From Board Member Clay Evans:
Great Plains Memory
A native of Boulder, Colorado, I grew up looking west for adventure, toward the mountains. But sometime in my 30s, I began to wonder what lay to the unheralded, little-celebrated east, the Great Plains. My explorations began with driving trips, the first of which took me through a checkerboard of gravel roads ever deeper into the wide-open spaces of northeastern Colorado and the Pawnee National Grasslands.
I remember the feeling of vastness and freedom and openness, not just in the landscape, but in myself, as I stood before the twin Pawnee Buttes and felt the depth of history they represented. Not just human history, not merely the westward settlers and native peoples, but the animals, from grasshoppers to pronghorns and, though now gone, bison. Also, the tough prairie grasses and forbs and hardscrabble trees, the impossibly slow accretions of minerals over countless eons.
Standing in the chilly shadow on the north side of the buttes on a blustery March Day, I fell in love. I said a silent apology and vowed to probe deeper into the mystery of the prairie, forever.
