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 […]

Time-lapse produced by Carlee Koehler  The first time I saw a trumpeter swan in the wild, up close, I was so cold I couldn’t feel my face. It was early January along Blue Creek in the western Nebraska Sandhills, and most of the high plains lakes, rivers and streams were locked in ice after a […]

You can stand there and you can see the whole northern part of the ranch, and way south, too. And I think just to stand up on that hill and be able to see all that… that’s never really changed in all of our generations here. That’s probably my favorite spot. My great grandfather homesteaded […]

A line of fire blazes in an ocean of grass. The smell of burning bluestem wisps through the air. A man dressed in leather boots carefully tips a drip torch to spark a flame onto the landscape–a familiar sight by those who live on working landscapes in the Great Plains. In early spring, I photographed […]

I am currently a wildlife biology major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney, working on various undergraduate research projects. I first learned about Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) last spring and was thrilled to see how imagery was being used to convey important stories. After that meeting, I knew I wanted to contribute to this […]

We drive down a long gravel road parting a sea of grass. I look up and see the moon – a fingernail crescent. We park the truck in front of an old cottonwood tree and cut the lights. To the west, the night sky is still dark and star-filled; to the east dawn is a […]

Sarah Sortum grew up near Taylor, Nebraska, on her family’s cattle ranch in the Sandhills, the descendant of homesteaders. Her family continues to operate on the same property, running their own cattle, custom grazing operations for others, and Calamus Outfitters, a nature-based tourism operation.

The roads were dark, the truck was full of gear, and the Platte Basin Timelapse team was headed to the Nebraska Sandhills.  We were on our way to the Switzer Ranch, 16 miles northwest of Burwell, Nebr., to film a cattle drive for our forthcoming documentary. This would be my first time experiencing a cattle drive […]

It’s possible to appreciate the Nebraska Sandhills through a car window. Until a few years ago, that was about as close as I’d been to the grass-stabilized sand dunes that cover a quarter of our state. That’s because up in ranch country, the majority of the landscape is privately owned. As much as I wanted […]