By Bill Kelly, STATEWIDE Correspondent

It's been called a forest planted in the desert -- a ponderosa pine wilderness in the middle of the sandhills. And lots of people want a piece of the Nebraska National Forest.

"There's going to be some hard decisions."

"Real hard decisions to be made, you bet. And hopefully we'll be able to strike a balance somehow."

It's the only national forest in Nebraska. It is also something of a man-made freak of nature. In the middle of the sandhills there is a pine forest planted as an experiment. Campers and ranchers and wildlife advocates all have their own ideas of how this federally-managed land should be used in the years to come. Its a delicate balance.
All of those interests and more will be paying close attention to what happens at the Nebraska National Forest in the coming year. The rangers are preparing their forest management plan that, in effect, divvies up the use of the land to help accommodate its many, many uses. It comes at an important time, because this forest, unique in the nation, is about to feel the effects of old age. Important decisions must be made about re-planting this hand-planted pine grove outside of Halsey, Nebraska.

It is an unexpectedly lush green island in the middle of the sandhills of central Nebraska. 90,000 acres of land make up this region of the Nebraska National Forest. 20,000 of those acres are covered with a lot of pine in defiance of nature. These are, after all, sand dunes best suited for dry grass and yucca plants. You can see almost the whole thing from up here at the top of the ranger lookout station. Mack Deveraux is the district ranger for the forest.
"It's just a phenomenal thing," [Deveraux says.] "I'm glad they planted it before we got into a lot of the legality questions that we have today. It would never have been done today if this thing was still sandhills prairie."
Deveraux meant exactly what he said. The entire forest was planted by hand. If it hadn't, there would be no trees here.
"If a place like Yellowstone or the Black Hills, if those are left on their own, there's a large portion of that that would go to trees, particularly in the Black Hills. Here if you just leave it on its own, the trees are eventually going to disappear."

The forest is here because a century ago a University of Nebraska professor named Charles Bessy thought you could bring development to the barren sandhills if you supplied would-be settlers with an easy supply of timber. Thousands of Ponderosa Pine seedlings were planted. The forest grew, but the timber industry never took off. What remains is something of an open air laboratory for growing trees in sand complete with a sizable tree nursery that nurtures young seedlings.
"Yeah, we're kind of making it up as we go along, but the short term goal that we have in doing that is to try and at least maintain those acres that we have in trees, and since we're losing a few trees every year to insects, disease, and old age, we have to plant a few trees every year."
There lies the challenge. What is the best use of this taxpayer-owned land in the years to come? Especially because it requires the human hand and the federal government to keep the trees growing here. When the government made this the Nebraska National Forest in the '50s, it was for recreational use first. National forests by law have a number of uses. The campsites near Halsey are popular with hunters and hikers and cross-country motorcyclists.

[Two campers talking:] "We seen two wild turkeys yesterday.
"I seen two more today. Might have been the same two, I don't know."
"Two white tail. And two or three mule here".
"So that's kind of neat."
Protecting that wildlife habitat is an important part of the mission. Because of the pines, a variety of game and birds are here that ordinarily would not be part of the sandhills ecology. This is also prime grazing land. There are over 400 ranches using the federal range land in the Nebraska Forest System. Many of them move their cattle onto the Bessy District every spring. The Zutavern family has been doing it for over 50 years.

[Rick Zutavern:] "This is something that happens every spring. This is 55 times I've made this drive. And it's one of the highlights of the ranching season for us." The section they've used for years is along the Dismal River and it's considered especially good pasture. Leasing it is an important part of the Zutavern Ranch operations.
"Grazing definitely has a role to play here at the forest," [says] Con Zutavern, fourth generation on the family ranch. He argues that ranchers also give taxpayers a fair payment for the privilege and it is actually a benefit to this land. "This land belongs to all of us. This is federal government land. It belongs to all of us and it's for all of our use. And on of those uses is grazing, among others, hunting and camping but we're providing a service to you in managing this land for the public."
The ranchers maintain fences and water wells. Even the grazing itself, ranchers claim, will reduce the dangers of range fire.
[Con Zutavern:] "You just don't want to create a giant timber box sitting out here in the middle of the sandhills which will happen if you don't allow cattle or any other type of ruminant to graze it."
Fire is a part of life here. There was a scare this last spring when a lightening fire raced across 5,000 acres of grasslands and stopped after burning another 200 acres of the pines. Ranchers hate the grass fires. In their world, you might as well be burning money. Fire destroys valuable livestock feed. It can endanger the cattle and the family home. When anyone for the Forest Service says the fire can be good for the land because it rejuvenates the prairie, ranchers shake their head in disbelief. Such a basic debate over what's best for the land illustrates the difficult balance the Forest Service must make when considering the future of this land. The rangers will be hearing from the public in the coming months to hear their ideas about the best use of the resources of the Nebraska National Forest.

"How are we going to manage our grazing program to accommodate, improve wildlife habitat? How are we going to manage our recreation and our grazing to not conflict with the endangered species act?"
There is no issue more basic than the trees themselves. Should the forest service continue to plant trees where they were never intended to grow?
"These are all Burr Oak. They're two-year-old trees. We've been having a lot of moisture here lately so we should have some pretty good success with these trees once we get them in the ground."
Nature does not fully replenish this forest with the same rate that it was planted back in 1902. Most of the original Ponderosa Pines will be reaching the end of their normal lifespan in the coming years. Insects and disease are claiming even more.
"It's good to have species that are much longer lived out here rather than one stand of trees that will all grow up at the same time and die at the same time."
[Bill Kelly:] "Which is what's happening with the original Ponderosas?"
"In some places, yeah, that is what's happening."
For now the goal is planting trees only where there are only existing stands of trees with little expansion of the forest into the grasslands. As the Forest Service reviews how this land should be used, it must also decide how this land should be maintained.
"I guess that would be an issue that would need to be addressed politically whether or not we want to maintain an existing acreage of Ponderosa Pine, Jack Pine, Eastern Cedar plantations out here or do we want to revert back to a more natural type ecosystem where it's just native grassland."
More trees would mean more habitat for wildlife that ordinarily would not reside in the barren sandhills. It would also be a popular choice for those who love the camping facilities.

[Mack Deveraux:] "I think people from population centers that come out here and want to hunt prairie grass and they have a lot of money invested in an R.V. and a dog and a dog trainer and a shotgun, and, you know, and a this and that. They've got a lot of money wrapped up in what they enjoy doing and I think they've got a perfectly legitimate right to expect to come out here and find decent grass cover left for birds to hide in and to nest in the next spring."
[Bill Kelly:] "Do the ranchers understand that?"
[Deveraux:] "I think the ranchers, even though they don't like to accept it, they have accepted it, and we've had -- we've made some fairly major changes in our grazing program. More grassland would begin to return the land to the sandy prairie nature intended. It might open up more land for grazing."
[Con Zutavern:] "I would prefer to keep things as they are and have been."
Ranchers like the Zutavern family nonetheless are still concerned that the politics of the time might still squeeze them off federal land.
"We would have to sell the number of cattle that they would want to reduce our size by."
[Kelly:] "There wouldn't be other land you could move them onto?"
"There's no land presently for sale near us, and there's no land for rent, so we wouldn't have any choice but to reduce the size of our herd."
[Kelly:] "That would be a big hit then."
"It's a big hit."
And perhaps the biggest question mark for the forest is the shrinking federal budget. Even though the Nebraska National Forest spends less than any other part of the National Forest System, it will still be asked whether Dr. Bessy's experiment in sandhills forestry should go on into its second hundred years. For Statewide, I'm Bill Kelly.