangerous because of housing conditions: many people live in ramshackle trailers perched along remote dirt roads. Nick Campbell, an Oglala Sioux tribal-police officer, calls the forbidding winter months “suicide season.” During the winter of 2015–16 alone, nine young people between the ages of 12 and 24 killed themselves, and another 103 made attempts.

As I ride with G.W. up a long road toward a series of trailers that belong to the Jumping Eagles, a prominent Pine Ridge horse family, he tells me about Harlie Jade Tall Jumping Eagle, a 15-year-old girl with a playful smile. G.W.’s voice becomes a whisper as he points to the place where Harlie ended her life in March of 2015.

The following year, Stan’s friend Lawrence Harvey—a 23-year-old natural athlete who once missed a relay exchange and then ran alongside the galloping horse for a quarter of a mile—took his life. Stan named his second son, Kye Lawrence, after him.

While Lawrence was a strong horseman, neither he nor any other modern rider compared to Hermis Tall, who was an all-time great. G.W. says Hermis “grew up on the back of a horse” and never really got off. Sometimes he would ride 20 miles into town for a pizza.

Hermis was raised only a few trailers away from Lawrence, on the same dirt road in Manderson, the village at the epicenter of Pine Ridge’s horse culture—a place where 20 to 30 communal horses wander around at any given time, like a living bike-share program.

Manderson is also one of the reservation’s more dangerous areas, and driving through it on a weekday afternoon can be staggering. People of all ages spill out of dilapidated trailers in various stages of inebriation, some shouting and carrying on conversations with themselves. Tribal police approach it with trepidation, aware that reinforcements may be an hour away.

G.W. explains the challenge of growing up poor in such a remote place. A person raised in a housing project in New York City might have it bad, but at least they can walk out their front door and find a convenience store nearby. In Manderson, he says, “you have to drive 18 miles for fast food.” The sense of being cut off, marooned on an island of poverty and depression, is palpable.

This is the world that Hermis Tall was never able to escape. He was capable of warmth and affection, but there was a wildness that neither his friends nor his horses could tame. Like too many young people on Pine Ridge, he discovered alcohol early and was drinking steadily by the time he was 11. He was raised by his grandfather in a trailer crammed with up to a dozen extended family members.

But Hermis always had horses. He spent most days with his friends traversing the nearby hills, jumping into Mercy Creek from their galloping mounts and sometimes heading into town on horseback for a hot lap—an effort to bait patrolling tribal police before scattering into the backcountry. “We never got caught,” says Roger Jumping Eagle, G.W.’s 25-year-old relay rider. Racing takes him back to those carefree days. “I get that wild-kid feeling again,” he says, “that adrenaline rush.”

Riders like Roger and Hermis loved to compete for bragging rights at local races, like NBA stars who gain street cred for playing pickup games on playgrounds. One such race goes for a hundred miles across a huge swath of Pine Ridge, with horses switched out at designated checkpoints along the way. Hermis, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the backcountry, excelled at it.

Foremost among the local contests are the notorious suicide races, which entire towns turn out to watch. Anywhere from around 12 to 18 riders start, but usually only a handful finish after riding over rugged terrain, up and down hills, and across country roads. For a few brief moments, riders feel weightless—careening through the reservation’s grassland, adrenaline surging, temporarily able to shed their worries about money, the well-being of loved ones, volatile relationships, and uncertain futures. Unfortunately, the highs quickly dissipate.

Just weeks before he took his life, Hermis led the Brew Crew to their third consecutive world championship in Sheridan. Stan showed me YouTube clips of Hermis jumping off his horse while it was still moving and then leaping over the hindquarters and onto the back of the next one. “Ass jumping,” as Stan calls it, takes incredible athleticism. “Not a lot of people can do that,” he says, “let alone in the world championship on the last exchange.”

On August 25, 2016, Hermis had spent much of an unseasonably cool day drinking. His friend Jay, a bronc rider, sensed that he was headed to a dark place, in part because he’d lost a brother to suicide months earlier and had recently gone through a nasty breakup. Jay tried to calm him down, but it didn’t work. Hermis jumped on his horse and rode off into a valley not far from his trailer home. He slid a noose around his neck, tied it to a tree limb, and kicked the horse out from under him.

For years now, Shorty Brewer and his brothers have put on local races at Pine Ridge, coinciding with the annual powwow during the first weekend of August. The powwow is the biggest occasion of the year, a four-day celebration of Lakota history combined with carnival rides, sports, a rodeo, and a nighttime event featuring traditional costumes and dancing. The Brewer brothers’ races have the feel of a community picnic. Some families arrive in vehicles showing signs of damage from a recent hailstorm, their trunks filled with lawn chairs and blankets.

