260 miles from Lincoln, a little-known, cash-strapped NU outpost spawns renowned work – and serious awe

The year was 1974. It was early fall. Or was it late spring? Never mind all that, Gary Hergenrader says. It isn’t the season he remembers today, but the site: the old campground across the water, a dozen red cabins clinging like ticks to the canyon walls, the lodge overlooking Keystone Lake, the geology exposed in the rocky shelves above. It isn’t the semester he remembers, but the setting: the grassy dunes on his right, the North Platte River on his left, the Kingsley Dam looming just ahead, the clouds and the cattails and the cliff swallows darting between. 

Before retiring in 2005, Hergenrader served nearly 25 years as the Nebraska state forester. Back then, however, sometime in 1974, he studied lakes, not trees. He was a 34-year-old limnology professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Thinning hair. Thick glasses. Thicker sideburns.

He remembers driving a university van, leading a small convoy to the Sandhills. And he remembers Roger, his graduate student, calling attention to the old Girl Scout camp in the distance. He remembers the field station he once patronized as a graduate student himself at the University of Wisconsin, and the northern California field station where he taught his first limnology course for Chico State. He remembers how those experiences colored that first big gulp of Cedar Point – how he dizzied with visions of a different use, squinting behind the wheel.

He pictured his own students at UNL scurrying like ants among the cabins; collecting minnows and insects, soil and scat; breaking the routine of academia and immersing themselves in the field. 

“What a wonderful place for teaching,” he marveled aloud. 

And then he proved it. 

***

Next weekend, the Cedar Point Biological Station – roughly 260 miles west of UNL’s city campus, and a world apart – will celebrate its 50th anniversary. 

Long operated on a shoestring budget and lesser known than many of the university’s glossier assets, it has spawned groundbreaking research and bestselling books, novel architecture and soaring scientific careers. 

It is the only true field station on America’s High Plains, and fiercely – even lyrically – defended by students, faculty and alumni alike. To date, roughly 6,000 students have dusted its trails.

“This glorious elemental mixture of earth, water, and sky … comprises one of my favorite places in the world,” wrote the late Paul Johnsgard, a celebrated ornithologist and professor at UNL. “Here no radio stations blare out the most recent results of meaningless sports events, few newspapers ever manage to find their way to this outpost of civilization, and no traffic noises confound the senses. Instead … the leaves of the cottonwood trees convert its breezes into soft music.”

Once roamed by great herds of bison and the Native American tribes who relied on them, the cedar-studded property was later homesteaded by a dentist named Silas Philo Gainsforth. 

After graduating from Northwestern University, he pulled teeth in Montana and then in Holdrege before chasing the cattle business to Keith County, where he filed a homestead claim in 1911 on Cedar Point, a cherished local landmark skirting the south shore of the North Platte River.

Gainsforth quickly gave up ranching and returned to his dental calling, but he kept the ranch and a hobby herd of whiteface cattle. For years, while running his practice in Ogallala, he and wife Jessie allowed the public to fish and picnic at Cedar Point, if somewhat reluctantly. Careless visitors would often leave their trash behind, and sometimes harvest their Christmas trees, too. Their only child, Burdette, authored a poem for the local newspaper beseeching, in part:

Thousands of stumps may now be seen

If one knows where to look.

Imagine the beauty if those who came,

Could replace the trees they took.

But the Cedar Point Ranch was soon to witness far greater changes than its Christmas tree caper. In 1935, the Platte Valley Public Power District dammed the North Platte River, forming Keystone Lake. Soon boaters were as common as blue herons in the valley below.

And just three months after that, the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District began work on the nearby Kingsley Dam, at the time the second largest hydraulic-filled dam in the world. Within a decade, Lake McConaughy swallowed their western horizon.

Before his death in 1957, Gainsforth retired to the ranch. With his lakeside neighbor Robert Goodall, the renowned Ogallala industrialist and electronics pioneer, he sometimes imagined a scout camp blooming in the canyons. Their wives later realized their dream by establishing the only Girl Scout camp in western Nebraska. Mrs. Gainsforth donated a long-term lease of roughly 500 acres to the Guiding Star Girl Scout Council. Mrs. Goodall gave $65,000.

In turn, the council hired R. Alice Drought – a landscape architect trained by giants Frank Lloyd Wright and Jens Jensen – to survey Cedar Point and design the 40-acre campus. It opened in the summer of 1960 to the hopeful tune of 50 girl scouts singing “Bless This House.”

***

By the time Hergenrader and his limnology students drove past, the Girl Scout camp had folded. Doane College leased it for a year, but now it sat empty. So Hergenrader tested the waters back in Lincoln for a biological field station at Cedar Point. And when he was named interim director of the School of Life Sciences later that year, he dove all the way in, lobbying the administration from top to bottom. 

“I was just so convinced it was the right thing to do,” he says.

Many of Hergenrader’s colleagues had conducted research in the field. Some had taught at university field stations elsewhere, and most of them were eager for a similar opportunity in Nebraska.

After listening to Hergenrader’s pitch, John Janovy and Brent Nickol – both parasitologists – joined him on a single-engine plane chartered by the university and flew to Ogallala, where they were greeted by Myrna Gainsforth, the former Guiding Star president.

They toured the Goodall Lodge, the cabins, the pump house, the garage. The facilities were perfectly imperfect, they say. Rustic, not ramshackle. Dusty, not dilapidated. In March 1975, after they sold the administration on its academic merit, the NU Board of Regents approved a $4,800 annual lease. The camp would be known as the Cedar Point Biological Station.

