By Heidi Beguin
“And after that, one of the commissioners who said in the past that this will never get done, actually came up to us and he said, ‘if we don’t get the Cowboy Trail done, I think we’re really going to regret it.’ And the other commissioners next to him reached over and checked his temperature, because he was the same one who had said, ‘no, this is a waste of money,’” Helmbrecht said.
Game and Parks secured a grant to develop the 26-mile stretch from Chadron to Rushville, but it ended up only covering bridge development, Duryea said. They applied for and got a grant through the Nebraska Department of Transportation to surface the trail segment. Game and Parks just hired consultants, Duryea said.
The Chadron-based group also is working on a new connector rail-trail that will bring the Cowboy Trail – which will actually end 5 miles east of Chadron – into town. Game and Parks awarded the city of Chadron a $178,540 grant in 2022 for the first phase of the connector project.
“It doesn’t do any good for the trail to end out in the middle of the field there,” said George Ledbetter, Northwest Nebraska Trails Association’s treasurer.
‘Don’t hold your breath’
Even once the work near Chadron is complete, roughly 88 miles of trail will remain undeveloped between Valentine and Gordon.
Finishing it will undoubtedly be a heavy lift. It took about eight years to marshal support for and then complete the 17 miles between Gordon and Rushville. And even though Game and Parks has secured grant funding for the Rushville-to-Chadron segment, it will still take some time to finish the work on those 26 miles, especially since some of the funding is from the federal government.
“We’ve been told, don’t hold your breath on the surfacing happening anytime soon,” Helmbrecht said.
Game and Parks doesn’t appear to have any plans for finishing the missing link, which essentially exists as a natural area for wildlife.
It takes a lot of planning, effort and money to transform abandoned stretches of railroad into a safe and inviting trail, said Duryea. The real difference maker is the local community partners – groups like Cowboy Trail West and the Northwest Nebraska Trails Association.
“I mean, it’s possible,” Duryea said of the chances of completing the Cowboy Trail. “When you have a local group that supports the effort and the cities on board that are along there and all, that’s the spark that needs to happen for development to occur, in my experience anyways.”
In 2022, four Nebraska nonprofits, including Cowboy Trail West and the Northwest Nebraska Trails Association, announced they were forming the Cowboy Trail Coalition to advocate completing the trail.
Once the Chadron-to-Rushville chunk is done, the groups plan to turn to the stretch between Valentine to Merriman, said Elwood with Cowboy Trail West. Then they will be down to one final unfinished segment between Merriman and Gordon.
Helmbrecht with the Chadron group remains hopeful.
“I think, you know, we see all these trails on the east side of the state, and how successful they are. And then post COVID, we saw how much bicycle usage went up. I think now it’s kind of just a matter of time.”
Now 30 years down the road, Elwood and others want to make sure this end of the trail continues to inch forward, at hopefully an increasing rate of speed.
“We’ve got a lot invested in our trail … and we don’t want to see it go south on us.”
The Flatwater Free Press (https://flatwaterfreepress.org/nebraskas-cowboy-trail-still-incomplete-nearly-30-years-later/) is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.