2005/04 Deep South trip - Lewis and Clark park |
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It was another warm, sunny day as we drove west into Kansas through some run-down little towns and then settled in to a long day’s drive north through Kansas City into Missouri and Iowa. Our road followed the Missouri River, with river bluffs high above us on the Iowa side of the river and also in the far distance on the Nebraska side. The Missouri’s flood plain is maybe twenty miles wide here, evidence of the river’s power before it was controlled by the big dams in Montana and South Dakota.
We were headed for a park north of Sioux City, but we ran out of daylight and instead camped at Lewis and Clark state park on one of the Missouri’s oxbow lakes. Probably when Lewis and Clark came up the river two hundred years ago, this section of water was part of the river, but now it’s a wide oxbow lake, good for Canada geese and for humans to blast their power boats in circles.
Sunday April 17th
We awoke to thick fog surrounding the lake, but that soon burned off. I took a quick look around the park. It has some interesting backwaters and trails through the cottonwood trees, and plenty of wildlife. I was walking around a slough when I heard a loud splash close behind me. For a second I thought I was dead, but then I remembered that I was in Iowa and not in Louisiana, and the loud splash was probably a turtle or a beaver and not an alligator.