‘Not an easy place to be a tree’: The hunt for Nebraska’s biggest trees 

BURR — To get to the tree, you have to drive down a dirt road lined by fields and pastures. You walk a quarter mile through an untouched prairie full of tall big bluestem, switchgrass and indiangrass, not yet fully green this early into spring. You crouch under barbed wire fences, step over small trickles of water and patches of mud. 

The massive bur oak’s gnarled, furrowed branches stretch high into the clear blue sky, towering over the grove of sycamores Don Antholz planted here 25 years ago. Even without leaves, its canopy is thick enough to make a stretch of shade. 

Antholz remembers his daughter, then 10 years old, sitting in the crook of a low-hanging branch. His kids called it the Big Oak. His twin grandsons later dubbed it the Mother Oak. 

The question now: Is the Mother Oak tall enough and wide enough to become Nebraska’s new champion bur oak?

For decades, the Nebraska Forest Service has kept a record of the state’s largest trees — or at least those that it knows of. These trees — a mix of over 80 native and introduced species in Nebraska — make up the Nebraska Champion Tree Register. 

Nebraska Forest Service: Nebraska Champion Tree Register

The trees that make it onto the register are the biggest of their kind. The Forest Service doesn’t include invasive or problematic trees. Every month, one or two new nominations cross the desk of Justin Evertson, a green infrastructure coordinator with the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum. It’s his job to measure the trees and determine whether they’re true champs. 

“Our champion program, they’re typically older and bigger. And that actually means they’re not going to be always around as long as some of our other trees,” Evertson said. “They’re getting towards the end of their life.” 

The reigning champion bur oak lived on private property in Peru until it was toppled over by a storm. The bur oak on Antholz’s land — just outside a village literally named for a grove of bur oaks — was nominated by his son.

“I’ve owned this property since 1982, and it was already large,” Antholz says of the oak. “My son-in-law, he estimated maybe 200 years old?” 

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Evertson says, looking up at the tree. “There’s a lot of debate about these big old oaks. Most of them were logged at settlement in Nebraska. This one was too far away for anybody to make use of.” 

When you think of trees, especially giant trees, you don’t tend to think about Nebraska. The biggest tree in both the country and the world stands 274 feet tall in California, a giant sequoia called the General Sherman Tree. It’s one of 45 Californian trees on the National Champion Tree list. 

Meanwhile, Nebraska has one national champ: an 85-foot-tall eastern cottonwood in Wheeler County. 

“Sometimes, people will just even poke fun at the idea of Nebraska having a forest service to begin with,” said Graham Herbst, a community forester specialist with the Nebraska Forest Service. 

When Dan Lambe, CEO of the Arbor Day Foundation, talks about planting trees in Nebraska, out-of-staters will reply: “Are there even trees in Nebraska?” 

But the state that people associate with cornfields and prairies is where Arbor Day was founded. The pioneers got here and thought: It sure would be nice to have some trees.

“Not just because they wanted beautiful trees,” Lambe said. “They wanted the wood, they wanted the nuts, they wanted the resources … That was the vision for Arbor Day. The trees in most of our communities were planted. This is not an easy place to be a tree.” 

To live this long, the bur oak standing on Antholz’s property needed to root deep down into the ground, making it sturdy and drought-tolerant. Its bark and even its leaves needed to mature thick and tough enough to withstand prairie wildfires. Like many bur oaks, it rooted into fertile land near a streambank.  

“Imagine you had to survive by keeping your feet planted in one space and never moving while the world is changing around you,” said Eric North, urban forestry program manager with the Arbor Day Foundation. “Cities are being built, roads. Forests are happening and growing, maybe there’s forest fires. And so when you see trees that are hundreds of years old, to imagine the history they’ve witnessed is really awe inspiring.” 

Out on Antholz’s land, Evertson gets to work. He pulls out a long, wound-up measuring tape to measure the tree’s canopy cover, or how far its branches stretch out. A smaller, dual-sided tape measure to get the circumference and diameter of the trunk. And two clinometers, a tool used to measure tree height. He carries a digital clinometer, but he still likes to check it against an older analog model. 

