The Nebraska Sandhills. Waves upon waves of prairie grasses. “Unchanging,” some say, when their shoes tread once again on the sandy soil, “forever unchanged.” I consider myself lucky that I was born and raised and have lived my entire life (minus schooling) in the Sandhills of Nebraska. I never wanted to leave and find a better place—for I had already found it. I found security in the grand sameness where ancient winds placed the curls of the dunes, in the same plant friends (native long before I), and in the sense of comfort in the routines that follow the seasons.
In town, they referred to us as the “north hill people.” Our predecessors carved out a living through grazing the upland hills and haying a few wet bottoms. These bottoms, which accumulate shin-deep water only in the wettest years, are small compared to the spacious subirrigated hay meadows north and east of here. Wet years meant more grass, not more standing water.
Mother Nature, of course, sets no easy schedules. I saw ranchers fight hot, dry droughts, when neither rain nor snow fed the grass, then ease into years of plentiful precipitation. Ranchers constantly evaluated, penciled out tough decisions, and forged on. The pendulum swings, ranchers adjust.
I didn’t see the floods coming. My husband, young daughter, and I had just moved back to our family ranch in the eastern Sandhills. It was March 12, 2019, and the local news station reported a blizzard coming, with a term I had never heard of before: bomb cyclone. While we had never heard of a bomb cyclone, it seemed prudent to prepare for one.
That evening the winds howled, the snow blew, and the swirl on the radar indicated the snow would not let up. I remember waking up in the middle of the night to an eerie stillness, checked the radar again, and zoomed out. To my horror, I realized the swirling movement of the clouds resembled a hurricane, and we were in the eye of the storm. The calmness didn’t last. Chaos set in.
Three inches of rain fell on frozen soil on March 13, according to the weatherman who now read through a growing list of flooded areas. In an instant, extreme flooding roared in and didn’t leave. A second bomb cyclone hit in April, followed by rains that came with unusual force and frequency and didn’t stop all year. I can only estimate that between seventy-five and a hundred inches fell that year; never less than two inches at a time, never more than three or four days between rains. The water rose frightfully with each rain, flooding the barn, outbuildings, corrals, calving lots, and pivots and wiping out the county roads. The first bomb cyclone flooded so near our house that we lost our septic system and sandbagged around our home. That summer, amid rising water, the kitchen faucet spit out amber water as the domestic well flooded. Nine months with no septic, two months with no drinking water.
We did what we had to do because we didn’t have a choice. When headquarters flooded, my husband and dad slept in their pickups with the heavies during the bomb cyclones, picking up babies and putting them in a stock trailer full of hay. But the trailers, filled with warm hay and fresh calves, became islands as cold, slushy water rose in the night. We moved calving to our summer (hill) pastures, “swam” pairs to new pastures, attempted diverting water away with an irrigation pump (futile!), hayed the high ground (although most hay was soggy due to the unstoppable rains), doctored foot rot and pinkeye, lived in our Muck boots and fenced in chest waders, rotated sump pumps around, bleached mold off our saddles, and tried to get feed delivered in the short window of road repairs. The hay meadows and pivots sat underwater; gearboxes hidden. Everything took twice as long to do since getting anywhere involved weaving new routes through the flooded hills and getting stuck was a daily occurrence.
I read articles on the brilliance of the emergency response, but their splendor never reached this far. I don’t know how my husband or father managed in 2019, with water levels increasing into 2020. I don’t know how other ranches, from Bartlett to Lakeside, managed either. You trudge on.
Land is a man’s silent partner. Watching your partner succumb to natural disaster is painful for any rancher. For two years, we watched our land scream yet not utter a sound. In our “poorly drained” area of the Sandhills, a quarter to a third of our upland pastures were under deep lakes. The result: 25–30 percent of our grass drowned. Vegetation native to the hills could only tolerate two weeks of “wet feet.” The first year, 2019, the lakes grew, large and clear, all vegetation dead underneath. Water levels continued to rise in 2020, when cattails and bulrushes appeared from seedbanks.
In the Sandhills, water always seeped away in the sand, so what caused this historic flooding? “Catastrophic water mounding” is the term Chuck Markley, a Natural Resources Conservation Service soil scientist, used to describe it. According to Markley, normally, about five feet of dry sand will hold three inches of rain. “Amounts over that normally percolate downward into the water table. But since water cannot be compressed, mounds of water within the dune rise and eventually flow outward, creating pockets of water,” he said.
Beginning in 1990, our precipitation averages grew above normal, raising the Ogallala Aquifer water level unnoticed under our feet for decades. In 2019 even small rains significantly raised the water levels of our lakes, as water poured out of the hills and into the valleys. Water couldn’t go down, so it went out, creating water mounds.
As a child, I remember praying for rain, as the dryness of the 1980s lasted for years. More rain was always welcome, as the thirsty sandy soils sucked it up. “How much rain did you get?” was a community question, and the winner was “living right.” It felt sacrilegious, but I wanted to pray for the “d” word. Yes, a drought—to push the pendulum back the other way.
And late in 2020 it came, slowly evaporating water levels. The drought continued into 2021, and lakes faded away, leaving ugly bare ground. Annual weeds colonized these areas, but the native upland species have yet to return. Another year of 25–30 percent loss in pasture production due to dry lakebeds, plus losses from the drought. We thought about drilling native seed, but which seed do you choose: seed that tolerates wet conditions or seed that can survive a drought?
As a rancher drought is a “when,” not an “if.” But flooding? I wonder if my generation, and the next, will fight both drought and floods. The pendulum swings quickly now. Mother Nature changed the Sandhills.