Posts

Posted on

The Ceiling Project – Part II

It was late March/early April when the biggest disruption was happening at the house. Thankfully, weather wasn’t spectacular, so staying inside to get work done was fine, but the kids still had a lot going on and getting involved in a project like this wasn’t trivial.

Again, after our bedroom and the landing were done, we rearranged a bit upstairs to get the other bedrooms completed. Brooke, Calvin, and I were still messing with the living room downstairs while the workers were taking care of the bedroom ceilings. As I mentioned previously, Meg didn’t really like having a roommate, so the logical solution was for Brooke and I to sleep down in the dining room for a while while Meg and Calvin moved their beds into our bedroom while their rooms were being completed.

Their rooms didn’t take a ton of time, since the workers had a “groove” going by this point. As they waited for ceilings to dry (you know, mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding, trim, yada, yada, yada…), they could complete skim coating of the living room, and put up new, era-appropriate trim. The ceilings in the living room were generally fine, though we were going to paint them again and make sure everything feels more cohesive. Still, the kids were sleeping in our room, Brooke and I were sleeping in the dining room, and everything was still constantly disrupted…

It was around this time that we also got to painting the upstairs. The nice thing about the workers we settled upon was that we could have them do part of the work while Brooke and I would take care of the rest to keep costs down. So, we bought the paint for the walls, the ceilings, and the trim. We did the priming, and got creative about how we would reach across a cavernous expanse to paint the trim (pictured above…)

In the process of dewallpapering everything, we didn’t come up with too many discoveries, though we did find this hand-written note on the west wall by the main door to the house. “Melora P. Leonard lived here March 19, 1927” is the best we could make out from this note. It was unfortunate we had to paint over it!

By April 26, we were putting the finishing touches on. After upstairs was mostly “feature complete,” we moved the beds back to where they belonged and everyone starting getting the appropriate amount of sleep again. It was basically April 7 to 26 that someone was sleeping in the wrong place. It was a harrowing few weeks…….

Once the trim was up downstairs, the bulk of the work from our contractors was complete, so it was just a matter of painting and rearranging furniture again. Just like up on the landing, they had to try to level the trim with “the world” rather than with the ceiling, so they filled a bit of a gap between the ceiling and the trim on the main western wall of the living room.

The painting didn’t take all that long. Generally, I use the roller and Brooke “cuts in:” she’s a bit more detail-oriented and she gets bored using the roller, so it works out. Calvin helped out as well, mostly with the roller, but also with a paint brush. Maybe he’ll work summers as a painter eventually – he did a good job!

By May 3rd, we removed the coverings from the floor downstairs, just in time for me to enter Final Exam week and then head off to Utah. In total, from the time when Brooke first started, the project was nearly complete….after three years…

Most of the house is put back together now. The kids’ rooms have been done for a bit and the furniture has been put back where it all belongs. We’re taking our time on the walls, since some of the frames Brooke had put up over the years were specifically there to cover holes in the wall or other blemishes! With all of those repaired, everything looks pristine, so we aren’t in as much of a hurry to put new holes in the walls for picture frames.

Everything just feels new now! It feels like it’s a new house, in many ways, though clearly it isn’t. I still wake up in the morning and look at the ceilings and remain impressed with just how nice it all looks. Again, it’s still a work in progress: as we have the need (or inspiration), things will get hung back up on the walls. The landing is starting to take shape, but it isn’t done yet, either. The plan was to try and create a “reading nook” and a “work area” that was a bit more centralized. Our laser printer has lived in my closet for years, so we wanted to move things like that out into a shared space. We also have a desk so if someone wants to do some typing in a space other than the living room or a bedroom, it’s available.

Brooke’s had crafting materials up in the house attic since this whole process began, so she’s starting to go through things she thinks she needs (but hasn’t needed in three years……), and how to make items more accessible for various projects. Is it going to stay like this – probably not?? But my Dad came and installed a four-port electrical socket on the western wall here, so we have capabilities in this space that we didn’t before.

We’re using a red chair we inherited from my parents for now in the “reading nook,” but eventually, my antique La-Z-Boy is going to get reupholstered and move to this spot. We aren’t sure about the lighting in the space, either, as the sun has moved into a favorable angle for the next few months, so it is harder to judge what we want this to look like in January.

At least, the house is livable now! Brooke and I spent last Saturday morning going through the attic, mostly clearing out the electronics boxes I kept (hoarded?) in case I’d need them. We can move through the attic now, at least, so this Fall will probably be the time that we go through baby clothes and toys, old beds, crafting materials, luggage, and more that have accumulated for about as long as we’ve been married.

