Calumet Bluff Trail

During the first summer of the famed Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1804, the travelling company camped for four nights at the base of a high bluff along the Missouri River, described by the party as “composed of a yellowish red, and brownish clay as hard as chalk.” Here the expedition met several times with local Sioux and Yankton tribes before moving on, heading further upriver en route to the Rocky Mountains. The cliffs here came to be known as Calumet Bluff, which is now part of protected parkland between a base for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Lakeview Golf Course in northeast Nebraska. A short hike—about 1.2 miles round-trip—leads to and from the bluff and offers scenic views of the Missouri River floodplain and Lewis & Clark Lake, a man-made reservoir on the border of Nebraska and South Dakota.