Wilderness Park and the Seven Miles of Urban Wild

Long and narrow, Wilderness Park runs along Salt Creek in the southwest part of the city. The creek has its own agenda. In spring and fall, flooding shifts the banks. Seasonal fluctuations change which trails are passable. The park changes every year, shaped by water the way this whole region was once shaped by water before anyone put a city on it.

At fourteen hundred seventy-two acres, Wilderness Park is Lincoln's largest park by a wide margin. It is also heavily wooded along the creek. The label urban woodland is not quite accurate as a complete description: the park includes some prairie sections as well, an echo of what most of Nebraska looked like before settlement. The Salt Creek corridor here has been wooded since well before Lincoln existed.

The park took shape in the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, when several parcels, including the former Epworth Park and Camp Minis-Kuya, were combined into a single managed unit. Its hiking trail was designated part of the National Recreation Trails Program in nineteen seventy-seven. The trails inside the park are used by hikers, cyclists, and equestrians.

What makes Wilderness Park unusual for a city park is that it is genuinely difficult to forget that you are inside a working natural system. The creek rises. The cottonwoods shed. Deer move through. The city is visible at the edges, but the center of the park, along the creek channel, holds the sounds of birds and water rather than traffic. In a state that has converted most of its native landscape to agriculture, this corridor survived because it flooded too reliably to be farmed and was eventually protected before it could be developed.