C’mon Rain. There’s rain in the forecast! We are optimistically putting up rain gauges.
These photos were taken one month after the fire.
There’s a few key things to notice.
You can faintly see a trail road in the 2nd photo. Joe said that was not visible before the fire and we’ve never driven there. He’s guessing it’s an old mail route that the blowing sand uncovered.
The fence damage in this area is not as bad as we expected. The fire moved so fast that many of the posts are still decent.
The wind has blown a lot -the sand is moving. We will probably be scooping tanks out when the time comes, and it will be a struggle to find the bottom fence wire in areas.
You really grasp the size and scoop of the fire when all you see is miles and miles of sand. Right now it still looks like the Sahara desert, but the native grass is still there if we can just get moisture. It’s so fragile we have not driven back into the pastures to check our mills and solar panels yet, we’re also certain we’d need to take a side by side or we’d get stuck.
The other take away is how bad the roads are. Which is a mixed blessing. Our roads
have never seen this kind of semi traffic. The amount of truckloads of donated hay coming in (which has been absolutely incredible- and much needed) and the really sad part- is the amount of semis starting to haul cows/pairs out.
It’s hard to see our gorgeous Sandhills look like this, the Range experts tell us that the Sandhills will recover, we’ve also had really good calls with great advice from ranchers that have been through fires like this.
This is our summer pastures, not our
headquarters. We didn’t lose buildings or livestock. Our heart breaks for our neighbors that lost so much- and are waking up every morning looking out their kitchen window to see the “Sahara desert”-with nothing but sand blowing, instead of their lush green Nebraska Sandhills. Pray for nice slow rains. Pray for the ranch families who make their livelihood raising cattle in this remote pristine part of Nebraska. This is not easy to load your cows & calves on a semi -to sell them, or ship to another part of the country.
Van Newkirk Herefords Oshkosh NE 308-778-6230
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