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Little-Known Parts of Missouri's State Parks
Mike McArthy
Alley Spring is one of many springs featured in the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. Alley has an average daily flow of eighty-one million gallons of water and is thirty-two feet deep.
Ol’ Rough and Ready beat Missouri to the punch. Although Missouri was among the first states to try to establish a state parks system, its first attempt fell short in the 1907 Missouri General Assembly. Exactly one decade passed before the legislature enacted a state parks authorization, one year after Teddy Roosevelt’s National Park System was born.
But Missouri made history a half century later when its three original parks jumped the ship of state to form the nation’s first national scenic riverways. Those three—Big Spring, Round Spring, and Alley Spring—are highlights of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, christened in 1972 when Tricia Nixon Cox threw a floral bouquet into Big Spring. Big Spring is the biggest in the state, and one of the biggest in the world. But you knew that.
Before we leave the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the springs have something to tell. Their waters’ vivid colors come from dissolved limestone suspended in the water. You might see turquoise or aqua or azure, depending on sunlight and depth of the pool. An article on the National Park Service web site reports Big Spring carries away about 175 tons of calcium carbonate rock in solution every day.
When those parks left the state system, the Current River flowed past no state park for nearly forty years. That’s about to change, when our newest state park opens in 2010. Current River State Park began its civil life as the Alton Club, a private retreat for executives of the Alton Boxboard Company in Illinois who came to the Ozarks to fish for fun and trout. The property fell into the hands of the Missouri Department of Conservation, who honored a former conservation director by renaming it the Jerry J. Presley Conservation Education Center. A railroad tie smell permeates the air around the park’s 1930s-era wooden buildings, stained creosote brown, standing on sturdy rock foundations. Many of the structures are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the big rounded wooden gymnasium sitting on a steep embankment above a lake. The compound is as nice as any summer camp, nice as Bunker Hill teachers’ camp a dozen miles away on the Jacks Fork River. But the Conservation Department had no useful plan for the property—too small for big conferences, too large for small parties. Locals resented any attempt to board people there, saying it takes money from local businesses. So it met the fate of so many awkward misfit properties. It became a state park.
Missourians should be thankful. The state knows how to do parks. The very best kept secret about Missouri state parks is that in competitions every other year, Missouri’s parks have ranked in the top half dozen state parks systems in the nation. Consistently.
Another granddaddy in Missouri’s system is Meramec State Park. Sure, you know you can float the Meramec, but you may not realize that under your keel, more species of crayfish live in the Meramec basin than just about anywhere. They thrive because the water emanates from springs that filter through limestone formations, infusing high levels of calcium into the water. Crayfish need calcium, since they shed their exoskeleton armor seven or eight times during the warm growing season. Each time a crayfish sheds, it also regurgitates its entire stomach and esophagus. Not to worry, a new stomach already has formed around the old one, with a calcium stone the size of an oblong pearl wedged between. When the old stomach exits, the new stomach dissolves this calcium, which hits the critter’s bloodstream and emerges as the material for a new exoskeleton. Nifty.
Crayfish aren’t the only Missouri residents to shuck their duds in the summer. Who hasn’t heard about Party Cove, a gaggle of nano-clad sun worshipers who bump up against Lake of the Ozarks State Park every summer Sunday? You may even know that this park is saddled with a major airstrip on its spine, built in the ’60s to welcome half a hundred chief executives to the National Governors Conference. What you may not know is that before any governors or naked boaters invaded the park, two park camps formerly hosted Boy Scouts (Camp Pa He Tsi) and Girl Scouts (Camp Pin Oak). The Girl Scouts stopped using rustic Pin Oak three years ago, according to the Department of Natural Resources. At once rustic yet reachable, Ozark Caverns remains one of the park’s hidden gems and one of Missouri’s premier show caves. The caverns might be too cool to attract clothing-challenged visitors from Party Cove, but it’s one of the few caves in the state accessible for folks with disabilities.
Speaking of challenges, everybody knows what happened to one of Missouri’s favorite natural getaways, Johnson’s Shut-Ins. After the billion-gallon flush that rolled boulders the size of Lincoln Navigators through the park, its many features are in various stages of recovery. Meanwhile, travel just a few miles east of Johnson’s Shut-Ins, down the road from the granite elephants in Missouri’s smallest but heaviest state park. You’re looking for Hawn State Park, a natural gem too often overlooked. Whispering pines offer a majestic greeting to visitors, who soon discover that Pickle Creek has patiently cut through sandstone to reach bedrock and pulses through fantastic shut-ins all its own. And hey, don’t be intimidated by Devil’s Oven, Devil’s Fretwork, or Rattlesnake Rocks, and don’t eat the farkleberries growing on Evans’ Knob.