We’re running out of projects! Next year, the plan is to work on the landscaping outside, redo the concrete steps in the front, the flower beds around the house, maybe put up a fence around the garden, and so forth. Eventually, we hope to make the house attic somewhat livable, so a bed could fit up there, but that’s further down the road. For now, we’ll focus on putting some things up on the walls and enjoy the space that’s finally, mostly, almost done!

Posted on

The Ceiling Project – Part I

In 2023 (!!!!!), while I was in Utah with Field Biology, Brooke started to peel wallpaper upstairs on the landing. The last bit of wallpaper that we wanted to remove was the living room downstairs, but in order to do that, we had to do the upstairs and the stairwell, since it was all one continuous sheet. Of course, this was a daunting and disruptive task, so we hoped we could kinda take care of it “piecemeal,” and to a degree, we did. She took down the wallpaper upstairs and I primed the walls before our Alaska trip last Summer (…that I never posted about, apparently…whoops!).

After that, we got busy, school happened, band camp, robotics…you know, the usual “life” stuff that happens when you have a 12- and 16-year-old in the house. Fast forward to January and we decide “okay, this needs to happen.” But, we had talked for years about doing the ceilings simultaneously with the walls. If we could find someone who would put something up to cover the hole in the ceiling (pictured above) that had been there since before we moved into the house, and also deal with the wallpaper-covered plaster ceilings that had cracks in them, then the trim could come down at the same time and we could deal with the walls.

Brooke saw a sign for a guy in town and started a text exchange. We got an estimate, talked timelines, and decided to go for it. We’d tried for years to get an estimate on the ceiling(s) and no one would ever come through, but this guy finally did.

So on January 6th, while I was on Christmas Break, I started on the wallpaper on the stairwell. Brooke and I finished it about a month later, since I wanted an adult to be home to hold the ladder while the other adult could get the wallpaper in the upper left portion that was hard to reach. After the stairwell was taken care of, Brooke could then work on patching the worst bits of plaster.

The weird thing was that there was only one layer of wallpaper on these walls! There were multiple layers in the music room and upstairs on the landing, but once I started on the stairwell, only one layer.

More time went on as Brooke plastered here and there. We also had to clear off the landing and start moving things to the garage and the attic of the house. To make this all work, we effectively had to move everything out of the spaces that were getting the new drywall ceilings, so what we decided to do was move everything off the landing and do our bedroom first.

It should be noted that, we really do mean everything had to be moved out, so it took time to pack the house attic as full as we could with furniture, and we also took things out to the garage. My car is the one that routinely has its own dedicated bay, so for about a month or so, my car stayed in the driveway while my bay was taken up by bed frames, dressers, end tables, and other things.

By February, the stairwell was dewallpapered and Brooke was busy working on the plastering. The plan was to start the upstairs bedrooms in early March, so this time period mostly just featured limited disruption and consistent movement of furniture and other things to the attic and garage. There were a few days we had available to move large chunks of items, but it was basically “carry a box out that you know you won’t need for awhile.”

It wasn’t really until late March that we dewallpapered the main floor, necessitating the movement of the rugs, couches, TV, etc. into other spaces. The music room became the the living room on March 28, giving us at least some space to live in for most evenings. It was also around that time that I was given a roommate in the form of Meg, who moved down to the dining room. Her bed and box springs were brought downstairs, the table was moved against the wall, and for about a week and change, she slept down there. I’d stay up later than she wanted watching TV (though I was quiet…….), but it wore on her pretty quickly.

This, of course, had to happen because there could be nothing in our bedroom or on the landing while the contractors put up the new drywall ceilings. They would put the ceiling up, do some mudding around the seams, sand, mud, sand, mud, etc. The ceilings themselves were up pretty quickly, but the mudding process took days. For the most part, they would put up ceilings on the landing, move all their equipment into our bedroom, then the next day, they’d put up ceilings in our bedroom while they mudded and sanded the landing. Then, they’d hit the bedroom ceiling and return to the landing for crown molding, and so on. It was about a week and a half for them to do the ceilings on the landing and the crown molding, and put the ceiling fans back into place.

Of course, any time they needed to mess with anything electrical, I’d have to go down to the basement to cut power before I went to work. The cats were kept in the basement any time the workers were here to keep them out of the way, so there was no access to the circuit breaker unless I took care of it.

The fact they got the drywall put up so quickly above the stairwell is still probably the most impressive feat to me. They had some equipment to hold up drywall sheets, but again, the height of the space and the lack of flat surface for said equipment to sit on is still crazy to me… Again though, the biggest deal was getting the crown molding up in those spaces, and making it seem mostly level with the house. On the landing, the workers had to add an extra board along one of the walls to make sure the ceiling ended up level with the world, but not with the house. The house had settled over decades, and the ceiling was “bowed” on the landing (very, very noticeably…), so there was more to do than just put drywall up.

