There is a stunning panorama in northern Colorado unlike any other in the Centennial State, a place of solitude far from crowded trails and high country attractions teeming with tourists. It lacks the alpine grandeur of the Continental Divide and the state’s iconic fourteeners. The elevation is the same as Denver. But it is a landscape shaped by geological upheaval over eons, with a human history dating back thousands of years, making it a place of stark beauty that encourages a visitor to stop, linger and imagine the past. Beholding the Pawnee Buttes, 45 miles northeast of Greeley as the crow flies, one can imagine the Arapaho, Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa and Pawnee people hunting bison for millenia in the shadow of those twin rock towers and a neighboring escarpment to which they once were attached. One can reflect on the hard life of homesteaders who settled here and elsewhere in the sprawling Pawnee National Grassland during the 19th century, only to pack up and leave during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s when drought and dust storms destroyed millions of acres of farmland. In “Centennial,” an epic historical novel about northern Colorado, best-selling author James Michener noted that it took 200,000 years for the buttes to form. The Pawnee Buttes trail head near Grover, on Oct. 10, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) “They were extraordinary, these two sentinels of the plains,” he wrote. “Visible for miles in each direction, they guarded a bleak and silent empire. They were the only remaining relics of that vast plain which the New Rockies had deposited. Each bit of land the sentinels surveyed dated back to ancient times before the mountains were born.” This past January marked 50 years since the publication of “Centennial.” For those who read it, or saw the 12-part TV miniseries on NBC (1978-79) starring Raymond Burr, Richard Chamberlain, Sally Kellerman and Lynn Redgrave, it’s impossible to visit the buttes without imagining scenes from Michener’s tale — even if he gave them a fictional name, calling them the Rattlesnake Buttes. “This land was beautiful,” he wrote. “From the buttes at sunrise a man would be able to look east and see a hundred miles to unbroken horizons, stark meadow after meadow reaching beyond the human imagination. The colors were superb, but the uninitiated could look at them and not see them, for they were soft grays and delicate browns and azure purples.” Today, the Pawnee Buttes trailhead provides a scenic view with covered picnic tables. A trail leads to the buttes, about 2 miles away. En route, one can hike up and over the neighboring escarpment to an overlook with a great view of the buttes. There are dispersed campsites not far from the trailhead. There is much more to the Pawnee National Grassland, which is administered by the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. The land was reseeded with grasses by the U.S. government in the middle of the last century after the Dust Bowl blew away most of the topsoil. The best times to visit are fall and spring, because it can get very hot in the summer. The ghost town of Keota, reminiscent of scenes in “Centennial,” is worth a stop en route to the buttes. All that is left is a handful of derelict buildings and a water tower, but a century ago it was a thriving town that served homesteaders in the surrounding area. It was located on a rail line that ran between Sterling and Cheyenne. “There were automobile dealerships, book stores, dry grocers, butchers, bakers,” said Vernon Koehler, who has worked at the grasslands for 15 years as a mineral and lands program manager, and who seems well acquainted with every creek and cranny in its 193,000 acres. “Across the prairie there were all these people who homesteaded. About a mile out in every direction, there would have been a house. You had thousands of people who were trying to make a go of it on their farms. The Ghost town of Keota, on Oct. 10, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) “There would have been trains daily, or nearly daily, going between Sterling and Cheyenne,” Koehler added. ” Along that route, they were little town sites sprinkled along it about every 10 to 15 miles.” Also worth a stop is a cemetery built for the town of Sligo, 10 miles north of Keota. The town is gone, but headstones remain. Lilies planted decades ago still bloom beside graves. “If you wander around and look at the dates, you realize the very first people buried here were children who died in the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-20),” Koehler said. “From their ages, you can tell. They were a year or two old.” There’s also a self-guided birding tour in one section of the grassland that attracts birders from as far away as Europe. Related Articles Outdoors | As population pressure mounts, Front Range land managers release vision statement Outdoors | 5 not-so-obvious Front Range campgrounds to enjoy this fall “The best time to visit is in May and June, when migrants (birds) are passing through and resident breeders are arriving on their nesting grounds,” the authoritative Cornell Lab of Ornithology says of the Pawnee grassland. “In late spring, the birds are bustling at the height of nesting season and the grasslands are in full bloom. With as many as 301 species of birds using these windswept plains, the Pawnee is a bird-watcher’s paradise.” Michener became familiar with the history and scenery of northeastern Colorado long before he wrote “Centennial.” A native of Pennsylvania, he lived in Greeley in the late1930s, earning a masters degree from Colorado State College of Education and teaching at a K-12 school attached to the university, which was renamed the University of Northern Colorado in 1970. UNC built a new library in 1972 and named it after Michener, who by then was a successful and wealthy novelist. It is a repository for many of his papers, and it houses an exhibit that tells his story. “He left a lasting mark,” said Jay Trask, head of archives and special collections at the Michener Library. “He was a great believer in philanthropy. There are people here who are paid for with Michener’s money. There is an endowment. There are students who will never know his name except that it is on this building, but he’s the reason they get to go to school (with scholarships).” When Michener began working on “Centennial” in 1970, America was planning the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, which also marked the centennial of Colorado statehood, and he had been consulting with the national Centennial Commission. One of his notebooks at the library includes a typewritten note dated July 4, 1970. “This morning I was up with a complete novel outlined,” he wrote. “I had not thought of its subject since 1937, but now it stood forth in complete detail. … The word Centennial must have reminded me of the Centennial State, and of an imaginary plains town of that name which has lived with me since 1937 when I first saw the Platte (river).” The notebook also contains handwritten diagrams, research on dinosaurs that roamed the area, detailed geological notes, historical observations of life there in the 1800s, recipes of the period and a description of the buttes that had captured his imagination. The multi-hued buttes reveal eons of sedimentary rock deposited over millions of years, rising 300 feet over the surrounding plains, 13 miles south of a point where the borders of Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming meet. The sweep of history, if only imagined, is inescapable. A view from Pawnee Buttes trail in Grover, Colorado on Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024. The Pawnee Buttes locate in the northeast corner of Weld County, Colorado, approximately 13 miles south of the Wyoming border. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post) “The Indigenous people spent a lot of time here, but a lot of it was just passing through, going from water place to water place,” Koehler said last week while admiring the view at the trailhead. “There’s probably no 30-meter by 30-meter square out here that is untrodden by humans. Then, the settlers. We have pictures of, I think it was a Model T pulling a plow over near the buttes. Between here and the buttes was farmground in the ‘20s.” Now it’s a silent panorama of rock formations, empty plains and wide-open sky that tells part of the Centennial State’s history in a way no other place can. “Ideally we want folks to come out here and have a similar sense of stepping into a church in Paris that was built in 1100,” Koehler said. “There have been humans out here doing things just as long. They just didn’t leave that sort of physical monument.” Subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Adventurist, to get outdoors news sent straight to your inbox.