Niobrara

Why should it be a National Park?

The Niobrara runs east across northern Nebraska through a valley that should not contain what it contains. Six ecosystems overlap here: tallgrass prairie, mixed-grass prairie, shortgrass prairie, Sandhills prairie, eastern deciduous forest, and northern boreal forest, with ponderosa pines whose nearest relatives grow a state away in the Black Hills. Species that have no business meeting hybridize in this valley. It is one of the most biologically strange seventy-six miles in the country, and it looks, from the highway, like Nebraska. More than two hundred waterfalls drop off the canyon walls into the river. They come out of the Ogallala Aquifer rather than off the surface, which means they run year-round at about fifty degrees and never freeze or dry.

The waterfalls are the reason people come, and the canoes are the reason the fight over this river matters. Tens of thousands of people float the scenic stretch every summer, most of them on outfitter tubes out of Valentine, which means the river already carries park-level use on a corridor that is mostly private ground with public water running through it. For biologists the valley is a laboratory. Because six plant communities meet here, species that should never encounter each other do, and they hybridize: eastern and western warblers, oaks, flickers. The zone is narrow, it is documented, and it is one of the better-studied hybrid corridors in North America, which is a form of national significance that has nothing to do with scenery.