The Shortgrass Prairie

East of the mountains, Colorado opens into one of the most overlooked ecosystems in North America. The shortgrass prairie rolls from the foothills all the way to the Kansas and Nebraska borders. It is defined by two ankle-high grasses, blue grama and buffalograss.

Blue grama is Colorado's official state grass, Both grasses survive on very little rain by locking roots deep and going dormant in dry spells. That dense root mat is the prairie's real foundation. Before European settlement, an estimated tens of millions of bison roamed the Great Plains, grazing almost exclusively on these two grasses.

By the end of the eighteen hundreds, hunting and habitat loss had cut that number to only a few hundred wild animals. Pronghorn, the fastest land animal in the Western Hemisphere, still run the eastern plains. Colorado's pronghorn population has recovered to tens of thousands of animals.

The Dust Bowl of the nineteen thirties hit this region directly. Decades of plowing broke the root mat that held the soil, and when drought arrived, the topsoil blew away in massive black clouds. Much of the surviving native prairie in northeastern Colorado is now protected as Pawnee National Grassland, about one hundred ninety-three thousand acres in the South Platte basin, a quiet, wide-open piece of the original Great Plains.