Ella’s parents, Mona and Ted, are on hand for the 2018 powwow. Ted, a massive man wearing an Oakland Raiders T-shirt, lifts little Kye, engulfing him in his thick, heavily tattooed arms. Ted is especially proud of a chest plate he made for Parker to race in, using hair from Parker’s favorite pony, Daisy.

The cool and overcast afternoon features all kinds of races, most designed more for family fun than intense competition. Everyone seems happy, transported far from worry and sadness, though shadows can feel inescapable.

Just across the highway, an eight-year-old named Jayla Rodriguez, a beautiful girl with an infectious smile, was mauled to death in 2014 by one of the reservation’s ubiquitous packs of wild dogs. Ted shakes his head when the attack is mentioned, lamenting the fact that there are some streets you can’t walk down for fear of feral dogs, before turning his attention back to the races.

Ted is imposing now, but he was a vulnerable kid when he attended a predominantly white high school in neighboring Rushville, Nebraska, where he was taunted because of his Native blood. Decades later, returning to Rushville, thick with muscle and hardened by jail time in California, Ted confronted one of his high school tormenters. “You remember me?” he said. His antagonist said no, to which Ted replied, “Well, I remember you.” Sensing the menace, the man broke down in tears, which was probably the only thing that saved him from a beating.

As Ted relaxes in his lawn chair, Parker and Kye’s other grandfather, Stan Sr., is preparing for his race. A sinewy horse trainer, Stan Sr. looks like he was born in boots and jeans and has subsisted on cigarettes and caffeine ever since. Stan gives his dad some last-minute advice, and Stan Sr. goes on to have the most exciting race of the day, falling just short in a duel with an old friend of his. Dismounting, still breathing heavily, Stan Sr. can’t wipe the smile off his face. For a few minutes, he was no longer a creaky 54-year-old man but a young boy, riding his pony across the same fields his ancestors had ridden generations ago.

Shorty oversees the races in his usual understated way. He’s quiet by nature, but words spill out when the subject turns to the children who are taking turns riding his pony, Suzie. “Just putting a smile on their face is what keeps me going,” he says, adding that the hardest part of his time with kids is when it comes to an end and he has to tell them, “It’s over, you gotta go home.” Their homes can sometimes be scary places, overflowing with rowdy adults who are drunk or high.

The relay races on powwow weekend are held at Three Moccasin Park, a classic bush track. There are a few rickety wooden bleachers near the finish line. Otherwise it’s just a dirt oval with an elevated wooden announcer’s platform in the middle of an infield of overgrown grass. There are plenty of whites from Nebraska interspersed among the Native families, some on the bleachers and others sitting on the beds of pickup trucks or under portable tents. In Loving Memory T-shirts, with the face of a child or teenager on them, are common among the Lakota in the crowd.

Clouds move in, delivering relief from the unforgiving sun, and it looks like rain may be on the way. As usual, Ella has arrived early and staked out a good infield spot near the starting line, rolling out a blanket for Kye and unloading an assortment of toys to keep Parker busy before his pony race. Her parents join her, as does her brother and his family, with a cooler full of soda and sports drinks. Most people seem to be obeying the reservation’s prohibition of alcohol, though the doors of the car next to Ella’s blanket open periodically, releasing a powerful cloud of weed smoke every time.

Ella gets word that the kids’ pony race is next, and she has to scramble to dress Parker and apply war paint. Parker betrays no signs of nerves as adults shout his name when he passes by on Daisy.

The pony races last around 50 yards, with an adult leading the pony while the child rides. Parker wins, assisted in no small part by Stan’s speed as he leads Daisy at a full sprint. Stan, Ella, and Stan Sr. are beaming as Parker rides over to the bare-bones winner’s circle for a victory photograph. After the ceremony, he hops off and hot-walks Daisy, guiding her in tight circles to cool her off, mimicking the adult relay teams who do the same thing with their massive thoroughbreds.

Soon it’s time for the Brew Crew’s preliminary heat. Confidence is high for this race, which is against middling competition on the home track. But when the horn sounds, the Brew Crew implode. Substitute rider Roger Jumping Eagle’s horse gets bumped during a chaotic start, panics, and jumps off the track. Roger is thrown, suffering a concussion.

And that’s it. A team that had until recently dominated the relay circuit couldn’t get past the starting line.

As Ella and her father quietly take down the tent, she warns me that Stan will probably be in a bad mood. When Parker and Ella approach the team, I follow along, relieved when Parker breaks the silence. “How did Brew Crew do, Daddy?” he says cheerfully.

