Me and my rental car were lost, on a skinny gravel road that Google maps claimed was the way to Cedar Point Biological Station. I reached a padlocked gate and pulled over. At the same time, another car was headed away from the gate, so I waved it down and out stepped John Janovy, Jr., […]

My stomach still shivers when a flame is set to dry grass. Maybe it’s the culture I was brought up in, a few personal experiences, or instinct programmed into my DNA. Whatever the reason, after all these years of successfully using fire on our rangelands I still feel my nerves rise in tandem with the […]

While driving down a two-track road, deep in the Nebraska Sandhills, one may be so lucky to witness a heavenly white bird gliding across one of the many spring-fed lakes. The trumpeter swan is the largest waterfowl species in the world. Almost hunted to extinction, these birds have since been reintroduced to the Nebraska Sandhills […]

Everything about the outdoors was my interest. That was my home and then when I heard the term wildlife biologist, I’m like, “You’re kidding me. I could get paid to just watch wildlife. Cool!” I had talked to a game warden in high school, he told me it was too much of a dangerous job […]

As an elementary-school-age Nebraskan, Michelle Kwan’s 2002 Olympic run remained my exclusive exposure to ice skating. Hearing of a small pond close to my grandparents’ Colorado home induced wonder beyond previous possibilities in my young life. I waited impatiently for our Christmas trip to their home on Wisp Creek Drive. My dad, as tall as […]

How does one define a place? Is it a location someone has visited? Does one have to stand on the shores of a lake to feel like they know the lake? Can someone who has never visited a place still have a connection to it?   I grapple with these questions as my time as […]

At first look, the Great Plain’s most striking characteristic is often the vast, open horizon that may invoke a sense of emptiness. While driving along I-80 through central Nebraska, it is easy to dismiss the surrounding land as monotonous – a lackluster flip-book of crop fields where each page is exactly the same. But hidden among the sea […]

As tame as the state of Nebraska may seem in these days of interstate highways and carefully plotted section lines, it was not always so. There was a time in America’s history when the land that would become Nebraska was a dangerous unknown, an unforgiving, unending plain, cut through by a long, broad river which […]