Nine miles from the heart of downtown Lincoln lies an ecological rarity.
Surrounded by farm fields and a retired Cold War-era bomb storage depot, a 230-acre plot of native prairie remains untouched.
Named for its distance from Lincoln’s urban core, Nine-Mile Prairie is one of the last tallgrass remnants that once dominated eastern Nebraska. Home to species such as big blue stem, Indiangrass and goldenrod, the prairie plants can reach peaks of 8 feet in the fall, when gold and red hues begin to replace the summer green…