“We sucked, son,” he says. With a bitter smile directed at me, he shakes his head. “This is the worst year we’ve ever had. Three straight world championships and now 17 dead lasts,” he says with some exaggeration. Half-wondering if I’m a jinx, he adds: “Fucking media.”

George Strait’s “” plays over the PA as the last tents are struck and pickups exit the track, leaving clouds of dirt. The afternoon is starting to feel ­something like a vacation ­ending too early.

As the track empties, one boy remains: Kayden Brings Plenty, an earnest 14-year-old rider who Shorty introduced to racing years earlier. He pulls his horse alongside Shorty.

“Hey, Grandpa Shorty,” he says, “when are we riding next?”

For the Brew Crew, the season’s final race—with its biggest purse, $75,000—takes place in late August at , outside Minneapolis.

Hosted by the wealthy , this is a popular, invitation-only event. The Mdewakanton are known for treating participants well, covering travel expenses and providing goody bags, welcome dinners, and generous payouts. A few teams have driven 25 hours from as far away as Washington State.

Competition will be fierce, but the Brew Crew arrived with renewed stability—Sylvan has been riding for the team again—and momentum, having recently won smaller races in Parshall, North Dakota, and Lower Brule, South Dakota.

Canterbury Park feels a world away from anywhere else the Brew Crew have raced this summer. On a cool and pleasant Thursday night, the stands are packed with an affluent suburban crowd—golf shorts and shirts are more common here than cowboy boots and hats. The bars are stocked with beers and tasty food, and there’s an enormous children’s play area. No surprise, this is Ella’s favorite destination of the summer.

Fourteen teams made the trip to Canterbury, where they’ll compete in two preliminary heats of seven teams each on Thursday and Friday nights to qualify for the championship on Saturday night. The Brew Crew draw the second heat on Thursday. Canterbury is a mile-long track—as opposed to the half-mile courses the team usually sees—and Stan has brought different horses with him this weekend, including three he recently purchased in Nebraska for $2,000.

As Stan leads his team onto the track, I find my way back to Ella and the boys. Parker, amped by the excitement of the impending race, is desperate to find a pony to ride, and Ella snaps that if he asks again, he’ll have to do a time-out. He’s soon distracted by his father and the rest of the Brew Crew as they pass by, dressed in lime green shirts, jeans, purple headbands, and canvas vests. Parker waves and shouts “Hi, Dad!” and “Let’s go, Brew Crew!” as they move by.

The race gets underway. Unfortunately for Stan, one of his new acquisitions, Kitty Blonde, is slow over the course on the first mile, falling far behind and causing the Brew Crew to finish a dismal sixth out of seven teams. They’ll need a strong finish on Friday night to have a chance of making the final.

As I approach the stalls with familiar trepidation, Stan is letting loose a torrent of f-bombs, angry at the performance of his new horse and at Sylvan for riding too cautiously.

The next morning I meet Stan, his family, and the three boys from his team at the Canterbury Inn and Suites for an outing to the Mall of America. Stan hands them each some spending money for the afternoon, for which they offer grunts of gratitude.

Stan is wearing a purple Vikings T-shirt along with a belt buckle, while the boys are in Pine Ridge teen attire, which seems to borrow heavily from hip-hop: flat-brimmed caps and low-slung jeans.

As we wander, I ask Stan what he sees in Sylvan, who hasn’t ridden well or shown much emotion at the races I’ve been to.

Stan makes it clear that he takes pride in having mentored Sylvan. “Sylvan has always been a rider, since we carried him crying onto a horse,” he says. Stan explains that while Sylvan is quiet and can be a bit awkward socially, he has the hunger and competitive spirit necessary to win. He cites Sylvan’s work ethic and the fact that he woke up early throughout the spring to ride six horses for their daily workouts.

As I watch Stan and Ella guide Parker and Kye’s stroller through the sea of mall humanity, I wonder if this is disorienting for them. Does visiting the cathedral of consumerism make it more difficult to return home, where the only shopping available is at the Sioux Nation Superstore or a Family Dollar in nearby Whiteclay? This leads me to wonder—given all the challenges of reservation life—why so many stay.

The answer always involves some variation of a powerful idea: family.

As Stan has explained, many Lakota grow up on the reservation in small trailers or houses packed with people. While this is not always easy and can lead to problems, it’s a comfort for those fortunate enough to be surrounded by loved ones. Another factor is a spiritual connection to the land—a small parcel they can call their own. Though Pine Ridge is poor, it’s beautiful, too, and it’s sacred to those who practice traditions like sweats and Sun Dances. As Stan reminds me, the Lakota are “proud, even if we are in a bad way and in a society that has been trying to kill us off for over a hundred years.”

