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Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/1519842
May 2024 • Nebraskaland 49 canyons, and in 2000 convinced Mark Alberts to try a burn on his pasture on the edge of the Central Loess Hills northwest of Gothenburg. As was the case in the steeper Loess Canyons to the south, cedars were spreading from the steep slopes into open pastures. The idea did not go over well with his neighbors. "The greatest ad campaign in this country, the most successful, has been Smoky Bear," Alberts said. Prescribed burning "was something kind of new, and we had a lot of people mad at us. Mark was a four-letter word." But with the help of NRCS staff and some neighbors, they gathered a hodgepodge of equipment and burned 300 acres. "We kind of made up our burn plan as we went," Alberts said. "If we burned today the way we did then, we'd probably go to jail." With just 30 percent mortality on cedars, the results of their fi res were poor by today's standards. But even that, Alberts said, was enough to turn some of the naysayers into some of today's greatest advocates for prescribed fi re in the region. And lessons were learned: Where Alberts had cut trees with a chainsaw in one location and left them lay next to standing trees, the dried, dead formed a perfect ladder fuel, taking the fi re from the ground to the crown and through the stand, killing more trees. This cut-and-stuff method of controlling cedars had already been used elsewhere, but word of its eff ectiveness had not spread. In 2002, Whisenhunt helped Alberts and a dozen or so other landowners form the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, the state's fi rst prescribed burn association. With Alberts as the burn boss, they burned 1,300 acres. With grants from the Nebraska Environmental Trust and others, they purchased equipment to make burning safer and more effi cient, including 200-gallon water tank sprayers that could slide into the back of a pickup, and then burned more acres in 2005. Scott Stout, a Burwell native, began working on his wife's family's ranch north of Curtis when they married in 1999. He said he was "shell shocked" by the number of cedars in the region. When he wasn't working cattle or farming, he was doing something to control cedars, which covered 20 to 50 percent of their pastures. He helped neighbors with one of those burns in 2005, and while he wasn't overly impressed with the results, he could see fi re was a better option than cutting and joined the burn alliance. He continued to cut scattered trees to prepare for his own burn, but wasn't happy with the time it took to move and pile those trees. Instead, he pushed them up against the dense stands on slopes too steep to cut. When he fi nally burned in 2008, he saw the same success Alberts had, but on a larger scale. Where previous burns had resulted in 40 to 50 percent Mike Gruber and Russ Sundstrom, a contractor and rancher in the Loess Canyons, watch Sundstrom's crew cut and pile cedar trees on Gruber's ranch south of Brady to prepare for a prescribed burn. Gruber had cleared trees on the land in the 1980s. "It seems like it's slow, but then when you think back it's like, 'Wow. How did there get to be so many trees so fast, and a worthless cedar tree too,'" Gruber said.