Nebraska’s Pine Ridge feels cool in the shade of the region’s namesake trees where the forecast calls for high temps, adventure and family fun in Chadron State Park.

Buttes towering over Chadron Creek glow amber and gold at sunrise 10 miles south of Chadron. Hikers, mountain bikers and horseback riders gladly risk blisters and saddle sores to explore more than 100 miles of twisting trails in Chadron State Park and adjacent Nebraska National Forest land. They find tree-studded valleys and wild animals at every bend, and jagged ridgetops exposing scenic views. Adventurers find the crisp smell of pines a constant on the Western Nebraska breeze.

Adventure was in the air whenever Mike McConkey had the day off from his railroad job. The family’s favorite Chadron State Park campsite was only a 45-minute drive away after packing up their pop-up camper and making tracks north from the family home in Alliance. Days spent exploring the park instilled in his daughter, Molly McConkey-Vergil, an intimate knowledge of its trails, wildlife and scenery. Now she shares Northwest Nebraska’s natural playground with her own children.

She camps with her daughters Penn and Cybill, son, Sylvan; husband, Buck; and Labrador retriever, Woodstock. A yet-to-be-named Vergil baby due in late May will see Chadron State Park for the first time during a park cabin overnighter in June. “We come here to spend time with the people we love in a place that is special to us,” McConkey-Vergil said.

Chadron State Park turns 100 in 2021. This 972-acre haven for man and beast – Nebraska’s first state park – attracts 250,000 visitors each year who seek respite and recreation from among the pines.

The park’s beginnings can be traced to a neighborly dose of bipartisanship 440 miles away in the Nebraska State Capitol in Lincoln. Dawes County senator James Good introduced a bill in 1919 to establish a state park along a particularly scenic stretch of Chadron Creek that was known for its thick stands of trees and scenic Pine Ridge vistas. The land, a section of county property rented out to benefit local schools, was already popular with outdoorsmen and picnicking families.

In return for their votes for his park plan, Good and other Western Nebraska lawmakers reached across the aisle to support the eastern senators’ road paving project near Omaha. Both bills passed. Good was appointed superintendent of the park. He then bought 160 acres of adjacent land with his own money to keep bootleggers from crafting their illegal whiskey under the cover of the land’s dense forest.

Community support for the park grew as merchants from Chadron and other towns, grateful for the increased traffic, gave money and supplies to build picnic tables. Locals used horse-drawn scrapers to dig the lagoon and clear land for baseball fields. Fans filled bleachers as Chadron teams battled rosters from Hay Springs, Alliance and Hemingford on the dirt diamonds.

The park was still mostly trees and buttes in 1933 when the men of the Civilian Conservation Corps moved in. They erected a sawmill and cut local logs to build the park’s first cabins. All these years later, park visitors still spend the night in the well-built strutures with names such as Rattlesnake, Antelope and Bighorn.

The establishement of the park opened the door to the creation of Nebraska’s  state parks, state recreation areas and state trails – 78 areas in all – over the last century. Nebraskans and visitors from surrounding states and elsewhere reap the recreational rewards of the park system’s 105,366 acres. Most of that land is in the western part of the state.  

Western Nebraska languished in extreme drought during the summer of 2012. When a blaze sparked by lightning traveled 25 miles in only seven hours and jumped Dead Horse Road, Dave Kinnamon, park superintendent at the time, evacuated the park.

Swirling winds whipped the fast-moving flames to the park’s northwestern corner, then across U.S. Highway 385, the park’s eastern border. Classes were cancelled at Chadron State College. Residents of nearby Whitney were evacuated.

A wall of flames as tall as a football field long burned up to the south edge of Chadron before 200 firefighters made their stand. In the park, Kinnamon’s wife, Fawn, called her husband as fire approached their home. The blaze was funneling through a tinder dry draw when he arrived with firefighters.

The men fought through smoke with their eyes burning until fire surrounded them, their pickup-mounted grass fire rigs not enough to extinguish the inferno. With only a narrow logging road left for escape, Kinnamon switched from protecting his house to saving lives.

“I radioed that we were getting out of there and that my house would be lost,” Kinnamon said. Pine trees were exploding around him when a voice crackled from the radio, “Stay there, help is coming.”

