Niobrara River Dreams

It took four generations to destroy this country’s grasslands, George Frazier writes in his book “Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America.” These complex biological communities once blanketed the middle of the country, but in 80 years, homesteaders and farmers plowed most of the existing prairie lands. “Gone were prairie dog colonies larger than European nation states,” he writes. “Gone were the fathomless herds of buffalo, elk and antelope. Gone were plains wolves and grizzly bears that had followed those herds for millennia.”

But is a prairie revival underway? Will efforts including grassland rewilding and restoration of heartland rivers (the yang to the ying of the prairies) continue to expand and resonate with future middle Americans, he asks. Or will indifference, invasive species and climate change “lap away at the last tiny islands of prairie” until they disappear forever?

To find some answers, Frazier embarked on a “grand grasslands barnstorm,” traveling by canoe down eight different rivers — “because when it comes to exploring wild places, even the brownest river is bluer than the bluest highway.” In this excerpt, he paddled down a stretch of Nebraska’s Niobrara River that is part of a national park site with his then 19-year-old daughter, Chloe, and walked through an ancient forest, a relic of the last ice age, with one of the forest’s foremost experts.

It was the season of the yellow puccoon. Everywhere, the prairie reached up with bouquets of creamy Lithospermum caroliniense flowers arranged atop furry stalks of blithe greenery. It was always the season of wind. In the Nebraska Sandhills, wind and time flow together in syncopated tandem, their invisible orbits entwined in a never-ending dance.

On the edge of a spoon-shaped plateau perched a breathtaking 400 feet above the Niobrara River, the wind roared, gusting 40 miles per hour. Only the cinched chin strap kept my hat from blowing off to the Rosebud Reservation 10 miles across the South Dakota line. The overlook, in a grove of ponderosa pine atop the precipitous drop-off, revealed a shocking panorama.

Below an oak-covered ridge, the river marched with military precision for a quarter mile before hard-pivoting left at a bend where a spring poured down over the face of a beautiful sandstone cliff. In the valley of the spring, oaks, elms and linden trees, typical of an Eastern deciduous forest, dissolved into an altogether different environment — one of the strangest woodlands in North America, a relic from a lost age. Beyond the thread of river forest, a scroll of native grasslands — northern mixed-grass prairie, tallgrass prairie and Sandhills prairie — unrolled toward the horizon in the four cardinal directions. Like the wind and the river, the entire landscape was moving — waving and rolling. Numerous plant communities were visible from the overlook. The spirit of the river somehow unified them all. Niobrara National Scenic River, the national park site that includes 76 miles of the waterway, is considered the biological crossroads of the Great Plains. A little-known national treasure, the river flows through one of the wildest grassland corridors left in America.

Spanning 20,000 square miles, the Sandhills harbor extensive never-plowed grasslands, wild rivers, tens of thousands of namesake sandhill cranes, uncountable natural lakes, wet meadows and marshes, and a fascinating flora and fauna adapted to the harsh environment. The Niobrara River nicks the northernmost flume of the Sandhills on its 568-mile journey from the shortgrass prairies of Wyoming to the Missouri River. Translated from the Omaha-Ponca term that means roughly “broad water” or “water spread out,” the liminal river joins six different ecosystems, serving as a biological ecotone: Here dozens of species reach either their eastern or western limits, and sometimes they hybridize to create unique organisms found nowhere else.

I’d always wanted to paddle the section of the river christened “wild and scenic” by Congress in 1991. My curiosity about the area dated back to grad school, when a geographer friend told me that spring-chilled microclimates allowed stranded remnants of a long-vanished ice age forest to freakishly survive into modernity.

Running a thin-skinned Kevlar canoe was a bad idea. Chloe and I had arrived at the upper Niobrara National Scenic River Trail with a used Wenonah canoe I’d acquired the previous winter. Our plan: paddle all morning, hike into the riparian zone with one of America’s foremost ice age forest experts in the afternoon, then paddle to Rocky Ford Rapid before sundown. As soon as we launched below Cornell Dam (where we had each paid a $1 launch fee for the privilege — what else as valuable as access to a wild and scenic river costs only $1?), we scraped the delicate hull of the Wenonah across the jagged top of a moss-covered rock. A sloppy start.

As navigator in the bow, Chloe had to guide us through small rapids and around boulders and outcrops. At 7 miles per hour, the obstacles came at us fast. It was a tough job.

Ripe plums grew in briars along the banks, so we pulled out below the first bend to check the canoe for damage and gorge on what we could knock down with our paddles. The bushes sagged with small wine-colored fruits, each with a worm we had to flick out before eating. Chloe said she felt rich.

The first miles of river passed a series of canyons and at least a dozen separate springs, although I lost count. Springs ran from forests on both sides of us. The river meandered at will, untouched by channelizers who had had their way with most of our grassland rivers. When it got hot, the river would enter another wooded canyon that cooled things off.

