 Claire Scavello, Bud Megee, Jessica Nees and Katrina Schou let their horses take a drink, while the unusual Pawnee Buttes tower in the background. They ride their horses through the open land of the Pawnee National Grasslands in North Eastern Colorado.
Imagine you're pulling a handcart with all your possessions, including a child or two, across a 1,300-mile trail through the wilds of Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah.
There are hundreds of people like you on this trek - pioneers with no money for wagons and oxen. You're heading west on a blistering summer day as part of a Mormon expedition in 1856.
Your leader, Edward Martin, gambled that the caravan could make it to Salt Lake before winter despite starting in late August.
You trade watches and keepsakes for food when you reach Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Even then, food is rationed when the journey continues. You worry about your children.
In early October, a bitter storm blows hail, sleet and snow as you cross the North Platte River in Wyoming. Thirteen people die in one night, many of them youngsters.
You leave behind furniture, bedding, even blankets, to lighten the load as you desperately head west.
In late October, another storm forces you to a halt about five miles from the Sweetwater River where relief wagons are waiting.
Yet another storm stops the expedition at the Devil's Gate rendezvous on the Sweetwater. It follows the survivors to Salt Lake. More than 100 people die on the journey.
The handcart caravan left late, but all pioneers faced hardships we can only imagine today. They forged across the Great Plains, they pushed and pulled their wagons over the Rockies - only to face deserts that were far wider than they looked. If it wasn't snow storms, it was sandstorms. If it wasn't freezing cold and icy river crossings, it was scorching sun and buzzards looming overhead.
Yet hundreds of thousands of men, women and children headed west between 1841 and 1869, when the transcontinental railroad was completed.
We encountered many reminders of these pioneers on our own journey through Nebraska and eastern Colorado: museums, monuments and even deep ruts cut by hundreds of thousands of wagon wheels.
The Mormon Trail, the California Trail, the Oregon Trail, the 49'ers Trail, the Pony Express and the Overland State Coach all cut through Nebraska. At some point, they all followed the Great Platte River Road, a series of trails that paralleled the river.
"The rivers were their highways. There was always a source of water and you couldn't get lost," said Anna Mae Hagemeier, curator of the Overland Trail Museum in Sterling, Colorado.
 The Archway Monument located in Kearney, NE. is the only monument to spans over I-80. The inside holds three floors of interactive displays on how America was pioneered.
Some of 49s followed the South Platte River through eastern Colorado in search of a shortcut to the California gold fields. Later, prospectors followed the South Platte on their way the Cripple Creek gold fields just west of Denver.
Many of the trails converged at Kearney, Nebraska where there is now an eight-story high arch that straddles I-80. If you've seen the movie "About Schmidt" you've seen a little of the Arch. But that's just a peek.
Take the long escalator ride to from the lobby to the museum and you'll soon be standing in the midst of a buffalo stampede.
 An old pioneer stands in front of the elevator that leads to the entrance of the Archway Monument located in Kearney, NE. The monument spans over I-80 and inside holds three stories of interactive displays on how America was pioneered.
You'll hear the stories of the handcart expedition and other pioneers retold from their diaries. You'll watch the west change with the completion of the cross-country railroad and, later, the invention of the automobile.
Not far from Kearney, you can visit the massive Pioneer Village in Minden or the Prairie Museum in Hastings. In Colorado, the Overland Trail Museum and the Fort Morgan Museum recount the settlement of areas that the pioneers bypassed or merely passed through on their way west.
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MOUNTAINS IN THE MIST
From the crest Wiggins Hill, 60 miles northeast of Denver, white puffy clouds are so low you think you can reach up and touch them.
In the distance, the Rockies are a series of mist-covered gray peaks with white patches of snow spilling down the sides. Below the tree line, the mountains are dark, almost black. Stretching in front of these mountains is a sea of brown and gray prairie speckled with occasional trees and black dots of cattle.
 Fields of sunflowers off of I-76 west of Keenesburg, CO glow in the morning sun as the Rockies fill the background. Although sunflowers grow wild in this area, these sunflowers are used for their oil and seeds.
It must have been an awesome, and frightening, sight for the pioneers.
There's not much rain in northeast Colorado, but this area has its own dry beauty. Small sunflowers grow in clusters here, like bouquets scattered by the roadside. Sometimes you'll see fields of the yellow and black flowers.
STARGAZERS
In Columbine Park in Sterling, Colorado, five gold and brown giraffes seemingly grow out of a tree trunk. The 15-foot-tall sculpture is the work of Bradford Rhea, the area's best-known artist.
 The Skygrazers sculpture, located in Sterling, CO, was created by Merino, CO resident Bradford Rhea. Originally carved out of wood it began to deteriorated after years, so the city and people of Sterling helped save the sculpture by financing a bronze duplicate.
The tree sculpture, called Stargazers, was Rhea's first big project. He carved the long necks and slender heads from the limbs of a dying elm. The trunk became the body and legs.
Some of the giraffes are looking up as though gazing at the stars.
It's not hard to recognize Rhea's sculptures. You'll find people, animals or spirits emerging from a central core, often in a fluid, circular motion.
"I try to achieve a spiraling flow to everything," said Rhea, who carved Stargazers in 1981. It was so popular that Rhea cast it in bronze when the tree decayed.
"The community latched on to that piece," said Rhea.
It was the beginning of a love affair between the artist and the city. You can find Rhea's works at the park, the library, the high school and the tourism center out by I-76.
Rhea moved to Sterling in the late 1970s with a different career in mind. He had a degree in nuclear medicine and was working at the local hospital as a laboratory technician.
"I quit my job, sold my car, got a bike and survived through people's generosity," he said.
Each of his works has a Biblical theme. The inspiration for Stargazers was the verse, "Just beyond the clouds of doubt and chaos, they appeared, a congregation of spindling appendages fused in a mass of true belief with heads reaching in all directions."
 Bradford Rhea, a sculptor from Merino, CO, chips away marble to create a sculpture he calls "Transfiguration". In the background stands a finished piece called "Seven Angles for Seven Trumpets". Following themes from biblical passages, the two pieces were funded by himself in hopes of finding a buyer.
In the library, Rhea's "Windlace" sculpture is a series of women emerging from a common center. The faces are progressively more detailed as move up the sculpture.
" Here, I wanted to show the evolution of women," Rhea said.
Now Rhea is creating marble sculptures in his unpretentious studio in nearby Merino.
Kneeling on a scaffold eight feet above the floor, Bradford slowly chisels shape out of 10-foot-tall white rectangle of marble.
He thinks the piece will be called Transfiguration, but already, he's found faces in the marble that he didn't know would be there.
"When I dig into the material and I see something, maybe in a shadow, I follow it," he said.
"You make mistakes, but you keep chipping away and something comes of it - it's like life."
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