The bluffs are survivors. Geologists believe all the surrounding land once stood at the same height, but millions of years of erosion wore away the softer rock while harder capstones protected these formations. Another theory suggests the North Platte River once ran twenty to thirty-five miles wide through here, with the bluffs standing as islands in the ancient current. Today, Scotts Bluff rises 835 feet above the North Platte Valley, making it the third-highest point in Nebraska. The formation includes South Bluff, Eagle Rock, Dome Rock, and Saddle Rock, all standing guard over Mitchell Pass, the narrow gap that pioneers discovered as their passage through this natural barrier. The Sioux knew these bluffs long before Europeans arrived, using the high ground to drive buffalo herds.

Between the 1840s and 1870s, an estimated 350,000 emigrants passed through Mitchell Pass on three overlapping routes: the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, and the Pony Express. For pioneers who had traveled hundreds of miles across featureless prairie, the bluffs were both landmark and milestone, proof they were making progress toward the promised lands of Oregon and California. Many tried to climb the formations but found them impossible. They carved their names into the soft sandstone at Register Cliff downstream, camped in the shadow of the towers, and recorded their impressions in journals that survive today. The ruts their wagon wheels carved into the sandstone of Mitchell Pass are still visible, grooves worn by the passage of a nation moving west.

When the National Park Service surveyed Scotts Bluff in 1919, their assessment was dismissive: a big bump in the land. Local residents disagreed. They lobbied, protested, and eventually convinced the federal government to designate it a national monument that same year. What followed was what rangers called an era of development. A zigzag trail wound up the bluff, later replaced by the Saddle Rock Trail when landslides threatened the original route. A Summit Road took seven years and $200,000 to build, rising through tunnels carved into the rock to overlooks 800 feet above the valley. The views proved so popular that traffic jams choked the tiny summit parking lot, visitors refusing to leave even when rangers asked them to move on.

From the North and South Overlooks, the Great Plains stretch to the horizon in every direction, broken only by the thread of the North Platte River and the distant spike of Chimney Rock twenty-four miles southeast. The elevation change from valley floor to summit, roughly 800 feet, creates a microclimate shift from shortgrass prairie to pine-dotted buttes. Watch your step on the trails: the rocky terrain is rattlesnake country. Today, between 200,000 and 300,000 visitors make the pilgrimage annually, many driving the same Summit Road that took seven years to carve. The Oregon Trail Museum at the visitor center preserves the story of those who passed this way before, following the same route that Hiram Scott somehow traveled in his final days, crawling toward bluffs he would never climb.