NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/695082
38 NEBRASKAland • JULY 2016 "William cut mostly pine, but also some cottonwood and elm. It was rough cut lumber used for corrals and barns," said Kuhre. "It is my understanding that the big pines in the river valley were already cut by this time. So they logged pines in the Sandhills between the Fairfield and the Niobrara and hauled them down the bluff to the mill with horse-drawn wagons." At the time, settlers were also felling legions of trees for fence posts and firewood for cooking and heating homes. Tree ring analyses indicate that few Niobrara pines escaped the settler's ax. Nearly all the oldest pines in the valley today began their growth after 1900. Foght wrote of the "giant cedars and pines" in the Loess Hill canyons: "Out of them the best dwellings in the settlements were erected; and so sought after were they that settlers would come from two and three days' journey to get the coveted timber. Great oxloads of cedars were carted all the way to Grand Island, a distance of fully eighty miles, and sold to the Union Pacific Railroad Company [to make ties]." In the NEBRASKAland 1993 special issue "A Walk in the Woods" Doak Nickerson with the Nebraska Forest Service wrote that early undocumented reports suggested that during the last decades of the 1800s more than 100 sawmills operated in the Pine Ridge, and similar to the Niobrara, most of the escarpment's large pines were cut, creating the uniform century-old forests we see today. Between 1900 and 1960, with the railroads completed and with less local demand for lumber, only a few small, part-time sawmills operated in the Ridge. During the 1960s, smaller pines were cut and the logs railed to Wisconsin paper mills, but by 1970, this pulpwood market dried up. In the mid-1980s, high timber demand nationwide justified limited cutting of large pines in the Ridge and trucking the logs to major sawmills in the Black Hills. High fuel prices and the opening of more federal lands to logging in the Black Hills in the early 2000s shut down the marginally profitable Pine Ridge operations. Commercial logging of ponderosa pine in Nebraska is now almost non-existent. Some Pine Ridge logs, mainly those cut during thinning operations, are chipped and used to fuel the boiler-driven heating and cooling plant at Chadron State College. Today, never-cut, old-growth ponderosa pine woods in Nebraska are a true rarity. Foresters in the Black Hills define old-growth as stands with 10 or more trees per acre with a minimum trunk diameter of 16 inches and an age of at least 160 years. This definition holds for Nebraska's old- growth pine stands as well. "I know of one roughly 10-acre old- growth stand on the rugged Gilbert- Baker Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in western Sioux County," said Greg Schenbeck, Commission wildlife biologist stationed near Crawford. The stand's largest trees have trunks 16 to 20 inches in diameter, big pines by Nebraska standards. Scattered even larger pines with trunks pushing 30 inches wide grow along Monroe Creek at Gilbert-Baker. "Deep in the shady, wet canyon they have their feet in the water and are reaching for the sun," said Schenbeck. According to Schenbeck, a small old-growth pine stand survived on the Ponderosa WMA south of Crawford, but the trees burned during a 2012 wildfire. He hopes to conduct surveys in coming years to document other uncut stands on the WMAs he manages. Other small old-growth pine stands could exist in the Pine Ridge on PHOTO BY SOLOMAN BUTCHER Kuhre flour mill and sawmill on Fairfield Creek photographed in 1900.