On your way from here to there, you likely have done what twenty-seven million travelers do every year on Interstate 70: bypass Graham Cave State Park, just off the road near Montgomery City. Pity. The cave provided shelter for Missouri residents ten thousand years before the federal interstate highway system. It may be Missouri’s most prominent crack this side of New Madrid, although not caused by an earthquake.
Just south of New Madrid, Missouri’s second-longest boardwalk sits among some world record-sized trees in Big Oak Tree State Park. The longest boardwalk sits just a few miles north of there, in the grossly under-visited Mingo National Wildlife Refuge.
Before Missourians made significant alterations to the landscape during the last century, prairies were common in Missouri. Not many people realize that a rare sand prairie exists at Wakonda State Park, just south of La Grange near the Mississippi River. The sand prairie is a result of the hand of man, a remnant of a dredging operation to provide gravel for concrete in a growing highway system. The dredging ceased, but the sand prairie thrives, along with the largest sand beach in the entire Missouri state park system.
On the western frontier, prairie is making a modest comeback, with help from Prairie State Park in Barton County. The park is in the middle of nowhere, and the bison like it that way. Back before the Civil War, millions of bison owned thirteen million acres of tallgrass prairie in Missouri. Settlers killed off every one of them. Fast forward to 1982; Missouri reintroduced nine bison to this rare reservation. Today the herd is thriving, numbering about thirty animals, and with a guide, you can get up close and personal with them, within reason.
Hiding in plain sight, the unsung stars of the park are the prairie tallgrasses: Beard-tongue and Rattlesnake Master, Ripgut and Turkey Foot. These grasses and flowers, including some desert varieties that grow on the hillsides, feature deep roots that can survive drought, fire, wind, and flood—everything but civilization. A dozen species of birds, and another dozen species of critters, insects, and fish call the grasses home. They all get along, in a food chain sort of way.
American Indians know this. Always have. They leave us clues how to live in harmony with the land. They teach us through the school of hard rocks, and they make you stretch your vocabulary: In the grand tradition of confusing stalactites with stalagmites, add petroglyphs and pictographs. The latter are paintings. Petroglyphs are engravings, and they’re as permanent as your neighbor’s tattoo, reporting the world from a prehistoric point of view.
Find one ancient library at Washington State Park, in the northeast part of the county with the same surname. Beyond the park shelters built by the loving hands of African-American Civilian Conservation Corps stonemasons, the petroglyphs reveal symbols carved indelibly in dolomite long before English became Missouri’s official language. These petroglyphs tell tales of hunting and fertility, sun and rain, thunder birds and lightning bolts.
Similar symbols sit preserved under a new octagonal shelter at Thousand Hills State Park north of Kirksville. Long before Big Creek was dammed in the 1950s to form the park’s lake—the water source for a thirsty Kirksville—the petroglyphs recorded the history of life along these thousand hills.
Van Meter State Park sits among verdant hills and deep ravines, too, called the Pinnacles, north of Marshall. The area is the ancient home of the Oumessourit tribe, as they were called by French explorers. You know that name, anglicized to become Missouri. You may not know that the park is the new home of the Missouri American Indian Cultural Center, a long-overdue interpretation of the nine tribes of early nineteenth-century Missouri.
During that same century, railroads came through Missouri, and as a result, trees were cut, buffalo were slaughtered, and progress muscled every obstacle out of the way. Somebody’s Great Father might’ve cracked a smile when a portion of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad relinquished its rails and reverted to human-powered transportation. Sure, you’ve heard the controversies about the Katy Trail, the world’s longest, skinniest state park. But if you can’t get over it, get on it. And on your next trail trip stem to stern, look for these icons on the central portion of the trail: His ’n’ Hers outhouses, the world’s best Thai food trailer, and BoatHenge. Think Stonehenge with runabouts.
To mix metaphors, this print pictograph barely scratches the surface of Missouri’s forty-nine state parks. Like two thousand other Missourians, according to the Missouri Division of State Parks, you may have visited all of them, but among the more than two hundred thousand acres in Missouri state parkdom, there’s always something new to discover.
Visit www.mostateparks.com for more information.