Evertson stands about 100 feet away from the tree, where he can get a full view of it from the base of its trunk to the top of its branches. Through his left eye, he looks at the base of the tree. Through his right, he looks through the viewfinder of the analog clinometer. 

He does some quick mental math. The oak is 63 feet tall. 

He logs the canopy cover at 88 feet, and the circumference at 12.3 feet. 

“That’s a big one,” he tells Antholz. “We do have bigger ones in the lineup, so it probably won’t be a champion. But it’s in the top five or six.” 

Just because a tree isn’t the biggest doesn’t mean it isn’t important or interesting, Evertson said. Nebraska also has a Heritage Tree Register, maintained by the Forest Service and Community Forestry Council. These trees aren’t the largest of their species. But they are historically interesting. Some trees end up on the list because Herbst and Evertson nominated them, Herbst said. But they like to find people who are both history buffs and tree nerds to help grow that list. 

Heritage trees include trees mentioned in Willa Cather novels; trees at the sites of historic battles or Native American encampments. There was an old bur oak in Ponca State Park named “Old Wolf Oak,” alleged to be older than the Declaration of Independence at the time of the tree’s death in 2025, Herbst said.  

But there are other noteworthy Nebraska trees that either aren’t big enough to be champion trees or aren’t historically significant enough to be heritage trees, Evertson said. 

There are the limber pine trees in Kimball County — a species that was stranded in the Panhandle after the last ice age glaciers retreated 15,000 years ago. They’re what Evertson and others call a “relic tree.”  

“This pocket of trees has hung on for thousands of years, and they’ve seen really dramatic change in climate,” Evertson said. “Really wicked droughts, hail storms. And yet, they still exist out there. To me, the tenacity of that species is just pretty incredible.” 

Then there are the Rocky Mountain junipers in the Wildcat Hills south of Gering. 

“Those trees are some of the oldest in our state,” Evertson said. “And they’re not the biggest, but boy are they impressive for what they’ve witnessed.” 

Evertson grew up in Kimball County. There weren’t many trees, but he loved climbing the ones he could find. He loved nature, but didn’t think seriously about trees until he started working with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s landscape services department. He joined the Nebraska Statewide Arboretum in 1990.  

“There’s nothing else in (my brain) except tree facts,” he jokes. “And maybe a few baseball statistics.”

After measuring the tree on Antholz’s land, Evertson drives 30-some miles to Nebraska City to check out a second bur oak. Wearing a Forest Service cap and a T-shirt that declares “Tree Husker,” he pulls out his tools. 

Unlike the one on Antholz’s land, this bur oak isn’t secluded. It sits on Arbor Day Farm, home to several other champion trees, like a persimmon, a Douglas fir, and a Japanese pagoda tree. Arbor Day’s founder, J. Sterling Morton, filled the property with both trees native to Nebraska and some rare even to North America. 

This bur oak’s branches stretch over a grassy patch with benches and a firepit. Budding green leaves are just starting to poke out. 

Evertson looks through the clinometer — 72 feet tall. He pulls the measuring tape around the trunk of the tree — a 14.6-foot circumference. He doesn’t need the measuring tape for the canopy cover; he knows he has a 3-foot stride — about 30 steps across, so a 90-foot canopy.  

This tree — right where Arbor Day was founded — is Nebraska’s likely new bur oak champion tree. Evertson still needs to re-measure a bur oak in Beatrice, and two split-trunk burs near Geneva and Talmage to determine the official champ.   

Bur oaks like this one and the one on Antholz’s land can support dozens of butterflies and moth species along with thousands of other insects. They support the birds that eat those bugs all summer and winter. They drop edible acorns, a starvation food for Native Americans on the Great Plains hundreds of years ago.

Evertson points to the fanned-out, craggy branches of a nearby bur oak. 

“It’s kind of wild and rough and bold. I think that’s beautiful. Its winter form is just bold and kind of stark. It stood the test of time against a tough environment in Nebraska,” he said. “The bur oaks out here on the prairie say, ‘Boom, I’m here, baby. I’m here for a couple hundred years. I’ll give you shade.’” 

Of all the trees, they’re probably Evertson’s favorite. 

“If I could only pick one, I love a bur oak,” he said. “But don’t make me just pick one. Can I have 10?”