Location Taken: Northern Nebraska along Route 20
Time Taken: November 2012
What do you think of when you hear “Nebraska”?
Corn?
Flat fields along a braided river?
The large cities of Lincoln and Omaha?
Fly-over country, just endless plains far below the window of the plane?
How about a vast area of sand dunes, the remnants of an ancient desert, barely held in place by a layer of hardy grass?
The Sandhills of Nebraska make up a significant portion of the state, about one quarter of the land mass. It’s soil that can’t support crops or really anything except grass and cattle. It does do the cattle pretty well, and there’s a large aquifer underneath, so water for the cattle’s not really a problem. But the human population there is quite low, with only tiny towns dotting the one road going through the region.
Because of that, the land’s actually largely untouched by humans, which is quite rare in that part of the world. Admittedly, the desert was only stabilized by the plants back in the Medieval period, just 500 years ago, and it really wouldn’t take much abuse for it to convert back. The only reason it survived the early 1900’s belief that “if you farm an area, the rain will follow” is because even those clueless farmers didn’t think the sandhills were worth anything. So while a lot of the other parts of the state blew away in the dust bowl, the sandhills just sat there, growing grass.
It’s not all bad being thought of as worthless.