The Brew Crew return to the track in late afternoon to begin preparations for the evening’s races. Stan has made some substitutions in his horse lineup, replacing two underperformers with recent acquisitions What’s in the Box and Significat. He doesn’t know what to expect, but facing elimination, he has no choice but to take a chance.

As soon as the race starts, Sylvan weaves his way into the lead pack of seven horses. Omak Express, a strong team that came here from Washington, and Bad Nation, from the Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota, maintain a narrow lead as the riders pull into the first of two exchanges.

As the second mile begins, Stan’s decision to swap horses appears to be paying off, and Sylvan enters the second exchange well ahead of the field. He loses precious seconds changing horses, though, and he emerges in fifth place. He remains well behind the leaders for much of the final mile. Heading into the homestretch, Sylvan is mired in fifth, a seemingly insurmountable eight lengths short of the second-place finish needed for the Brew Crew to at least have a shot at advancing.

Ella and I are screaming, desperately trying to will the team to a miraculous finish. Suddenly, Significat finds another gear and begins to overtake the horses separating him from the leader. He noses into third as they charge down the stretch, hugging the rail, just behind the second-place horse, which veers to the inside, threatening to box him in.

Sylvan matches this move with a quick thrust to the outside, nearly colliding with the horse that had just cut him off, before thundering ahead to a second-place finish. It was a marvelous feat of horsemanship by Sylvan and a resounding show of heart by Significat.

Ella and Parker are beaming as we head to the barn to check in with the team. Everyone is smiling. They joke about replacing their Indian regalia with Viking horns tomorrow, to win over the Minnesota crowd.

Now there’s nothing to do but wait and find out which teams will advance. I say goodnight, and Stan assures me he will text as soon as he finds out if they made it.

I head to a nearby bar for a drink. I’m still there as the clock inches toward midnight, and there’s no word. Just when I’m about to assume the worst, I get a message.

They’re in.

To the crowdÌęstreaming into Canterbury Park on Saturday night, the Indian relay races are a fun sideshow. But to the families and friends of the participants, the nervous excitement is palpable. I watch Stan feverishly chew on a blue plastic seal from a water bottle. Ella says he didn’t eat or drink anything all afternoon.

Tribal drummers wearing ceremonial war bonnets play as the Brew Crew, clad in the usual fluorescent green shirts, take their position in the box and Sylvan rides to the starting line. Stan is using the same horses as last night, hoping they have one more strong performance in them.

The crowd is amped. While there’s no official betting on Indian relay—as a sport, it’s too unregulated—a voice on the loudspeakers announces that “side betting is highly encouraged.” Spectators seem more engaged with the relay races than the conventional gate races, another reminder that the sport has the potential to be bigger. “Cornhole and darts are on ESPN,” Stan said once. “Imagine what relay could do.”

Horses and riders finally converge on the starting line under a bloodred moon. After the start, with the horses accelerating toward the first turn, Sylvan pulls into the lead pack, where he remains for the first mile.

Racing comfortably in third place coming into the first exchange, Sylvan rides hard into the box, where the mugger, Will Brewer, jumps in place to guide him in. Sylvan leaps off the moving horse as Will corrals it and, with only a few steps, bounds onto the waiting horse, J.W. Red, to complete an exquisite exchange. This propels him into the lead as he approaches the first turn of his second mile. Sylvan pushes J.W. Red relentlessly and is ahead by ten lengths as he comes down the homestretch toward the final exchange.

Then things start to go wrong. After cleanly dismounting J.W. Red, Sylvan can’t jump onto Significat to start the final mile. Seconds go by as he tries—once, then again, then a third time—to generate enough thrust from his fatigued legs to make the leap. Other teams execute their exchanges smoothly and start thundering toward the first turn. Finally, Sylvan manages to get on, and with a slap from Stan, Significat is off, striding furiously ahead to rejoin the leaders as they round the first turn.

Significat keeps making up lost ground, and as they head down the backstretch, Sylvan and the rider from a rival team, Little Badger, are neck and neck, their horses’ heads bobbing past each other with every stride. Heading into the far turn, it’s a two-team race, and it hits us that the Brew Crew have a legitimate shot at winning.

As the announcer bellows “And down the stretch they come,” Sylvan extends his lead, putting five lengths between Significat and his pursuer. The finish is in sight. Whipping furiously with his right hand, Sylvan looks over his left shoulder and sees a third horse exploding into the fray, furiously closing the distance along the inside.

For the second straight night, Significat finds another gear. Horse and rider are indistinguishable, churning toward the finish line. They pull away, crossing it first by a comfortable margin.

For a brief moment time seems to freeze, the demons that have haunted the team over the course of a long summer exorcised by victory, an explosion of joy.