“I don’t think anybody ever thought we were going to build it into a real field station,” says Janovy, who delivered the first lecture at Cedar Point. “We assumed it was a real field station the minute the lease was signed.”

***

Janovy taught at Cedar Point for 34 summers, often with his family in tow. Shortly after he began, he developed a new course – tailored to the area’s natural resources – called “field parasitology.” Though Janovy retired in 2011, the course remains a staple in the summer catalog.

Picture 20 students in late July, he says. T-shirts and cutoffs. Sweat-stained ballcaps. Picture them at Dunwoody Pond, “a blocked spring with a gurgling drainpipe” just a few miles north of the station, he once wrote. Picture them dragging handheld nets through mossy water. Picture them back in the lab at Cedar Point, beneath the Goodall lodge, gently releasing their catch: hundreds of damselfly nymphs, six-legged and skinny as pencil lead, tail-gills fanned like turkey feathers.

After sharpening their forceps, his students would spend hours dissecting larvae in search of the single-celled parasites within. Counting and sorting and diagnosing different species. They’d build their own spreadsheets with hard-won data. After dinner, they’d work the math and the models. Janovy would ask, “What did we learn today?” He would explain the utility of their work and how for the rest of their lives, directly or not, they’d be dealing with a simple question: How are infectious agents distributed in a population of hosts? 

“That’s a question that goes from fish in the South Platte River to damselflies in Dunwoody Pond to the COVID virus in the United States,” he says.

Janovy twice served as director and stoked a literary career in the process. A magazine feature published in 1976 flowered into his first book, “Keith County Journal,” two years later. Inspired by his time at the field station and the Sandhills beyond, the essay collection earned a host of favorable reviews. The New York Times called it “A gracefully written, horizon-expanding book.”

He vowed never to write a grant proposal again.

Instead, he wrote a sequel, “Back in Keith County.” And “Yellowlegs,” a semi-autobiographical novel. And “Dunwoody Pond.” And “Life Lessons from a Parasite,” forthcoming this month. All of these books and dozens more are the product, Janovy says, of “the richness of that whole environment, and the way that richness can be so easily exploited intellectually.”

“I think Cedar Point symbolizes everything a biologist believes about planet Earth.”

***

Five years after the regents signed the lease, the NU Foundation bought the property for $95,000. In 1996, the property was transferred to UNL.

Since then, the Nebraska Environmental Trust, National Science Foundation and others have awarded Cedar Point funding for various upgrades and additions, and the Gainsforth family has donated easement rights to 400 acres west of the camp.

But a decade of budget woes at the University of Nebraska has left the Cedar Point Biological Station stretched thin and short-staffed, according to John DeLong, the current director.

“We’re one large problem away from being in the hole. We have no buffer.”

Operating Cedar Point alone is a roughly $380,000 annual endeavor. More than half is currently paid for by the field station’s own revenue, primarily room and board. The remainder is cobbled together via a shrinking matrix of university funding.

Just four years ago the college supported three full-time staff positions: the associate director, the hospitality coordinator and the maintenance technician. Now it supports the associate director alone, he says, leaving Cedar Point’s inherently limited income to pick up the pieces where it can.

“So the pinch point is that we have a sizable campus with 35 buildings, and sometimes well over 100 people on site, and we have no full-time, state-supported maintenance.”

According to Mark Button, dean of UNL’s College of Arts and Sciences, circumstances at Cedar Point reflect broader budget constraints across the university system. The college’s state-aided budget – which includes state funding and tuition dollars – has shrunk by more than $9.7 million over the past four years. That’s roughly 14% of the college’s total budget, he says. 

In light of these pressures, Cedar Point has both increased its fundraising efforts and opened the gates to departments well beyond the biological sciences. This summer alone, for example, it hosted courses in environmental literature, Indigenous history and Zen philosophy. Architecture students have built new cabins from encroaching eastern redcedar trees, and student interns now assist with property maintenance and habitat management.

“Our mission is to get students out there to have these transformational experiences,” DeLong says. “So the more people who come out, the more money goes into our operational budget, the easier it is for us to take care of the place.”

***

Artist Katie Nieland, associate director of UNL’s Center for Great Plains Studies, is a beneficiary of the station’s broadening horizons. She’d been stewing at the intersection of art and science for years, increasingly interested in the representation of Plains animals. When she saw a posting for the artist-in-residence program at Cedar Point, she jumped at the opportunity.

The COVID-19 pandemic postponed her start date, but in the summer of 2021 she loaded her supplies and headed west for a week-long retreat. But Google Maps didn’t guide her up Highway 61; it took her down the backroads, tracing the Sutherland Canal west until she hit a locked gate at the Keystone Diversion Dam. The road was narrow. The cedars were dark. Her cell service was scrambled. The flies were biting. 

“I started to panic a little and went to turn my car around when John Janovy pulled up,” she says. “What a great coincidence to be rescued by the author of ‘Keith County Journal’ himself.”

Back on her deck at the Killifish cabin, the lake framed by trees and a low-slung roof, she sketched out the scene of her rescue: the road, the gate, the tree. She itched, at first, detoxing from her life back in Lincoln, skeptical of her sudden freedom. No texts. No emails. But then she found her rhythm, and then, she says – like Gainsforth and Hergenrader, Janovy and Johnsgard and thousands more before her – she found her awe.

“When you finally get to the top of the hill, and there’s prickly pear and cedar and all these plants around you, and you can smell it, and you can see the lake and feel the breeze, you’re like, ‘Oh, I get it. I get this place, and I get why it’s important,’” she says. “And I really hope that Cedar Point is around in another 50 years, because it is an incredible place both for students and faculty to connect with their subject matter.”