We pulled into slack water below a short series of rapids, and Chloe, who had noticed movement downstream, got out her binoculars. “What are those fat things?”

I took the field glasses. A pickup truck was backing around slowly on a flat, angling to get a long trailer down close to the water. Three guys began unloading inflated floating devices off the trailer. An old school bus had pulled up to the launch, and people were getting out with their coolers and pool toys and heading down toward inflated tubes molded into the forms of floating chairs, loveseats, porch couches, full-on sunken living rooms and classic canvas-hided black rubber donuts, each fitted with drink holders aplenty. We paddled toward them, and the river swung into another secluded meander and then straightened out as a light mist began to fall.

We had reached our stopping point for the morning, Smith Falls State Park, home to the highest waterfall in Nebraska. From the park down to where it leaves the Sandhills, the Niobrara runs through a series of light rapids and tight turns, turbocharged by the effluence of cool springs, making it the most popular stretch of river and a bustling scene of activity during summer. But we had stopped here because the park is also a window into a lost time.

[FALL 2025] Grass - Falls

Smith Falls is the highest waterfall in Nebraska. The nearby aspen and birch forest is a remnant of the last ice age.

©TIMOTHY MULHOLLAND/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The boreal forest, the most unusual plant community of the Great Plains, occurs on the south side of the river in steep spring-branch canyons. Intimate microclimates refrigerated by the waters of springs and waterfalls that tap deep into the heart of the Ogallala Aquifer, spring-branch canyons create slivers of habitat where the magical forests can survive.

On a map of ecosystems, boreal forest — also called ice age forest, snow forest or taiga — appears as a green ribbon wrapped around the Earth immediately below the southernmost arctic tundra. It represents a quarter of the world’s forests and is relatively uninhabited by people. During the last ice age, forests like these covered much of the future northern United States, but after the glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, boreal forests retreated along with the ice. Most of them, at least. The geology of the Sandhills and their unique interaction with the Niobrara created a refuge that allowed the remarkable ghost ecosystem to persist to the present, hundreds of miles from its nearest counterpart.

Wildlife biologist Gordon Warrick had recently retired from the National Park Service, where he had worked on natural resources management for the Niobrara National Scenic River. After meeting him in the Smith Falls State Park headquarters, we walked down to the footbridge over the river. A Nebraska native, Warrick had been coming to the spot for almost his entire life. While attending college in Kearney, he worked summers at the Nature Conservancy’s nearby Niobrara Valley Preserve and ran canoes for an outfitter. We crossed the bridge and followed the path leading to Smith Falls.

As soon as we reached the trees below the waterfall, the temperature dropped. Warrick explained how this was unusual in the Great Plains. “We’ve got the bluff line on the south side of the river that is very steep because the river is downcutting. That creates a sharp north-facing slope that doesn’t get a lot of sun. It doesn’t get the desiccating south wind. It’s in the shade much of the time. So that’s a degree of microclimate right there. But then, going into a spring-branch canyon, the evaporative effect further cools things, and we get even more trees. This creates a virtually closed canopy and a cool, moist climate.”

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Beyond the thermocline, we began to see birch and aspen, two keystone species of the boreal forest. It was astonishing that this waterfall and the thin, refrigerated wafer of woodland had remained stable enough to support this oddball forest since the last glaciation. Similar spring-branch canyons south of the river harbor ice age forests along a 30-mile stretch.

We passed some tall, papery-barked white birches, then stopped at a cluster of aspens, their leaves trembling in the wind. I initially mistook the trees for quaking aspen, the familiar tree of the Rockies. However, true to the crossroads nature of the Niobrara, these aspens were an east-west hybrid.

We lowered our voices at the falls. The water thundered over the chin of sandy soil like a glistening beard, creating a stain of moss-covered bedrock on the vertical cliff that reminded me of the Shroud of Turin. After emerging from the scour pool at the bottom of the waterfall, the discharge cascaded down the hill and dumped into the river near the footbridge. A typical prairie river might be fed by one or two half-hearted springs per mile, but Smith Falls spring was one of hundreds in tight proximity, watering the soul of the river and its wondrous forest. I’d never seen anything like it.

Below the waterfall, Warrick took a thin side trail paralleling the river up into the bluffs to explore more spring-branch canyons. Soon, we were 150 feet above the river. As the din of the falls receded, we began to hear birdsong again.

The intermingling of species in the central Niobrara River valley is not limited to trees. When a flicker flew over us, I asked if it was the yellow- or red-shafted variety of the jaunty speckle-chested woodpecker. Warrick thought it could be a hybrid. Because the ranges of several closely related eastern and western species overlap, the forest is a hot zone for avian hybridization. The yellow- and red-shafted varieties of northern flicker, eastern and spotted towhee, Baltimore and Bullock’s oriole, indigo and lazuli bunting, rose-breasted and black-headed grosbeak, and eastern and mountain bluebird are all thought to hybridize to some extent in the Niobrara woodlands.

