Sandhills

Why should it be a National Park?

The area between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains goes by many names, including the great plains, Midwest, prairie, or the fly-over states. The often maligned region is perceived as an expanse of cornfields and open grassland where nothing worthwhile exists for the nature-minded traveler. While it is true, the Midwest lacks the towering scale of a Yosemite or Great Smoky Mountains, there are grand natural settings to be found if you know where to look.

The sandhills of western Nebraska are one of the largest unknown, uncultivated, and unprotected areas of the country. They make up a quarter of all the land in Nebraska, a staggering 19,600-square-miles. Their total size is actually greater than that of nine states. The sandhills do not have the vertical grandeur that most people associate with our iconic natural wonders, but this landscape has a similar scale to the Everglades. This immense environment deserves our attention and admiration.

To understand their appearance and size, picture the flowing sand dunes covering the Sahara Desert, now cover those dunes with a layer of prairie grass, and you have a general idea of the sandhills. Instead of waves of shifting sands, the landscape is an enormous series of yellow and green mounds that extend to every horizon. Like the nearby Badlands of South Dakota, this stretch of land was bypassed by settlers moving west, because it offered very little in the way of resources besides scenic beauty. Because of this avoidance, the bulk of the sandhills remain unaltered by humans.

As much as 85 percent of the land remains in its original state. From the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, the government gave incentives for homesteaders to move west. People who braved settling atop these sandy landforms received up to 640 acres of land. However, these pioneers quickly learned that the sandhills were inhospitable to farming and cultivation. While some small towns popped up throughout the region, most of the homesteaders continued west.

Currently, only a tiny percentage of land has federal or state protection to conserve this impressive and ignored landscape, including Valentine, Crescent Lake, and Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuges, as well as sections of Samuel R. McKelvie and Nebraska National Forests. However, all of these areas combined results in the conservation of fewer than 400-square-miles, or roughly 2% of this forgotten landscape.

During the 1960s, a Sandhills National Parkway was considered for this region. The idea of making a National Park in this region has been made by individuals such as high school biology teacher James P. Jackson, but nothing approaching a serious campaign has ever emerged.