At first glance this is just another Sandhills ranch trail winding its way to the next windmill. Upon closer examination we notice that an opportune jackrabbit used the truck tracks during its nightly feeding foray. A fog cloud is hanging in the valley to the north, obscuring the windmill at the end of the trail. What we can't see though, is the hidden valley four miles beyond that knob to the right known as the Lost Chokecherry.

Nebraska's famous author, Mari Sandoz, wrote a book called Cheyenne Autumn about a band of Native Americans who escaped their reservation down in Oklahoma to flee on foot back to their home in the Yellowstone country. They survived a shootout with the U.S. Army in Kansas and eventually made it to the Platte River near Ogallala where the group split ways. Dull Knife took his followers northwest toward Fort Robinson where they were captured during a blizzard. Little Wolf, along with thirty-nine other men, forty-seven women, and thirty-nine children headed north into the Sandhills with the Army in pursuit. They managed to elude the Army and holed up for the winter on a hillside above Chokecherry Lake just south of the headwaters of the Snake River. The year was 1878.

Sandoz wrote about how the Cheyenne men made hunting excursions to the south to get meat and hides to survive the winter. They shot mule deer on Spring Lake, which if you turn and face the other direction in the photo above, you would be looking down upon.