How volunteers work to protect Elmhurst's Great Western Prairie

Keith Olson knows something about prairies.

He knows a little bit about saving them, too.

Roughly 10 times a year, he leads a group of volunteers - sometimes a handful, sometimes several dozen - in work to spruce up the Elmhurst Great Western Prairie, a 6-acre strip of virgin land that runs parallel to the Illinois Prairie Path from Spring Road to Salt Creek.

Owned by Elmhurst Park District, the Great Western Prairie is the oldest living environment in the city. A unique ecosystem in the heart of a suburban setting, it's home to more than 100 different types of native plants.

Olson knows the acreage better than most. He helped spearhead the drive to save the prairie nearly 40 years ago and remains a member of the volunteer group that assists the park district in maintaining and preserving it.

Olson and a group of volunteers were out Saturday morning doing their thing near Berkley Avenue and Prairie Path Lane.

"It's just a miracle that it's here at all, considering that it is a tiny 6-acre piece of property completely surrounded by suburbia," said volunteer Eric Keeley, marveling that it's seen daily by hundreds of people who jog or bicycle along the Illinois Prairie Path.

"If we don't keep getting rid of the woody growth, then the prairie will eventually just be taken over and become a shrub land," Olson said. "Some of the tall big bluestem Indian prairie grass plant has two-thirds of its structure below ground so it can withstand harsh winters, wind and hot summers characteristic of Illinois."

Depending on the weather and time of year, the volunteers sometimes collect trash, sometimes cut down unwanted woody plants and sometimes in late summer and early fall collect seeds to help repopulate the native plants.

Olson says the volunteers work at the prairie for about three hours on the third Saturday of every month from March through November.

They used to come out in winter, too, but one or two frigid days when the temperature hovered around zero convinced them that maybe wasn't the best time for outdoor work.

Olson says he views the strip of prairie as a "living museum." Only this, he says, is a "museum that's several thousand years old and it has no hours and it has no cost. It's free and open all the time."

History lesson

Ironically, the museum that is the Elmhurst Great Western Prairie was saved from development because it grew between two railroad lines, the Chicago Great Western and the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin.

While much of the surrounding prairie gave way to farms and development, this strip was so narrow it wasn't practical to use it for either.

So at a time when much of Illinois' natural prairie was disappearing, this one survived.

It got its name because it grew primarily on the former right of way of the Great Western. The right of way of the Chicago, Aurora and Elgin, meanwhile, became the Illinois Prairie Path.

The site is managed by the park district as part of Wild Meadows Trace. The district conducts regular controlled burns to remove unwanted plants, cuts nonnative woody plants and spreads native seeds to add more plant varieties.

It also recently installed interpretive signs to help visitors better understand what they're seeing.

Olson and other volunteers help with those efforts and he says people often stop to thank group members for what they're doing.

On occasion, the number of volunteers will swell - the record is around 80 - when a Scout troop of business sends a contingent to lend a hand.

After four decades, though, few know as much about the prairie and its plants as Olson.

Ask him his favorite and he quickly sounds like a parent asked to choose a favorite child.

"There's not one specific one," he says. But hold his feet to the prairie fire, so to speak, and he comes up with two.

First, there's porcupine grass, he says, a favorite because when you gather a bunch of its seeds, they look like porcupine quills.

Then, of course, there's big bluestem, the state grass of Illinois.

"It can get really tall," he says. "I'm about 5 foot 9, and in a good year it grows over the top of my extended arm."

The best part of the prairie, though, is, well, that it's still a prairie.

"It's a little surprising," Olson says, "to have a natural area surrounded by homes right in the middle of town."

And it's downright inspiring to think that while the park district and its volunteers have been working to protect it for decades, the prairie has been right in this space spot, looking much the same, for thousands of years.

"It's been there for millennia," Olson says. "That's a good word for it: 'Millennia.'"