Where to find the largest sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere

The 72-mile-long Dismal River winds through the Nebraska Sandhills near the Nebraska National Forest.Novelist Jim Harrison once called the Nebraska Sandhills “without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States,” and for good reason. As the last Ice Age began to wane, glacial meltwater carried sand and silt from the Rocky Mountains to central Nebraska, where the relentless winds whipped up dunes like surf cresting offshore.(Related: Avoid crowds at the 10 least-visited U.S. national parks.)The Nebraska Sandhills region is home to four of the top 10 least populated counties in the U.S. While the COVID-19 pandemic has shuttered tourist attractions across the country, many of those in the Sandhills—a National Natural Landmark since 1984—are ready-built for social distancing. Within a year of Roosevelt’s proclamation, the Bureau of Forestry had established a tree nursery along the Middle Loup River and planted nearly a hundred acres of pine.Today, at nearly 20,000 acres, the Bessey Ranger District within the Nebraska National Forest is the largest handplanted forest in the Western Hemisphere, and the Bessey Nursery—which supplies well over a million seedlings every year to fire-prone forests across the country—is the oldest federal tree nursery in America. Below you’ll find the unnatural boundaries between forest and grassland, pine and prairie, and the old world and the new.See thousands of migratory Sandhill cranes roost on the Platte River and feast on corn during their spring stopover in central Nebraska.All of these woefully undercelebrated attractions are found within a 150-mile stretch of north-central Nebraska, but the Sandhills don’t end at the forest.