Temperatures reach above 90. 25mph winds gust to 40. Moisture wicks away from my skin. The sun bakes on the salt that remains.  Trains provide a temporary block to the gusts.  Or so I tell myself.

At lunchtime I pull into The Country Store in Cassoday for much needed rest and some food.  A man in a cowboy hat asks if he passed me on the road.  My assent prompts another question:

Whatever are you doing out here on a day like this? 

Little choice. I have to make it to Wichita by tomorrow morning.  

To arrive in Ulysses by next evening I have to pick up a rental car before the noon Saturday close of the East Wichita Enterprise.

I am headed to SW Kansas to learn more about the land that was once known as the Dust Bowl.  During the 1930s, some of it was so devastated by the plough and the wind that many sold it back to the U.S. government. Today that land has reverted back to a sandsage prairie managed by the National Forest Service.

Cimmaron National Grasslands

Production still continues, but mostly underground. Rich fields of gas and oil were found in the first half of the 20th century, but too late to help the Okies.

Land deemed worthless in the 1930s—sold for $3 to $8 dollars an acre to the U.S. government—became some of the richest in Kansas.  During the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s, tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue from the mining of these natural resources came to the federal government and Morton County.  It funded new public facilities.  The 615 student school district received a new gym and eight new classrooms. An aquatic facility went in with a zero-entry pool, water slides, wading pool and bathhouse.

Today, oil and gas money has dramatically decreased. In October of 2005, natural gas sold for $15.69/MMBtu.  Last month it sold for $2.37/MMBtu.  Taxes on this natural resource extraction once paid 80% of the counties taxes, now just 46%.  Concerns about the future circulate.

As in many parts of Kansas, human futures are intimately tied up with the fate of natural resources.  These futures, in turn, are entangled with the wellbeing of the land’s other inhabitants.  Today, for example, there is a delicate dance underway with the lesser prairie chicken.  Once numbering in the millions, today their population stands at roughly thirty thousand, decimated by habitat disruption caused by development of infrastructure. Roads, for example.

In recent years, pressure has mounted to protect this iconic dancing bird.  Indeed, wildlife advocates succeeded in using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to list them as threatened in 2014, but a lawsuit by oil and gas companies removed them in 2016. ESA protection threatened oil and gas production as well as hunting.  Both are important in the Cimmaron National Grasslands, and the human communities that depend on it for resources and recreation. Managers of the grasslands explained to me their voluntary efforts at conservation now aimed at preventing more draconian mandatory preservation efforts later.

Cimmaron Grasslands: A place of great and subtle beauty

This is not the first time that the National Forest Service has sought to find a way to implement practices that conserve while aiding human habitation and economic production in SW Kansas.   In 1905, it undertook an effort to create a 30,000 acre national forest on the sandhills south of the Arkansas River—from Garden City to the Colorado border.  The goal was to provide wood for building and to help homesteaders figure out what trees they could plant to “prove up.”

It worked in Nebraska.  In Kansas, though, of the one million trees planted between 1906 and 1909, only 20 survived.  The fierce south wind creates transpiration rates so high that there is no way to keep the moisture from blowing away, taking with it organic life. The federal government gave up.  Most of the land ended up in private hands.  Three thousand acres became a game preserve, today known as the Sandsage Bison Range and Wildlife Area.

Buffalo on the Sandsage Bison Range

I biked out to see if I could find any remnants of the forest. I was told by the range manager that no bikes were allowed.  Sensible.  It would have been a futile effort.  Gravel bikes go over rough terrain, not sand. He instead offered to take me out in one of their all-terrain vehicles to see what remained.

Here is what I saw.

Most of the remaining trees had died in a drought in the 1990s.  They still stand, providing a place for birds to roost. The rest are on their way out, growing only at their bottoms, creating a structure known as a death spiral.

I am grateful to those who manage this land and who help us to understand its possibilities and limits.

I am grateful too to that rancher back in Cassoday for asking his question. Yes, what am I doing out here?  What are we all doing out here?  These dead trees.  My bike. The bison, who in centuries past would have come through, but not stayed, moving on to richer prairie grasslands.

Are we still part of efforts to prove up?

I assured the rancher that I try to take as much care as possible on the roads.  And when I reach the limits of care, I pray.  A smile crossed his face. I pray too, he told me.

Point of Rocks, Cimmaron National Grasslands