Sylvan and Will—often monosyllabic—are talking nonstop, their voices charged with the energy of their triumph. “We were only here to do one thing—win!” Will shouts. Ella greets Stan with a hug, and then they usher a jubilant Parker and a sleepy Kye toward .

Later, pointing to the spot on the homestretch where Significat briefly appeared to falter, Stan says, “A horse’s fitness can get him there—but his heart is needed for the rest.”

Back at the stables, night has brought a crisp chill to the track. The young members of the Brew Crew, who usually move about with a bit of teenage slouch, are walking with their chests out.

Stan comes up to me as Parker jumps atop a nearby fence and starts whacking it with his whip, mimicking a rider.

“You know this is two years to the day since Hermis hung himself?” he says, reminding me that the team had been here when they got word of the suicide. “I know Hermis was there pushing Sylvan down when he was trying to mount Significat on that last exchange.”

I say I don’t understand exactly what he means but assume he’s suggesting Hermis was there helping his friend to the win.

No, Stan says. “I know he was messing with Sylvan and laughing up there.”

The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. This was not Hollywood, the guardian angel intervening to assure the success of his friends among the living.

No, it was more real.

Hermis was still there, still being himself. Still fucking with them. Still laughing.

Will Bardenwerper () is a former U.S. Army ­infantry officer and the author of .

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Sure, you can just load a bag in the car on a Friday afternoon, pick a scenic byway, and go. But what’s nice about charting your path ahead of time is scoring great deals, making sure you don’t miss iconic sights, and knowing exactly what gear you’ll need along the way, whether it’s boardshorts, a down jacket, or both.

Highway 101, California

Start in San Francisco, with San Diego as your final destination. It takes just eight hours to drive the 500 miles via inland Interstate 5, but stick closer to the coast on Highway 101 and you can stretch the trip to a few days or longer, with some choice stops along the way. Low-key , in San Luis Obispo, has wine tasting, live music, and food trucks on Friday nights all summer. , outside Santa Barbara, rents beachside cedar cabins and safari tents (from $170) and has beach cruisers to borrow, the occasional yoga class, and nearby surfing, sea kayaking, and hiking. When you get to Encinitas, stay at , an eight-room hotel (from $120) that opened a block from the beach in 2017 and offers surf coaching from local pro Damien Hobgood.

Have more time? Driveway Highway 1 instead—this slow-paced road hugs the Pacific Ocean nearly all the way down the California coastline.

Highway 385, Nebraska

Surprisingly, Nebraska makes for an ideal road trip—you can leave Denver, Colorado, for a long weekend and enjoy 250 miles of endless sand dunes and grasslands of western Nebraska. Check out Highway 385, the so-called Gold Rush Byway because hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gold traveled the route every day in the late 1880s. , Nebraska’s first state park, has 22 cabins for rent, tent and RV camping, and access to 100 miles of hiking trails. In Alliance, don’t miss the replica Stonehenge made from cars or the coffee and cinnamon rolls at , and stay the night in a renovated Airbnb loft called ($125), just off the main street.

Have more time? Tack on another 200 miles and stay on Highway 385 until you hit South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest to visit Mount Rushmore and explore the area’s growing mountain bike scene.

Highway 50, Nevada

Nicknamed the loneliest road in America—you can go more than 100 miles between gas stations—the roughly 400 miles of Highway 50 across Nevada may be desolate, but there’s plenty to do in this vast desert landscape. Start in Reno and head east, spending a couple of days traversing the state. Stop off in the old ghost town of Austin for a soak at the primitive Spencer Hot Springs, where you can find in the surrounding area. Or book a room at the (from $128), a bed and breakfast in nearby Kingston with a wood-fired hot tub, and don’t miss the prehistoric pictographs in. , in Baker, might be the country’s most under-the-radar national park. You can navigate underground caves, forage for piñon pine nuts, or take a ranger-guided hike under the full moon. And don’t miss the chance to spot distant galaxies from the park’s solar telescopes. Great Basin was designated an International Dark Sky Park in 2016 by the International Dark Sky Association.

Have more time? Venture another 200-plus miles into Utah and drive the 72-mile , a rugged paved and gravel road that crosses into Capitol Reef National Park and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Highway 93, Alberta, Canada

Also known as the Icefields Parkway, Highway 93 connects Banff National Park to Jasper National Park. Start in Calgary and spend a few days traveling nearly 600 miles to Jasper and back. You’ll drive along the Continental Divide, passing glaciers, waterfalls, and stunning valleys packed with bighorn sheep along the way. You can stop to camp or hike at countless points, but be sure to check out the 7.5-mile trek to high-alpine Helen Lake or the views of the Saskatchewan River’s headwaters from the Parker Ridge Trail. In Banff, pitch a tent, rent a canvas A-frame at , or book a room at Lake Louise’s (from $135), which is adding a bike-tuning station this summer. In Jasper, has in-town cabins (from $193) with fireplaces and access to a sauna. Bonus: There’s no cellphone service along this route, so download a playlist for the car and enjoy being disconnected.

