LEARNING

Researchers at the university recently quantified the Sandhills as the largest intact temperate grassland on Earth. In a land so remote, so utterly unobstructed, the mind begins to wander. I park the car in the middle of the road and take a photo from the ditch. It’s a folktale, lush and green and swaying with cattails. It’s a paperback western. Maybe a post-Apocalyptic fiction. A Sandhills Station Eleven. Either way, I should have looked down. My fingers bleed as I pry the sandburs one by one from my boots, cursing loud enough for the fairies to scatter.

The University of Nebraska Foundation owns not one, but two sprawling ranches in the Sandhills: the Gudmundsen Sandhills Laboratory (formerly the Rafter C) and the Barta Brothers Ranch, 100 miles east. Both were gifted decades ago. Both saddle ludicrous, if little-known histories. And both now offer unparalleled resources for students and faculty alike.

Beyond niche academic and agricultural circles, however, most have never heard of the university’s Sandhills spread. Only in recent years, in fact, as both a native Sandhiller and woebegone regionalist, did I learn of them myself. And when I finally stumbled upon the peculiar story of Elmer “Pete” Gudmundsen — a legal saga that swept from the local Tribune to the New York Daily News — I knew it was time, at last, to visit these far-flung outposts myself.

With rogue sandburs still pricking my calves, I follow Gudmundsen Road for another four miles, skirting the wet meadow and later driving straight through, crossing a small culvert along the way.

“That would be the South Fork of the South Branch of the Middle Loup River,” says Troy Gilmore, a groundwater hydrologist and associate professor at UNL, “if you don’t mind the word count.”

He’s agreed to give me what he calls a “windshield tour” of the ranch, where he’s been conducting his own groundwater research since 2016. When I arrive at the dormitory — less city campus than country bunkhouse — he’s wearing knee-high rubber boots and loading a collapsible ladder into the back of his utility vehicle. Not only does the ranch sit directly atop the thickest portion of the aquifer, nearly 1,000 feet deep, he tells me as we bounce further up the valley, but a sort of ecotone within the Sandhills itself, a transition zone between the lake-studded hills further west, and the yawning dry valleys to the east.

“When I made my coffee this morning I was using groundwater that’s coming out of a 600-foot well that’s thousands of years old,” he says.

The green fades behind us as we pass a small herd of red angus, cross an invisible county line and enter what maps here call the Dry Flat. Somewhere below us, feathered in bluestem, the south fork merged with the south branch, and they’re now hiccuping toward the horizon as one. Fifty meters east. Twenty meters north. Eighty forward. Thirty back. Later, I’ll spend hours tracing the creek on Google Earth. If the Sandhills from above look like ripples on a beach — and, indeed, they do — the south branch of the Middle Loop resembles a bark beetle gallery, frantically boring its way through the ranch.

“I consider this a big bonus of my job,” he says, nearly drowned out by the whine of the engine. “Route 2 is great, but this takes it to another level.”

Before Gilmore landed at the university in 2015, he was completing his doctoral dissertation in North Carolina, studying how groundwater moves beneath the state’s ag-heavy coastal plain. Equipped with a roughly $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, he’s now asking many of the same questions here in Nebraska, surrounded by 19,000 square miles of grass-covered sand dunes. How does groundwater travel through the aquifer, for example, and for how long, before it finally rises to the surface?

“It’s helpful to first understand something before you try to manage it. That’s the short story,” he tells me. “For instance, if you talk to people, you might hear about a dry year, but the valley was especially wet. There’s some hydrologic lag going on there.”

Understanding these dynamics could help managers better predict everything from hay quality to road access. And it could prove especially useful in areas like much of eastern Nebraska, for example, where nitrates from agricultural activity have leached into the groundwater, posing a significant threat to public health. Knowing when and where those nitrates might re-enter our rivers and streams, he explains, could significantly influence how our watersheds are managed.

Roughly seven miles from the dorm, Gilmore kills the engine. He struggles briefly with a makeshift gate — little more than a heavy iron rod attached to a rusty chain — and drives through. A smirk creeps across his face.

“It’s too bad I don’t have more of my colleagues out here,” he says. “I have pictures of multiple Ph.D.s trying to close one.”

We drop another 150 yards to the valley floor and watch the creek squirm at our feet. Down here, he says, he completed one of his first research projects on the ranch. Scouting for thermal anomalies — and therefore areas of focused groundwater discharge — he and his students laid fiber optic cable up and down 700 meters of the stream bed. Hydraulic measurements were then taken in these “informed” locations and compared to another set of “uninformed” locations along the same stretch of the creek.

