Introduction: Wide Vistas, Azure Skies

With vast prairies, wide vistas, azure skies, and refreshing breezes, the northern Great Plains is where Big Sky Country begins. Yet this lovely land is also a land of climatic extremes: devastating floods and searing droughts, raging wildfires and blinding blizzards, violent tornadoes and choking dust storms. Flanked by humid forests on the east and high plains on the west, its rolling hills and broad flatlands stretch over some 220,000 square miles of North America, across parts of two Canadian provinces and four American states, mainly between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.¹ In the words of North Dakota geologists John