Have more time? Start in Spokane, Washington, cross the border into Canada, and hit up on your way.

U.S. Route 1, Maine

Hit the road in Boston and drive 275 miles to Bar Harbor, Maine, taking I-95 to picturesque and coastal Route 1. Spend a night at Portland’s swanky (from $220) or Kennebunkport’s kid-friendly (from $162), then push on to the riverside town of Bath. Collect picnic supplies at for a detour to lunch on the white-sand beaches of before catching a few waves. In Camden, stop at to camp, mountain bike straight up from the sea, or hike to the top of Mount Battie for views of Penobscot Bay. Once you make it to Bar Harbor, explore Acadia National Park and toast to your journey with a pint of New Guy IPA at .

Have more time? Venture 100 miles farther to Lubec, Maine, the easternmost town in the United States. From there, you can reach Campobello Island, in New Brunswick, Canada, for a visit to historic Roosevelt Campobello International Park, the summer retreat of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt.

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For nine years, a small army of Nebraska landowners has defended its homeland against TransCanada, the Calgary-based company intent on running its $8 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline through Nebraska so it can deliver oil from northern Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas. At times, KXL has been the national environmental issue; other times, like now, it’s lucky to make the local news, a worry only for those whose land might soon be interrupted by a 36-inch pipeline carrying heavy, viscous tar sands oil (mixed with undisclosed chemical diluents) just beneath the surface and directly atop their primary water source: the Ogallala Aquifer.

Landowners and other opposition groups have quietly gathered in courthouses and prairie churches, protested on capitol grounds and on cable TV. They’ve memorized the fact sheets: the mileage (1,179); the barrels per day (); the likely number of full-time jobs in Nebraska (); the fact that TransCanada has spent more money lobbying for this pipeline than any other utility company in Nebraska’s history (). Some landowners have given up retirement plans to fight the pipeline full-time. More than a few have lost friends along the way.

From a national perspective, President Donald Trump’s pro-industry stance has drastically changed the optics on the pipeline battle. Barack Obama twice rejected the pipeline, while Trump campaigned on a pledge to approve it, along with the similarly controversial Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. Opponents nationwide considered both projects a bellwether for the next era of America’s environmental policy: if approved, they would signal a renewed commitment to fossil fuels and a direct threat to one of the world’s largest underground freshwater sources. So when Trump approved the Keystone XL last March, claiming it would be “,” the battle seemed to be over.

But for pipeline opponents in the Cornhusker State, the view from the ground is far from hopeless. Last November, , the Nebraska Public Service Commission (NPSC) rejected TransCanada’s preferred route. Instead the commission okayed the company’s alternate choice, a path that differs from the original 63 miles in northeast Nebraska. Those 63 miles could make all the difference: a new route means new easements and likely a host of pricey new lawsuits.

The decision was such a blow that the company requested the NPSC modify the wording of its decision. But the commission unanimously rejected the motion, a ruling that landowner attorney Brian Jorde called the “worst decision possible for TransCanada.”

What this means is that the Keystone XL—after nine years and two presidents—might finally be felled by legal technicalities and groups of well-organized farmers. To gauge the project’s momentum, I attended landowner meetings hosted by both TransCanada and the Nebraska Easement Action Team, a legal defense nonprofit representing landowners affected by the pipeline. Or rather, I tried to.

Despite the legal ambiguities, TransCanada continues to push forward. In early December, the company announced a slew of landowner meet-and-greets at what it called Landowner Engagement Centers in communities along the new alternate route. One was held in a small conference room at the Cobblestone Hotel in Seward, Nebraska, a county seat of 7,200 people surrounded by the stubble of empty cornfields.

When I arrived at the hotel, hoping to meet some landowners and gauge their feelings on the risks and rewards of the pipeline, the ice machine gurgled and the Weather Channel was playing on mute in an empty lobby. A large welcome sign stood next to the conference room door, which TransCanada spokesperson Robynn Tysver immediately closed when I introduced myself as a journalist.

“Seriously, they deserve privacy,” she said.

Less than a minute later, as I waited in the lobby, jotting a few useless notes about the Weather Channel and the ice machine, Tysver returned.

“You know, I have to tell you, I’m uncomfortable having you even here.”