Kinnamon heard but could not see the airplane screaming down through the smoke. Thinking it was going to crash, he dived to the ground. The plane was a twin-engine Cessna guiding the way for a Boeing 737 “Fireliner” air tanker loaded with 4,000 gallons of fire retardant. “Next thing I knew that tanker dumped its load right on top of us,” Kinnamon said. “With a ‘whoof’ the fire and smoke were gone.”

Wildfires burned nearly 500,000 Nebraska acres that summer. Most of the destruction was in the Pine Ridge, a 20-by 100-mile volcanic escarpment stretching from Wyoming, through northwest Nebraska and into South Dakota. The rocky region’s most extreme topography is in Nebraska.

Chadron was saved but some people living near the park lost their homes. Kinnamon said that hundreds of the park’s trees burned. Countless others were damaged. 

Area Boy Scouts, the Chadron State College football team, students from the Pine Ridge Job Corps Civilian Conservation Center and residents have since planted 20,000 trees in the park. Fallen logs provide shelter for new seedlings. Bighorn sheep, deer and other wildlife have moved back in, much to the delight of the park’s visitors.

Park superintendent Gregg Galbraith was jogging through the park one morning when he had the wildlife sighting of a lifetime. His son, Caden, was riding alongside on his bicycle when they locked eyes with a mountain lion. Father and son stopped in their tracks.

“We came over the top of a hill and saw the cat step out of the ditch and onto the road,” Galbraith said. “The cat looked at us for a moment and then it walked straight away from us.” Galbraith and son turned tail, too, looking back over their shoulders all the way home, but appreciative of the encounter.

Debbon Shields is no fraidy cat, but the stuffed cougar in the park’s Trading Post does startle her when she flips on the lights. Taxidermy mounts of white-tailed and mule deer, bison and other furry dead heads decorate the cafe with the dual mission of feeding hungry visitors and educating them about the Pine Ridge ecosystem.

Splashing attracts children to the aquarium teeming with bass and catfish. What could be the biggest bullfrog in Dawes County presides over the menagerie. Frog legs are not on the menu.

Shields fires up the grill and the lunch crowd stampedes through the screen door. The buffalo super nachos made with meat from the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission’s bison herd always is the most popular item.

“I think it is a Wild West thing,” Shields said. “When our visitors go home – usually reluctantly – they want to leave nowing that they got to taste, feel, hear, smell and see everything there is to experience here.”

Teenagers down the last of their chips and rush outside with nacho cheese sauce dripping from their faces. Dessert can wait until later when there are tomahawks to throw.  

Edged weapons spin through the air  toward huge chain-sawed slices of tree trunks set up as targets. Sydney Settles giggles at her lack of accuracy but doesn’t settle for failure. Her persistence eventually pays off with a bullseye throw.

The Lincoln native and cross-country runner crossed the state to study range management at Chadron State College. The self-described “former flatlander” has fallen for the Pine Ridge.

“All of these trees made me feel a little claustrophobic when I first came out here, there are so many,” Settles said. “Now I’m not so sure I would ever want to live anywhere else. When I go home for the holidays or summer break, I always miss my trees.”

Roger and Donita Weiss leave their cares behind once their 42-foot-long camper is parked between the park’s pines. The Chadron couple lives here for two-week stints during spring, summer and fall, working as camp hosts to help other campers’ vacations go smooth. They answer questions about reservations and trails, sell firewood and give directions to the ice machine.

Donita was already a regular at Roger’s Chadron barbershop when her boss set them up on a date. Roger lost a paying customer when they married in 1996.  “Now she gets haircuts for free,” he said.

They spend five carefree months each year living in their mobile home, splitting time between Chadron and Fort Robinson state parks. The recreational rig has two bedrooms, a kitchen and a fireplace. Tonight’s fire will burn outside.

Roger fills the fire ring with pine logs as the sun and temperature sink. Children walk by and wave, wet towels draped over their shoulders as evidence of swimming pool fun. Families cast night crawlers to hungry smallmouth bass in the park lagoon. Trail ride horses bed down in their stalls. The Weisses settle into lawn chairs as their campfire begins to pop. Roger cracks open a beer.

“This is a good way to live, pretty darned laid back,” he said as a deer doe with twin fawns walked between campsites and into the trees. The smell of the pines swirls in the evening air. Here’s to the next 100 years of Chadron State Park.