Given that Sandhills’ rivers are fed primarily by groundwater released from the aquifer, rather than surface runoff, he says, the Gudmundsen lab was “an ideal location” for the study. Not only did their fiber optic technique show a substantially higher groundwater flux than the “uninformed” method, he says, but they set a new precedent for using the technology in lower discharge streams. Overall, he was surprised to find that groundwater seepage in this stretch of the Middle Loup wasn’t drastically different from other sandy-bottom streams he’d studied beyond the Sandhills.

“You come out here and think it’s a big sandbox in terms of water moving through it,” he says, “but there are a lot of nuances here that are similar to a lot of other places.”

The wind stampedes. The silence gathers. The water trickles by.

“Anyway, yeah,” he adds, his ball cap snug and pulled down low. “This is almost a nostalgic spot.”

Several miles downstream, Gilmore stops to fix one of several time-lapse cameras on the ranch, this one overlooking a small oxbow in the creek. I trudge back to the water. Two sandy blowouts cradle the stream like cupped hands on the opposite shore. The clouds hang low. The valley stretches beyond vision. And again, my imagination takes flight.

The truth is fuzzy. This much I know: Pete Gudmundsen wore smart, oval frames perched high on his nose, wingtip collars and a three-piece suit. He earned his Juris Doctor from Nebraska in 1922, started practicing with his father — a former judge — in 1923, and married fellow Cornhusker Abbie Forsyth (’22), in 1924. He was elected Grant County attorney six years later and served in that position — juggling a private practice on the side — until the early 1940s, when his growing legal reputation ground to a screeching halt. Enter Festus Corrothers: a 300-pound rancher, a lifelong Southern sympathizer, and a distant relative — on his mother’s side — to Edgar Allan Poe. He started running cattle on just 320 acres near the present day Gudmundsen lab in 1891. When he died in October of 1937, he left behind a 27,000-acre ranch he called the Z Bar O. Thanks to his many supposed paramours, the local press posthumously crowned him the “Casanova of the Sandhills.” His sister hired Gudmundsen to serve as the estate’s attorney. What she didn’t know, however, nor did the rest of his many heirs, was that Gudmundsen had also been hired by George Manning, a prominent local rancher, to help him secure the Z Bar O for well below market value. And he did. According to the courts, the ranch was worth roughly $174,000. When all was said and done, Manning paid just $37,000. (The same ranch would likely net eight figures today.)

Exactly why Pete did it — why he misrepresented the land’s value to Corrothers’ heirs, why he acted as a secret agent for Manning, why he conjured false claims to encourage the heirs to sell — no one seems to know. Whatever the case, the attorney’s misdeeds soon caught up to him. A friend of Corrothers, somehow privy to the scheme, convinced all nine of his brothers and sisters, plus two of his estranged children, to file suit against both Gudmundsen and Manning. In August 1941, in the same district court his own father once presided over, the judge condemned Gudmundsen’s behavior as unprofessional and insisted “the legal profession had no room for such an attorney.”

I’m pondering this bizarre chapter of Sandhills history as Gilmore drives us deeper into the hills, pointing out windmills and test wells and “Ope, there’s a coyote,” he says. None of it explains how Gudmundsen — disbarred shortly thereafter — acquired the Rafter C to begin with, or why he and Abbie, who never had kids, finally donated the ranch to their alma mater in 1978, after retiring to Sun City, Arizona. Nor can we ask them. Both passed away in 1993.

But according to Andy Applegarth (’78), former operations manager at the Gudmundsen lab, there’s another chapter to the story, one that simmered quietly beneath the headlines. Around the same time Gudmundsen and Manning were conniving to buy the Corrothers place, he’ll tell me several days later, they also purchased the neighboring ranch, owned by Jay Taylor, his great-great-grandfather. The details are blurry, he says, passed down from one generation to the next. But as restitution for his underhanded work securing one ranch, and perhaps, too, for his mounting legal troubles, Gudmundsen allegedly received title to the other.

“He ended up with the ranch and not paying a dime for it,” Applegarth says. Had it stayed in the family, the lab might have one day been his.

I hesitate, then ask.

“I wonder if donating this ranch to the university was his way of, you know —”

“Righting a wrong?” he interjects. “I do not know.”

Now celebrating its 45th anniversary, the Gudmundsen lab has nevertheless proven a scientific wonderland — a seemingly endless field site for studying everything from hydrology to rangeland ecology and wildlife management — and is now the envy of countless academic programs across the country.

“I only wish it were a little closer to my university,” says Kip Solomon, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah who has conducted research on the ranch. “Students and faculty at UNL are very lucky indeed.”