I turned to the receptionist.

“Do you mind me sitting in your lobby?”

“Nope,” she said.

During the 2.5 hours I sat there, fewer than ten people entered the room, and those who did were hardly willing to talk. Each time I stood from the table to follow them out, another TransCanada representative rose and followed close behind. Tysver had never heard of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, so perhaps I sounded fishy. Tysver had a hunch.

“You’re not here on behalf of ?” Tysver asked, referring to a nonprofit environmental advocacy group that has dogged TransCanada from the start.

I left soon after, but not before catching a pair on their way out who agreed to answer a few questions. Both Sam Ferguson and his mother live in Seward, though they don’t own land in the path of the alternate route. As they talked to me, neither smiled.

“Whether or not I’m a landowner, this does affect me,” Linda said. “A pipeline does affect me and my children and his children.”

“I don’t even have an opinion on this thing yet,” Sam added. “I don’t know shit about the pipeline. My concern was if there’s a danger of it leaking, that trumps anything positive.”

There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about leaks. Just weeks before, the existing Keystone pipeline had spilled more than 210,000 gallons near Amherst, South Dakota, and barely a fifth was recovered. This was TransCanada’s third major spill in the Dakotas since the pipeline began operation in 2010.

The original Keystone was installed just west of Seward, and the newer, larger XL pipeline would also run west of town, though residents here negotiated to steer it away from the local reservoir. Save for this notch around the town, the southern half of the alternate route in Nebraska would run parallel to the existing Keystone pipeline, all the way to its southern terminus in Steele City.

It’s this slight deviation that could ruin the pipeline’s future, because while TransCanada insists that the Keystone XL “remains a viable project with strong commercial support,” some energy analysts say it’s become a risky gamble.

requires mining and separation, a much more complex and costly process than extraction from conventional oil shales, where bitumen can be pumped in its natural state directly from the ground. In other words, the profit margin is inherently lower. But TransCanada first conceptualized the pipeline about a decade ago, when oil prices peaked at nearly $150 per barrel and producers rushed to siphon every last drop. Since then, prices have crashed.

The pipeline faces another problem: oil companies are selling off their Canadian assets, signaling a shift to less expensive and cleaner products. This math gets worse for TransCanada the longer the fight drags out.

In September 2014, after six years in regulatory limbo, TransCanada acknowledged that legal delays had already driven up the cost of the pipeline by nearly half, . Had the NPSC approved the preferred route, TransCanada could have started construction immediately. But now it has two options: build along the alternate route and face what is likely to be an onslaught of new lawsuits from previously unaffected and unnotified landowners, or fight the commission’s decision in the Nebraska Court of Appeals, a process that would likely take years and add millions, if not billions, to the tab.

One night after the Cobblestone event, the (NEAT)—a legal defense nonprofit representing landowners affected by the pipeline—hosted a gathering of its own, the first of several up and down the length of the alternate route. Unlike TransCanada’s Landowner Engagement Centers, the NEAT meetings functioned as de facto public events. This one was held in the Olde Glory Theatre, a repurposed church just a few blocks off the town square, and the seats were filled with about 75 area residents, some of whom, presumably, recently learned that the pipeline’s new path would now cross their land.

NEAT was established by Brian Jorde and Dave Domina, the same attorneys currently fighting TransCanada. Weeks before, Domina had told the NPSC that if it accepted TransCanada’s request to amend its application, it would destroy the commission’s reputation. “That would make a mockery of you,” he’d said. “It would make a mockery of the judiciary.” Though an outgrowth of Bold Nebraska, NEAT emphasizes that it is not an anti-pipeline group, but rather a pro-landowner group, and the landowners were finally enjoying the upper hand.

Landowners who currently welcome the pipeline are lured either by the money—which includes a signing bonus as high as $80,000, NEAT says, in addition to a one-time easement payment—or the politics. In a deeply conservative state, claims of American energy independence have convinced many that supporting the pipeline is an act of patriotism. On the other hand, those who oppose the project see a loss of private property rights and an environmental cancer: not just increased greenhouse gases and a threat to the aquifer, but also soils compacted beneath heavy machinery, reduced crop yields, and negative impacts on surrounding wildlife. Nevertheless, should TransCanada clear the remaining legal hurdles, landowners of every political stripe will share at least one desire: to have the upper hand in negotiating with a multibillion-dollar corporation.

“Imagine if Ted Turner, one landowner, happened to have all the holdings that stretched 280 miles along the length of this pipeline,” Jorde told the crowd in the theater, employing an oft-used analogy. “Do you think one person with all that land would have more leverage than one of you, who might just have a small piece? So how can we empower each of you to be Ted Turner? By grouping together.”

