Halfway Across America: A Week of Trail Magic on the Great American Rail-Trail

Bernie Krausse

Great American Rail-Trail - Westbound
Started: March 28, 2026
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All photos by Bernie Krausse

Somewhere on the gravel roads west of Lincoln, the Great American Rail-Trail stops feeling like a route and starts feeling like a country. This week — Days 57 through 63 — Bernie Krausse walked across the middle of Nebraska on what's believed to be the first thru-hike of the trail, crossed what may be the halfway point between Washington, D.C. and Washington State, and turned fully west toward the Rockies. Seven days. 208 miles. One midnight visitor, and more strangers handing over cold water than he could count.

Eastern Nebraska is flat, hot, and unhurried. The scenery isn't why this week matters. Everything else is.

The trail was a patchwork

Bernie spent the first day threading through greater Omaha — greenways, old rail corridors, bike paths, past the data centers Facebook and Google built out on the prairie. Then the MoPac Trail took him southwest through Springfield toward the Platte River. And then it quit on him. After a bridge crossing, the MoPac just ends for a stretch, so he walked ten miles of road in the dark to find where it picked back up.

That's the honest texture of this trail. The Great American is rail-trails stitched together with greenways, gravel county roads, and highway shoulders, and this week had all of it. Smooth paved rec path through the Lincoln suburbs, mulberries staining the asphalt purple. Gravel along Oak Creek. A nine-mile walk down the shoulder of Highway 79 that was, at least, wide and paved. If you're planning your own Great American walk, picture exactly that — not one ribbon of trail, but a route you assemble surface by surface.

The kindness kept finding him

The trail wasn't the story this week, though. The people were.

It started in Omaha. His trail angel, Sophia, took him out for a meal on the Missouri River and put him up at her place in the woods. The next day, at the Heron Bay Bar and Grill on the Platte, owner Shirley sent him off with a full meal and snacks for the road. A regular named Jen pulled up Facebook and showed him that a cyclist from Seattle, Dave Evans, was riding the same route a few weeks ahead — close enough to have heard about "the guy walking it" back in Ohio, never close enough to meet.

Then it really picked up. Near the Platte, a woman named Molly, who co-owns a gas station he'd stopped at, went looking for him by car, just to hand over snacks and a cold Gatorade. Minutes later, Roy and Denise pulled over on their way to feed horses. Roy didn't offer a ride — Bernie's turned down about thirty of those by now. He offered seventeen dollars in singles and two beers to carry to camp. The next day, it was grandmothers who stopped their cars so the three kids in the back could give him water, then sign the cross over him and tell him he was in their prayers. And a young woman named Makayla, sprinting out of her house with an ice-cold bottle.

That's what it means to walk a trail that runs through towns instead of around them. On the AT or the PCT, the wilderness is the point. Here, the country itself is the trail — its gas stations, its bar owners, its grandmothers. Bernie put it his own way: "Trail Magic and abundance is wonderfully following me wherever I may go."

A coydog at midnight

Not every visitor was human. One night, camped under his tarp, Bernie woke to the strangest sounds he'd ever heard from a dog — yips threaded through something wilder. The animal circled his shelter for fifteen minutes, caught between curious and afraid. He figured out it was a coydog, a coyote-dog hybrid. The second he put his shoes on to deal with it, she was gone. Around 4 a.m. the coyotes ran their roll call across the fields, and the last voice to answer — distinct, unmistakable — was hers, miles off.

Bernie read it as a sign. "I too am a hybrid between two worlds in most things in my life," he wrote, "and had actually written this down the other day." He called it a positive omen. After the week he was having, I wouldn't argue.

Halfway, and turning west

For most of this stretch, the Great American Rail-Trail runs right alongside the American Discovery Trail — the two routes sharing the same rail-trails and county roads across eastern Nebraska. Near Columbus, they split. Bernie crossed a second bridge into town, watched the ADT peel away, and started what he calls Stage 3: the long haul across the rest of the Great Plains toward the Front Range.

He hit another milestone the same week, and it came with a wink. He ended a 31-mile day in Humphrey at the Midway Motel — and realized he might actually be close to the midpoint between Washington, D.C. and Washington State. About two months in, with roughly two and a half still ahead of him to the Pacific.

In Norfolk, the trail swings hard west onto the Cowboy Trail — the long rail-trail across northern Nebraska, town to far-apart town. The easy eastern half, with its rec paths and gas stations every few miles, is behind him now. The remote half starts here.

What it can teach you

On Facebook, Bernie writes like a man half in a trail journal and half in a meditation, but there's a steady stream of real intelligence for anyone thinking about a walk like this:

• Your shoes will die sooner than you expect. His New Balance were finished around 1,500 miles, and he got lucky — he ran into a Famous Footwear at 7:58 p.m., two minutes before closing, and found four boxes of his exact model, one in his size. West of here, on the Cowboy Trail, towns with shoe stores get rare. Plan your footwear resupply around the towns that have it, or mail a pair ahead.
• Small towns are your water network. This week he filled up at public libraries, gas-station soda fountains, town fountains, and a trailhead vault toilet's spigot. Know where those are before you're thirsty.
• Power lives at the gas station. Coffee and an outlet at a Sinclair in Elmwood. A charge while he ate out of his pack in Valparaíso. On a road-walking trail, the convenience store is your charging station.
• Heat is a timing problem, not a wall. He walked through high-80s and low-90s and still pulled a 41-mile day — his biggest of the year — by leaning on shade and early starts. Big miles are there. They're just not free.
• And the trail isn't continuous. You'll connect rail-trail segments with gravel roads and highway shoulders, sometimes after dark. Know where the gaps are ahead of time, and they stop being a problem.

What's next

Right now Bernie's rolling west onto the Cowboy Trail, headed across the rest of Nebraska toward Wyoming, the Wind River Range, and the Rockies past that. Three hundred and thirty-three miles up the trail, in Gordon, a couple he's only ever met online has left the door open for him. The welcome wagon, as he calls it, keeps showing up a little ahead of him.

We're building and verifying our Great American Rail-Trailwaypoint data in real time as Bernie walks it, staying just ahead of him. If you're planning this route, that's the intelligence going straight into the GPS tracks. The next update picks up on the Cowboy Trail. 🥾

Hiking America's GPS Tracks of the Great American Rail-Trail

Week 9 covered significant ground across Nebraska, including several sections that are actively being refined this week:

• We've updated three gap routes

The updated tracks are now live on Gaia GPS for Hiking America subscribers and available free to everyone via our public link - https://hikingamerica.kit.com/great-american-gpx

In addition, Hiking America Subscribers will find

• 181 new Great American Rail-Trail Service Waypoints - 7,900+ and counting.

Hike Your Hike - John.