Cheyenne, WY
Wyoming's busiest airport, three miles north of downtown Cheyenne at 6,159ft MSL. Class D, two runways (12/30 at 9,260ft, 8/26 at 5,624ft). The Wyoming Air National Guard 153rd Airlift Wing flies C-130s from the south side of the field. Cheyenne Frontier Days — "The Daddy of 'em All" rodeo, running since 1897 — fills the city every July and produces a fly-in week unlike anything else in the high plains. F.E. Warren Air Force Base, three miles west, hosts the 90th Missile Wing — one of three remaining Minuteman III ICBM wings in the US, with launch facilities scattered across 9,600 square miles of Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska prairie.
Scotts Bluff rises 800 feet above the North Platte River — a massive promontory of layered sandstone, siltstone, and volcanic ash that was the second great Oregon Trail landmark after Chimney Rock, marking where the trail had to thread Mitchell Pass through the bluffs. To emigrants it signaled the transition from prairie to the high country ahead. The bluff is named for Hiram Scott, a fur trader who died near it in 1828. Today a road (with three tunnels) climbs to the summit for sweeping views, and the deep ruts worn by tens of thousands of wagons are still visible in the ground below. It anchors Scotts Bluff National Monument's 3,000 acres of bluff, badlands, and prairie.
Five dramatic sandstone slabs tilted at 40-50 degrees, rising 1,000 feet above Boulder. Formed 290 million years ago and thrust upward during the same geological event that created the Rockies. From the air, they appear as sharp red-brown fins against the green mountain backdrop. The contrast between the flat Great Plains to the east and the abrupt mountain wall is one of the most striking geological boundaries in North America.
No landmark appears more often in the diaries of Oregon Trail emigrants than Chimney Rock — a slender spire of clay and sandstone rising nearly 300 feet above the North Platte River valley, visible for days as the wagon trains crept west across Nebraska. For the quarter-million people who walked the Oregon, California, and Mormon trails in the mid-1800s, Chimney Rock marked the end of the flat plains and the start of the rugged climb toward the Rockies — a moment worth recording. It was already eroding then and is shorter now; lightning and weather keep wearing it down. It stands today as a National Historic Site, a lone exclamation point on the prairie that thousands of pioneers used to mark their slow progress west.
Colorado's official air and space museum, housed in something a pilot can appreciate on sight: Hangar No. 1, built in 1939 on the old Lowry Air Force Base. Lowry was a technical training center from 1937 to 1994 that put more than a million airmen through schools in everything from aerial gunnery to photography; when the Air Force left in 1994, volunteers turned the surviving hangar into this museum. Inside the 1930s hangar are 50-plus aircraft and space vehicles — a B-52, a B-1A Lancer (one of only two), an F-14 Tomcat, Century-series fighters, and a replica X-Wing signed by the Star Wars cast. A B-52 is posed out front as if lifting off. Its sister site, Exploration of Flight, is down at Centennial Airport with flight simulators and ride flights.