Most landowners at the meeting seemed to oppose the pipeline, asking questions about tar sands oil, the county’s responsibility in the event of a spill, and whether or not TransCanada can sell the easement to a third party. (It can.) One woman, clutching a newspaper clipping with a map of the alternate route, stood and said simply, “I cannot tell exactly where the route is,” to which the majority of the room laughed and nodded in agreement.

At least one man stood to support Keystone XL and said he owned land already crossed by TransCanada’s first pipeline. His name was Roy Cast, and he argued that extracting oil “is in fact cleaning up the environment in Canada” and that opponents should remember that American blood has been spilled “to protect our right to have oil shipped into this country.” He spoke forcefully while those around him shook their heads or stared at the table.

In the foyer after the meeting ended, I spoke with Tad Warm, a farmer who lives ten miles northwest in the small town of Staplehurst. Not long ago, Warm received a letter from TransCanada, but he already knew his land would be crossed. When the alternate route was first published, he dove into the plat maps. The pipeline would pass within 100 yards of the house he lives in with his wife and two kids and would cross farmland that’s been in his family for nearly 70 years. He told me he’d been at the TransCanada meeting in the Cobblestone Hotel the day before and was frustrated with the way TransCanada sidestepped his concern.

“I brought up the South Dakota spill, and they said, ‘Oh, we’ll replace the land,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, how long? And will you replace it like it used to be?’ They didn’t answer the question.”

I asked him about the money, the signing bonuses.

“It could never be enough.”

After watching the pipeline battle rage on for nearly nine years, those who left the Olde Glory Theatre and shuffled out into the night already held a better hand. The last time TransCanada barreled through, some had been wooed by big checks. But they were wiser this time, their questions were more specific, their rebuttals more pointed, their concerns hardened by what they’d already seen.

This time, they were ready for a fight.

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In Ted Genoways’s new book, , Rick Hammond, a corn, soybean, and cattle farmer, is preparing to hand over the family business to his daughter, ­Meghan, and her fiancĂ©, Kyle—the sixth generation of Hammonds to work the land in central ­Nebraska. Genoways, an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributor and Nebraska local, spent more than a year visiting the Hammonds, from one fall’s harvest to the next season’s planting.Ìę

Perhaps surprisingly, Genoways learns, Nebraska is not a natural place to farm; there’s just never been that much water. It was government policy—the 1862 Homestead Act, then agricultural subsidies—that allowed the Midwest to become the world’s breadbasket. And at a cost: Genoways writes of the environmental damage wrought by pesticides and overwatering, the risks of genetically modified seed, and the harm of flooding global grain markets with cheap corn. American farming frequently receives tough criticism on these points. The beauty of This Blessed Earth is to understand them from a grower’s perspective. Under the current American system, environmentally sound farming is at odds with the Hammonds’ survival, something that few critics seem to get. “There’s a lot of things wrong with farming now,” Meghan, the idealist in the family, tells Genoways. “But we’ve also gone down this road quite a ways, and the people who say ‘This is all a brand-new development and it’s easily reversed’ don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”Ìę

The Hammonds, who have several hundred acres of land, are honest, ethical, and hardworking. In the end, it’s up to readers to decide whether the midwestern family farm is worth saving.

, the first book by former , is about another kind of family farm. In 2012, Tone learned of a DEA raid on a quarter-horse-racing track in Los Angeles and, noticing a Texas connection, began investigating. Quarter-horse racing, in which the nimble cattle horses sprint a quarter-mile, is the dominant form of racing in parts of the Southwest and Southern California. A top quarter horse can bring more than $1 million at auction.Ìę

As Tone reports in brilliant detail, racing quarter horses was once a favorite pastime of the Zetas, which in 2010 was the most brutal of the Mexican drug cartels. Former leader Miguel Trevino, himself arguably the most murderous of the Zetas, was a quarter-horse fanatic.Ìę

In Bones, Tone tells the bizarre story of Trevino’s older brother, JosĂ©, a bricklayer in Dallas with no direct involvement in drug trafficking. Miguel, Tone believes, cheaply sold JosĂ© a champion quarter horse named Tempting Dash in the hope that JosĂ© would become rich off the horse’s winnings and breeding fees and provide for his family.

Relying on extensive court records and interviews with Scott Lawson, the rookie FBI agent who discovered the brothers’ scheme, Tone re-creates the early successes that led JosĂ© and Tempting Dash into the winner’s circle, and then the U.S. government’s crosshairs. Bones is an important addition to the literature on the U.S.-Mexico drug trade and a fascinating window into the subculture of American quarter-horse racing.Ìę

Illustration by

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