The Sandhills

Out here the land does something unexpected. The prairie rolls in long, deep swells, as if a vast ocean was flash-frozen mid-wave and then covered in grass. These are the Nebraska Sandhills, and they are the largest grass-stabilized sand dune system in the entire Western Hemisphere, covering roughly nineteen thousand square miles across north-central Nebraska.

That number is worth sitting with. Nineteen thousand square miles of sand dunes, hidden under a thin but persistent skin of bluestem and switchgrass and needle-and-thread. The grass arrived after the last major drying period, a few thousand years ago, and it held. Remove the grass, and the dunes move. They have moved before, in geologically recent terms. The Sandhills are not finished.

The people who ranched here understood the land on its own terms. Farming the Sandhills with a plow was tried and it failed repeatedly. The sand beneath the roots will not support row crops. What it does support, remarkably well, is cattle. The Sandhills have the largest concentration of cattle ranches in the United States, spread across counties with fewer people per square mile than almost anywhere else in the lower forty-eight.

There are nearly two thousand lakes in the Sandhills, most of them shallow and windswept, most of them visible only if you climb a dune and scan the horizon. The water table is very close to the surface here. Beneath those dunes lies the Ogallala Aquifer, the great underground sea that supplies drinking water to eight states.

People drive through Nebraska and see grass and sky and call it empty. The Sandhills are not empty. They are one of the least-altered large landscapes left in North America, and the grass is the only reason they stay that way.