The trail was steep near the top of the canyon. At the summit, a few ponderosa pines grew among their deciduous and boreal brothers and sisters. From the ridge, it was easy to see that many of the big aspens and birches on the slope above the young trees were dead. Tree mortality and standing deadfalls are expected in old-growth forests, but with so little genetic diversity, biologists keep close watch on the ice age trees, especially the aspens.

Warrick seemed to know each tree personally and spoke about one of the giant, dead standing birches like a personal defeat. “Two years ago, we ran a fire through here to burn away the understory. The fire top-killed some of the big trees, not all of them, but ones like this.” He pointed to a steep ravine and a grove of toddler birches. “That’s the big dead tree trying to regenerate.” At least 50 feet from the dead trunk, the tree’s subterranean component had reincarnated through vegetative propagation after the death of the “bole,” as Warrick called it. For many trees, life does not end when the trunk dies. “They are all interconnected by this root system,” Warrick said. “After something like a fire, anything that sets them back to the ground, this stimulates a flurry of vegetative growth in the short term.”

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We weren’t alone in the forest. As we walked back down to the river, we saw some of the tubers using smartphone apps to identify woodland flowers, and a guided group was getting ready to cross the bridge near the waterfall. Interest in the ancient forest, Smith Falls and the river has created a unique opportunity for tourism in this remote part of the plains. Measured by proximity to large cities, the Niobrara is about as remote as any grassland river. Along its winding course, the largest town is Valentine, with about 2,600 residents.

Adventure travel and ecotourism are becoming increasingly significant to Sandhills economies. According to a Park Service report, 80,000 people visited the Niobrara National Scenic River in 2023 and spent an estimated $8 million. This was a sharp rise from visitor spending of $2.6 million 10 years earlier.

After bidding farewell to Warrick, Chloe and I waited in line for the ramp at Smith Falls, eventually joining the 50 or more tubes on the water ahead of us — the first traffic jam I’d ever experienced on a grassland river. Our destination was Rocky Ford Camp, where we’d left two trucks for the ferry back to our camp. The takeout was just upstream from an impressive rapid, known as Rocky Ford, that our canoe — and whitewater skills — were not prepared to navigate.

On the last bend, the river constricted and swept us left toward the bank. We had to concentrate to avoid big rocks. The bank had been partially stabilized with fill rock to keep the river from swallowing a nearby road. We eased the canoe as close to the sandy loam of the curve as possible and could almost touch the shore at the outside of the arc.

[FALL 2025] Niobrara River Dreams - author and daughter

The author and his daughter in a tributary of the Arkansas River.

COURTESY OF TOPEKA CAPITAL-JOURNAL

Chloe made a whistle like the call of a black-capped chickadee (two descending notes, slight pause, followed by one note: chick-a-dee!) to get my attention. A mink climbed out of a hole in the bank and scurried up the duff onto a field of bluegrass. Mink are shy and reclusive by nature. This was a first sighting for Chloe, and rare for me as well. We steadied the boat in the current and watched while the mink scrambled through the grass to the edge of a mud slide it probably used at night for sport. Pausing to sniff blades of grass at the top of the slide, the mink was aware of us 10 feet away in our yellow boat. It made one more trip to its hole, then bustled over the bank and into a plum thicket, disappearing from sight.

Our mink elation lasted for one nanosecond. Beyond the final bend, the river made two tight meanders before straightening out and barreling directly into Rocky Ford Rapid. After we cleared the final curve, Chloe pointed left with her paddle. We needed to turn the boat toward a two-story log building a few hundred yards ahead of us. This required crossing the river.

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The soft rushing sound of a rapid intensified, and a river-spanning field of rocks blocked the channel ahead. Chloe swung portside to aim at the takeout, but the current pushed us toward the riffle. I tried a draw stroke to straighten the canoe but overadjusted. We slipped through a chute between the rocks, and the white noise got whiter. A final shelf of rock stood between us and smooth water.

We were perpendicular to the current now. When it was too late, we both saw the boulder straight ahead. The canoe struck hard, and the current swung us around. The river began to swamp in through two holes under Chloe’s seat. I got out, steadied myself, and pushed the wounded boat back into the stream, towing it the rest of the way to shore. We borrowed a bailer and pailed out enough water to flip the canoe and drain it.

I’m a careful planner, and with a thousand-plus fresh grassland river miles notched on my paddle, it felt discouraging that one brief mental mistake could quickly end a voyage. At least we’d picked a good place to bash holes in our canoe: the tail end of a day on the river, vehicles parked at the ready, the day before we were set to return to Kansas.

Excerpted from “Riverine Dreams: Away to the Glorious and Forgotten Grassland Rivers of America” by George Frazier. Copyright © 2025 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.