| PERSPECTIVE |
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[October 23, 2002] -
The nation's largest hand-planted forest celebrates its 100th birthday this year - and it's right here in Nebraska. The Nebraska National Forest in Halsey may be the state's greatest unnatural wonder. Thousands of acres of pine and cedar trees that don't belong in the Sandhills of Nebraska. It hasn't been easy - in the last century the forest has survived attacks from animals, fire and people who didn't believe in the project. As "Statewide's" Mike Tobias reports, more challanges lie ahead for the "forest in the sand." |
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Watch the Perspective segment:| Click Here
Nebraska National Forest ranger and Halsey forest historian Herb Gerhard talks about how the forest got started:| Click Here
Gene Moraczewski of Omaha planted trees at Halsey in 1938 as a 14-year-old with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He describes how he planted trees:| Click Here
Nebraska National Forest ranger Jerry Schumacher talks about the future of the Halsey forest:| Click Here
View Halsey forest from the top of the only working fire lookout tower in Nebraska:| Click Here |
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Transcript of Forest in the Sand
[Mike Tobias/Reporting]
For years kids have slid away their summers at this 4-H camp. It looks, smells and feels like a Colorado pine forest - but it's actually in the Sandhills of Nebraska. At the Nebraska National Forest in Halsey. It's Mary Chapin's sixth year at the camp.
[Mary Chapin/Benkelman]
Just cause there's no other place like this in Nebraska. I mean, it's the Sandhills, you wouldn't think there would be a forest out here.
[Tobias]
The Nebraska National Forest in Halsey is a botanical oddity. A land where cactus and yucca plants fight with ponderosa pines for rights to the sandy soil. It looks like a mistake of nature - but nature had little to do with it. At first. Dr. Charles Bessey was already a renowned botanist when he came to the University of Nebraska in 1884. He brought with him a concern - that America was using up its supply of timber. And an ambitious solution - hand plant a forest in the desert-like plains of his new home state.
[Tobias]
Did people think Bessey was nuts?
[Herb Gerhard/Nebraska National Forest Ranger]
Yeh, they really did.
[Tobias]
Herb Gerhard is Halsey's resident historian.
[Gerhard]
The cattlemen perceived this project as being an infringement on their grazing. So yes, there was some resistance against it. Plus, people thought there was no way you could grow trees in a grassland like this.
[Tobias]
But Bessey persisted. He planted a test plot of pine trees on private land in Holt County, with some success. Bessey found a high-powered ally at the turn of the century. Avid conservationist Teddy Roosevelt was elected president, and soon thereafter established the Nebraska National Forest. In 1902 workers started planting trees on 90 thousand acres in Thomas and Blaine counties. The land was available for the project because homesteaders didn't want it.
[Jerry Schumacher/Nebraska National Forest Ranger]
One of the reasons people didn't homestead here is because it kinda looked like a desert, you know.
[Gerhard]
There was brush here and there and that was about it.
[Schumacher]
One of the reasons Dr. Bessey thought that trees could grow here was that, even though the surface looks very dry, in most cases you dig down a little ways under the surface and it's pretty moist.
[Tobias]
It wasn't easy. No one had ever tried to plant a forest on this type of land. Methods and machinery had to be invented. The first seedling trees came from the north - jack pines from Minnesota and ponderosa pines from Black Hills of South Dakota. Most of these died within three years.
[Gerhard]
Right away they had a lot of trouble with the little seedlings, damping off they called it, just wilting. A fellow from the University of Nebraska solved that problem for them. It was just one problem after another. Gophers, weather, things like that. All those things were disappointments to them.
[Schumacher]
They had crews that were actually, that's what they did all day, trapped pocket gophers. They'd have a tree that was three feet tall and they'd come back and all the roots had been eaten off. The gophers killed a lot of trees.
[Tobias]
Seedlings raised in the forest's nursery faired better. Early records show workers planted about a million trees a year. It was hot, dirty, hard work - remember, they were planting their own shade.
[Schumacher]
It was challenging to get good planters, so one of the things they used was the incentive of they'd pay for their transportation out and back if they stayed for the entire season. If they left early, they had to pay their own transportation.
[Gene Moraczewski/Omaha]We greened up the country a little bit.
[Tobias]
Gene Moraczewski planted trees at Halsey in 1938. He was 14 years old.
