Great Western Road Trip: The Roads and Scenery from Idaho to Nebraska

The final leg of our trip covered a great stretch of road through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. These roads provided some great scenery and some great stops. This is what you can expect.

As you leave Spokane, Washington heading east on Interstate 90, the landscape is low-lying, mostly-forested hills at a distance from the road, a mix of yellow-green grasses and dark-green trees (mostly evergreens). This continues through the first part of Idaho's northern tip. Then, the evergreens and steep hills come back in abundance as well as some really nice lakes and rivers along the roadside. This makes for some very lush and beautiful scenery. The hills and lakes hug the road pretty closely through Idaho and the first part of Montana.

As you get a ways into Montana on Interstate 90, the prairie grasses come back and are once again interspersed with evergreens. Also, the large hills once again move further off into the distance. Even though the vegetation is much like southern Utah, it's still somehow quite a bit greener.

The landscape in this portion of Montana actually seems to go through a cycle with hills further off and prairie vegetation to hills hugging the roadside and mostly evergreens. The constant variety in the landscape makes this portion of Interstate 90 very enjoyable. Personally, I think it might be best when the rolling plains are between you and the large hills are at a distance. It's a very wide-open country and it's very scenic. There are also quite a few creeks and rivers running by or beneath the road fairly often.

When you get to Butte, Montana, the road takes you up some really steep-graded hills to the top of a small butte. The road zig-zags through some tall and very interesting rock formations covered with a variety of different-colored evergreens, mostly cedar and pine. The colors of the trees range from dark green to light green to red and orange, reminding me of a scene in the early fall with deciduous trees. I'm not sure what causes this with the evergreen trees on this butte, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the relative rainfall each tree has a chance to take in.