After a quick overnight in Broken Bow, I drive another hour and a half north to the Barta Brothers Ranch near Bassett. Still two miles from what they call “The Home Place,” the gravel gives way to a pair of sandy ruts. The ruts grow smaller and finally disappear. Google Maps tells me I’ve arrived. Clearly I’ve missed the turn.

I backtrack a half mile, take the first accessible offshoot and land, at last, at another modest dormitory. One might easily mistake it for a simple farmhouse, a rural vet clinic, maybe a small nondenominational church. Far less spartan, however, is the view from the back deck, overlooking the Barta Brothers’ former 6,000-acre ranch. Small islands of cottonwood and cedar rise beyond another wet meadow. A lone windmill spins beneath an azure sky. The hills shed like a buffalo hide, thick here, grazed there, a hint of silver in the sage.

Nolan Sipe, a grad student in natural resource sciences at Nebraska, has offered to show me the ranch, but I’ve arrived early. The Home Place is silent. It usually is, he later tells me. Usually was. Jim and Clifford Barta ranched here for nearly 50 years, most of it alone. When their parents died, they simply kept on. They never married. Never had kids. Never redecorated the house. They bought groceries in Bassett every Monday. They watched The Lawrence Welk Show every Saturday. They planted trees. They trapped gophers. They fed the same coyote every night.

“I’d sit out there in the evenings with them, and I was told to be really quiet, because I had a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons walking between my legs,” says Dennis Bauer, a UNL Extension educator who managed the ranch for 20 years. “They’d come into the yard every night and eat cat food and drink milk right between our feet.”

And when the brothers finally retired and sold off their herd, their attorney — a Nebraska alumnus — suggested they consider a gift to the university, whose research they appreciated and whose football team they adored. In 1992, the Barta brothers, like Pete and Abbie Gudmundsen before them, donated their ranch to the University of Nebraska Foundation. They stayed on the ranch until 1996, then moved to a nursing home in Verdigre. Clifford passed away in 1999 followed by Jim in 2001.

Sipe pulls up to the dorm 20 minutes later wearing a backpack and wrinkled cargo pants, tight-laced boots and a fitted cap. He might as well be heading to class, in some sense, he is. In 2020, the Barta Brothers Ranch instigated what it calls a “collaborative adaptive management” program, he tells me, allowing stakeholders — in this case, area ranchers — to direct the focus of its grazing research. After identifying a host of different management issues, everything from climate change to multi-species grazing, stakeholders took a vote.

“They wanted to reintroduce fire back into the Sandhills,” he says, anxious to keep the eastern redcedar tree — a native species prone to encroachment — from swallowing up their pastures. They also wanted to know how their cattle might respond. “So that’s what I deal with.”

And suddenly we’re flying down those same sandy ruts on separate four-wheelers, plumes of dust trailing behind us. Five miles later, Sipe opens a gate and guides me back into the hills. They’re experimenting with a “modified patch-burn grazing system” across four different pastures, he tells me. Each pasture is burned at a different time of year, and because cattle prefer to graze in these areas, where the new growth is more palatable, the other pastures have the time to rebuild their vegetative fuels.

“So, part of that system is intended to create a more heterogeneous system,” Sipe explains, sweeping his hand across a distant horizon. “The more variable the landscape is, the more resilient it is to disturbances.”

They completed their first prescribed burn in March 2022, he says, but if you look closely, you can still spot the aftermath. Here the sand is more visible, the leaf litter burned off. Here the colors shift: more reds, more greens, more forbs, often the quickest plants to return. Sipe’s particular mission is to monitor the growth and recovery in each of these four pastures, from the grass to the soil and even the birds. Overall, he says, despite many ranchers’ concerns, most studies performed at the Barta Brothers Ranch have shown the Sandhills to be far more resilient than commonly understood.

For a minute, we both fall silent, scan the hills, breathe it in. East Campus? City Campus? Give me the Sandhills Campus, I think, where the bluestem billows and the history runs wild and the raccoons feed beneath your feet.

Sipe revs the engine.

“What else?” he finally asks.

By GRACE FITZGIBBON (’21)

All of the big challenges to our planet — food, water, energy, landscape systems, and the people who have to live among it all — are in the capable hands of the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources (CASNR), celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

And if one celebration isn’t enough, CASNR shares its sesquicentennial with the 50th anniversary of the Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources (IANR), the college’s administrative home. The two entities are marking their anniversaries with a Celebration of Innovation. Highlights include a kickoff picnic, installing a time capsule, and a special edition of Growing magazine. “We’re a servant to the entrepreneurs, the producers, the people of the state,” said Mike Boehm, who leads efforts across the University of Nebraska system for all agricultural, natural resources and related affairs as a vice president and vice chancellor.