After that was all done, it was time to switch everything up so they could do the kids’ bedrooms, but that’s a story for another post!

Posted on

Garden Update: 06.03.26

Long time, no post, eh? Gotta say, it’s been a crazy (checks notes) 6 months. I’ll post an update on what has taken up so much time, but figured I should get something up about the garden before we get too far into June!

Our neighbor was kind enough to use his pull-behind tiller again on the garden. We have had a shockingly large amount of rain this Spring, so it took a bit to even get much going. We burned the regular stuff in March, but didn’t get the tilling done until mid-April, and even then, it still took a few weeks to get things planted due to weather or us being busy with various other things. Really, though, due to the other “project” that I haven’t posted yet, we had to spend most of our extra time inside the house working on it.

We got kale, spinach, radishes, and a lettuce assortment planted the first week of May. Tomatoes didn’t go in until a few weeks later when Brooke’s Dad brought some tomato cages for her birthday (she’s wanted them for years). This picture is from a few weeks ago (more recent shot down below).

Calvin and Brooke picked the radishes on May 20th, so it didn’t take all that long for them to be ready – and they were pretty good this year, too! Not too spicy, but still had some flavor. Calvin and I are the only two that really eat them, though we did include some in a wilted spinach salad one night.

So yeah, we’ve been picking lettuce for sandwiches, salads, and Barnaby for a month now. It’s started getting warm, though, with some days reaching 87 F. It’s relatively cool today, but it’s supposed to start heating up this weekend and continue into next week. We’ve already had some of the lettuce bolt out to seed, so the days of picking fresh lettuce are probably numbered. The kale is still looking pretty good though, so hopefully it continues for awhile longer.

We ended up with a reasonable strawberry haul, though they were ready earlier than we’re used to. Brooke has some frozen downstairs for tossing in drinks sometimes. She also made some jars of strawberry jam. And of course, Calvin just went out to the patch to pick some from time to time!

The asparagus took off pretty well, too, but we’re told we shouldn’t eat it in the first year after planting, so we just let it grow outside the strawberry patch. More on that next year, maybe!

And unfortunately due to a freeze, we didn’t get any cherries this year. Around now, we’d have buckets full of them, but alas, not in 2026!

Here’s what the lettuce looks like today. More overgrown, but still some good stuff in there. Brooke will probably pick this weekend to do something with it. She already dehydrated some kale for making more powder since she’s out, but there’s clearly more where that came from! The tomatoes are liking this hotter weather, too, so they’re just truckin’ right along. But yeah, maybe another week or so of lettuce left, if I were to guess.

Brooke and Calvin made some mounds this past weekend for planting watermelons. We’ve never really had good luck with them, but Calvin insisted, so there are some planted. I think Brooke’s also putting garbanzo beans in this plot. It’s our “catch all,” or “plant weird stuff” plot for 2026.

The bean plot has started, though only the soup beans are up. The rows are marked for the green beans, but I didn’t see many pop up yet in my cursory look. Once they’re up, I’ll work on putting grass clippings between the rows, but we’ve got a long way to go on them.

As far as the bees go, like last year, on April 19th, one of our hives swarmed, and yet again they went to the apple tree. I think it took three tries(ish) to get them to stay in a hive body. It was difficult to figure out if they had the queen or not. I don’t think Brooke or Calvin ever confidently found her, but after multiple tries, they got the swarm situated in a new hive body.

We’ve got three supers on there now and Calvin took a peek yesterday. The swarm hive is the unpainted one to the north of the “bee plot.” That one doesn’t seem to have much going on, but there’s a solid amount of capped honey in the bottom super on the south hive. There’s a lot of stuff flowering right now and it’s still been raining at least once a week, so I’m not sure what the holdup is. Brooke will probably need to get in there with Calvin sometime in the next few weeks to get a better sense of where we’re at, but it looks like a promising year for honey!

That’s good for now! Stay tuned for another productive garden year!

Posted on

State Park #31: Montauk State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

The last state park we visited this past summer was Montauk State Park, the next morning after we visited Grand Gulf State Park. By this point in the trip, we’d had a whirlwind tour of a bunch of parks, some more interesting than others, so by the time we were at Montauk, we were all about ready to go home. We at least knew Montauk wasn’t going to feature a long hike or anything, so that powered us through the morning.

The biggest thing about Montauk State Park is that it is located near the beginning of the Current River, where the spring feeds cold water into the river system and provides a perfect site to raise trout. It also means that a bunch families were there fishing.