[Moraczewski]
You grabbed the top of the tree and you whipped it to fan out the roots. Then you put it in this trench. Then you stomped this trench. I can't even do that anymore. You had to stomp that shut.
[Tobias]
Moraczewski worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps - a depression-era program that put unemployed young people to work in national forests and parks. He made 30 dollars a month, sending 25 of that home to help save the family farm in Ashton. The army ran the C-C-C camps.
[Moraczewski]
We had a colonel, he was up in age. Then we had a young lieutenant, his name was Steele, and he lived up to his name. He was strict as hell. The old colonel come in for inspection through the barracks, he'd walk behind, he was like a puppy.
[Leonard Tuma/Farwell]
There's the pump house that we used to irrigate out of.
[Tobias]
Leonard Tuma worked in the nursery for the C-C-C in 1939. He was a homesick 18-year-old.
[Tuma]
But they didn't want to let me go home. I wanted to go home so bad, I wasn't away from home, that was the first time. They no, I can't go home. Only after I served 6 months here than I could just like reenlist and go home for a week.
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C-C-C crews sometimes planted 30 acres of trees a day, and put up a lot of buildings. Give 8 years of the Halsey C-C-C camp credit for much of what the forest looks like today. There are 20 thousand acres of trees - mostly Ponderosa Pines, Jack Pines and Eastern Red Cedars. 30 thousand people visit every year. They tour the only working fire tower in the state, ride all terrain vehicles, horses and mountain bikes on miles of sandy trails, float on the Dismal and Middle Loup rivers that border the forest, and pitch tents and park R-Vs in the forest campground. Cattle use the forest too. Halsey is heavily grazed - especially grasslands that make up more than three-fourths of the area. Grazing permits help the forest stay on good terms with its rancher neighbors. It also helps the forest survive its biggest threat - fire. A 1995 fire burned 190 acres of trees and 55 hundred acres of grassland. It was the second-largest fire in forest history. A 1965 fire took a much larger toll - 1/3 of the forest.
[Gerhard]
It is here now and it's pretty, but this country has been protected primarily from fires for 100 years. If it wasn't for protection of the country from wildfires, of course this forest probably wouldn't be here under these circumstances, climate and everything. After succeeding wildfires, of course, every one would take more trees, probably there wouldn't be just a few trees left here and there in areas that were protected from fire.
[Tobias]
That's why areas like this thick stand of cedar trees are a concern. A fire that starts here would spread quickly. Plans call for rangers to thin out these cedars with chainsaws. Until then they hope lightning doesn't strike this stand. Future plans also call for controlled burns of other forest and grassland areas.
[Schumacher]
There's really no way that we can stop a fire from starting. So what we have to do is we have to try to stop that fire from becoming a large fire.
[Tobias]
When fires strike other forests, they turn to Halsey for help. The Bessey nursery - named after the forest's patriarch - produces about 1 and one-half million seedlings a year. It's the oldest federal tree nursery in the country. Most seedlings are shipped elsewhere, like forests in Colorado devastated by summer wildfires. The Bessey nursery keeps frozen a 10 year emergency supply of seeds for trees from these forests and all others in the region.
[Gerhard]
As soon as the fire is out, they'll call this nursery and order so many seedlings of certain types to replant the burned area.
[Tobias]
Most seedlings are sold to Natural Resource Districts for use by private landowners.
[Schumacher]
People that drive along Nebraska's highways and see the shelterbelts and windbreaks planted along those roads, can be pretty assured that a lot of those trees came from right here at the Bessey Nursery.
[Tobias]
Fire is just one challenge the forest faces in the next 100 years. Another is declining rural populations. For years local workers were hired to handle the big spring tree harvest. This year an outside contractor handled the job for the first time, because there just aren't enough workers around Halsey. Another is rejuvenation. There hasn't been a major planting since after the 1965 fire and few trees start and grow on their own. As the pines age and die in the coming decades, will there be support to keep this experiment alive? Schumacher says there are good reasons there should be.
[Schumacher]
It's just a monument that kind of in my mind compares to a lot of the monuments maybe in Washington. We see those as big marble things, but this is a living monument that continues to grow. It's pretty amazing to me.
[Tobias]
So maybe 100 years from now the great, great grandkids of these 4-Hers will spend the summer here, singing the same traditional camp songs and wondering how a forest ended up in the middle of a central Nebraska desert. Reporting for Statewide, I'm Mike Tobias.