May 23rd - Rocheport, Missouri

Fortunately we were both re-energized and raring to go take a walk on the Missouri River in nearby Rocheport, Missouri. After a hearty breakfast using some of the 39-cents-a-dozen eggs from Aldi we drove about 30 miles west on I-70 to Rocheport. Fortunately the town was small and we found the turnoff for the KATY Trail State Park without any difficulty.

The Rocheport Lewis and Clark YRE starts at the Trail Stop Café and Bike Rental, which played a central role in our day’s activities. We retrieved the start folder from Tom, one of the café owners. This is an out-and-back trail using the KATY rails-to-trails path and the directions were another marvel of simplicity: they simply directed us to turn left onto the trail and proceed to mile marker 175 and then return.

The trail out was really quite interesting. Most of the walk is on the old rail bed just beside the Missouri River and we could watch the ever-changing river scene. The current was strong and swift, and you can just imagine how difficult it was for Lewis and Clark to pole or drag that keelboat upstream. There was also lots of wildlife including birds and a surprising number of snakes, which I usually don’t see during our walks. I saw a four-foot black racer, another dark-brown snake that moved off the path too quickly for me to identify it, and a beautiful green garden snake with black and bright yellow longitudinal stripes. They all ran away as soon as they felt us coming, of course, but it was unusual to see them. Along the riverbank, Canada geese seemed to be breeding (altho at other places we have already seen fledged goslings) and were sitting on nests or squawking noisily about. Monika saw a bluebird that I didn’t catch, and there was the ever-hopeful vulture searching along the riverbank for a possible meal.

The bluffs along the riverbank were of the same soft buff-colored limestone we had seen between Grafton and Alton along the Mississippi. The shapes were smoothly curved with many cliffs and the occasional cave. Underneath one very large cliff, a huge colony of swallows was noisily flitting in and out of their cone-shaped mud houses. We later saw them darting about all over the area, presumably catching insects—certainly we didn’t have any problems with mosquitoes for the entire walk!

One cave had a rock hut constructed in it and we stopped to take a closer look. Upon closer inspection I was surprised and impressed with the fitted stones and concrete chinking—clearly this was no squatter’s hut. We later found out that it was an old railroad supply house located midway along the line in Missouri.

One other special cave is a cave with old native-american pictographs that was visited by Lewis and Clark in June of 1804. That cave is not on the current walk route because it is an extra ½ mile past the turn around point for the walk (about mile 174.4). We didn’t know about this historic cave until after the walk and ended up renting bicycles at the café later that afternoon to ride back and see it. I took pictures of what I think are the pictographs but we didn’t go in because a sign said it was private property and a haven for gray bats. It gave me a charge to walk on exactly the same place that Lewis and Clark did 200 years ago and see at least some of the same things they did.

The trail back was, of course, mostly a reverse of the things we had seen on the way out. We met and chatted a while with Tracy Perkins, a Sheriff’s Deputy escorting a group of school children biking the trail. She seemed well liked by the children who all called her “Miss Tracy” as they passed by. She told us about an air show on the coming weekend at the airport between Columbia and Jefferson City. Since we planned to walk in the capital of Jefferson City anyway, taking in an air show after the walk sounded like a great idea.

After the walk we stopped off for lunch at the Trail Stop café and found that the food lived up to its billing in the Starting Point—much of the food really is home cooked. Monika said her hamburger was great and my sirloin sandwich was delicious. I also enjoyed cherry cobbler made from scratch that Tom had cooked. His wife mentioned Tom had actually been a dessert chef somewhere in the past, and altho she might have been joking the cobbler was certainly good enough to support that claim. If you do this walk you certainly should consider having a meal at the café.

While there, take a look at the articles on the wall about Ted Jones, who was an interesting character. He pioneered the establishment of small brokerage houses in towns throughout the Midwest and earned millions in that way. But instead of doing the usual millionaire things, he and his wife used their wealth for the public good. They purchased a worn-out farm in rural Missouri and used modern methods to bring the land back to life as a demonstration project. When the Missouri-Kansas-Texas railroad decided to abandon the line thru central Missouri back in 1986, Ted bought the 200-miles of KATY trail rights together with all bridges and infrastructure for $200,000.00. He then spent another 2 million dollars of his own money to surface the trail for hiking/biking use and gave it to the state of Missouri. He was certainly a man in the mold of Andrew Carnegie. Hurray for Ted!

The interesting thing was that he apparently also generated an honest corporate culture for his firm that has endured until the present time. The Jones brokerage firm is the only firm that I know of that took out full-page newspaper ads in the Washington Post urging the Federal Government to more closely monitor stock trading and take steps to discourage the short-term speculative buying and selling of mutual fund shares. The ad said that most of their investors were investing for the long term and their returns could be threatened by the short term buying and selling of mutual fund shares. Very interesting and completely atypical of the other Wall Street brokerage firms with their insider trading, after-hours trading deals for special customers, and other forms of unethical behavior.