Pawnee Buttes

The two Pawnee Buttes stand about 300 feet above the shortgrass of northeastern Weld County, the last pieces of a higher plain that erosion has stripped away around them, with the long wall of the Chalk Bluffs to the north still holding the old level. Their layers are soft sandstone and clay, and they have yielded the fossils of mammals that grazed here long after the dinosaurs. People have hunted on these plains for some twelve thousand years.

Homesteaders came in the 1880s, and more under the enlarged homestead acts of 1909 and 1916; there were once nearly six hundred families and eighteen one-room schoolhouses on the western part of what is now the grassland. They broke the sod, and in wet years the wheat paid. By 1930 more than half the high plains of Weld County had been plowed. Then came drought, falling prices and the dust storms of the 1930s, and most of the families left.

Under the New Deal the Resettlement Administration and later the Soil Conservation Service bought up failed and eroded farms, most of the purchases complete by 1941, and set about putting them back to grass. In 1960 the land became Pawnee National Grassland, nearly 200,000 acres in two units checkered with private ranches. A trail of about two miles leads from the trailhead out to West Pawnee Butte; East Butte is mostly on private land. From March 1 to June 30 the cliffs near the trail are closed to protect nesting golden eagles, prairie falcons and hawks, the birds the grassland is now best known for.