Red Cloud Buttes Hike, Fort Robinson State Park, Crawford, NE

June 25, 2017

We weren’t quite ready for the adventure we experienced on our hiking trip to the Red Cloud Buttes at Fort Robinson.  The trail map, located after talking with three different people, had so little detail that we didn’t take it with us as we headed up the mixed-use [many horses had left deposits for us to negotiate] trail to the top of the buttes.

Our trail area is circled in black.

The area was wooded and lovely but the trails were for horses and didn’t give access to overlooks of the valley.  We remedied that by veering off, getting some snapshots, and moving back to the East Red Cloud Loop Trail.

Fort Robinson from Red Cloud Buttes.

We had expected the top of the buttes to be table-like containing a loop path of maybe a mile.  After hiking in one direction for what we guessed was a mile, we began to wonder.  A little further on, the trail started to curve away from the Fort Robinson side of the valley which we took to mean we were rounding the loop.  Then the trail appeared to go down–all the way off of the butte toward the town of Crawford.  That didn’t feel right.  When we saw a “Cross Trail” [none of the trails had distances on them] we thought it would take us from our new side of the butte to where we’d been–a trail across the butte.  We followed this cross trail into a meadow–and it descended.  Thank heavens Dave had his phone (and service!) because when he checked a topo of where we were, we were paralleling our original trail but three ridges of about a hundred feet each were between us and the descent to the car!

This topo shows the Buttes are NOT flat on top.

So, we headed south through the woods, Dave breaking a trail.  Some challenges included a ravine so steep we had to backtrack west till we could cross it, a dead tree with its branches spread wide across what looked like our best route over a dry brook, and a barbed wire sheep fence that we crawled under.  Because we were going through woods, the ticks found us fair game.  Dave said it was a ten tick day.

Up and down, up and down.  Jane wondered if we would be spending the night in the woods and wished we’d brought more water.  We finally reached the mixed-used trail we’d taken up the buttes, headed down the hill and found a welcome cooler of water left for horseback riders.

This was quite a re-introduction to hiking in hills which we hadn’t done since our Maritimes trip last summer.