AINSWORTH, Neb. – Despite this week’s heat, a 70-year-old geologist from California is walking across Nebraska, one step at a time.

Kevin Cornwell, who is originally from Omaha, is tracking about 32,000 steps each morning as he makes his way across northern Nebraska. News Channel Nebraska caught up with him in Ainsworth, roughly halfway through his 450 mile trek that began at the Nebraska-Wyoming border 11 days ago.

“This journey has been on my bucket list,” Cornwell said. “You get to walk through it really slow. You get to hear Nebraska. You get to smell different parts of Nebraska. You get to see the landscape change slowly over time. It’s so much different than 60 or 70 mph on the highway.”

Cornwell, a retired geologist, has traveled all over the world. He said his training makes him especially attuned to the state’s landforms.
“I’ve been trained to look at landscapes through the long lens of time and process. Just walking through Pine Ridge, through the Sandhills, through the river valleys, my head is going with all of these different processes. More than 65 million years ago Nebraska was on the floor of an ocean,” Cornwell said.

While Cornwell is covering most of the miles on his own, his wife, Chris Belmer, is traveling with him to offer support and occasionally joins for a stretch of the walk.
“I thought he was kind of crazy at first,” Belmer said. “We follow him on the Garmin app to make sure he’s still moving.”

The couple is also making time for unique experiences along the way, such as visiting Golden Prairie Bison near Valentine.


“We went out and basically fed a herd of bison. Holy smokes. You just don’t do that in most normal day stuff,” Cornwell said.

For Cornwell, the journey is about more than just miles.


“There’s beauty everywhere. Just look for it,” he said.