Montauk State Park is one of three “trout parks” in Missouri, primarily featuring daily stocking of rainbow and brown trout. The different reservoirs being maintained at the site have fish at different stages of development. Reservoirs need to be emptied and cleaned (like the one above) occasionally, but it sure looked like millions of fish growing across the different tanks.

There was a little bit of hiking, but very limited. Really, it was a flat, gravel bike trail that went around the bodies of water in the area. We did a 1 mile loop around the pond, and that was basically the only “hiking” available at the site. Again, fishing is the primary draw, so not a ton for us to do, unfortunately!

If fishing was of interest to us, it would be a cool place to be! They’ve also got cabins on site, so it’s relatively easy to stay close to the fishing, making it convenient to get up early, if that’s your thing. For what we tend to be interested in, though, Montauk probably isn’t a park we need to return to any time soon. It was an easy stop to cap off the trip, though, so glad we saw it!

Posted on

State Park #30: Grand Gulf State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

After we spent the morning at Lake Wappapello State Park, we took a journey to one of the more remote options in the system: nearly in the middle of the state, a few miles from the border with Arkansas, lies Grand Gulf State Park. Again, if the goal was to hit the parks that we otherwise are highly unlikely to randomly cross, we had to make sure we hit this one! It was a two hour drive from Lake Wappapello, so that allowed a bit of rest time in the car before seeing what Grand Gulf had to offer.

The park itself features a cave system that collapsed thousands of years ago, leaving behind Missouri’s “Little Grand Canyon.” Before checking out the landmark itself, we took the 0.75 mile Natural Bridge Trail, which was among the easier ones we’d been on over this trip. There were some ups and downs, but it was generally suited to a wide audience of visitors. We always appreciate loop trails like this, too, so we don’t have any backtracking and are otherwise seeing a new landscape the entire time.

After the hike, we descended as far as we could down the hill toward the opening to the canyon. The history of the area was rather interested, though it is disappointing no one can go into the cave system. In the late-19th and early-20th century, there are records of folks attempting to explore the cave system, but a series of collapses over the millennia have made it mostly impossible. Aspects of the system were accessible into the 1920s, but a series of storms and floods washed trees and other debris down into the caves, shutting off sections. Even today, rains that get heavy enough can collect water in the canyon as high as 100 ft, taking weeks to drain.

While we were there, there was water down in the depths, but nowhere near that high. The “100 ft line” is essentially where the bottom of the deck hits here, so it’s crazy to think of what it looks like with that much rain!

I should note that this cave system has been traced another 9 miles away, emerging in Arkansas at Mammoth Spring. Apparently, that’s a state park, too, but for now, we aren’t planning on adding parks from other states to our list!

All in all, it was an interesting, albeit brief, visit. I think we’re glad we knocked this one out while we were down in southern Missouri, since making a special trip down there to hit this park may have been more disappointing. The trail just isn’t that long, and you can’t go deep enough to see much of the cave like you can at Rock Bridge State Park, so while it’s a beautiful view and an awesome sight to see, in a state where you don’t normally see formations like it, there just isn’t much to do there after you’ve seen the sight. Glad we went, but probably won’t return any time soon!

Posted on

Bee Update – Summer 2025

Like I said back in June, we ended up catching a few swarms for the first time ever. Early on, we weren’t entirely sure they would decide to stay or anything, but we kept an eye on them all summer. Brooke and Calvin added supers, and at one point in July, Calvin and I added another one to the south hive (the one that survived last winter).

Back on July 26, Calvin and Brooke took a look and claimed maybe 8 or 9 frames from the south hive that had capped honey (in the bottom super), and at the time, the northern hive had honey in it, but it wasn’t capped yet, so we didn’t take anything.

Flash forward to today, but we got more honey! They got another 11 frames, this time mostly from the northern hive, with a few to supplement from the south hive. Brooke said there’s more honey in that southern hive, but it isn’t capped and the bees appear to be feeding off of them, so they removed the queen excluder and are just allowing the bees to move up into the super that we left behind.

Last year, we didn’t get any honey, so it has been a few summers since we got to use our extractor! Brooke de-capped the frames and Calvin loaded two frames at a time into the extractor.

Calvin likes spinning the hand crank, of course, so that’s how he helped. Is it annoying to do this manually when we could use an electric one by taking the frames to Hannibal??? Meh. It’s fine. When we only have 8-10 frames to deal with, packing them all up into a cooler or bins would be worse, so using this cheap extractor is just fine for our purposes.

In the end, Brooke thinks we got maybe 5 gallons of honey this year! Ironically, this may be our best harvesting year at our house, which is crazy because two of the hives were collected from our apple tree in the yard! It’s always interesting the color that late-summer honey turns. It’s substantially darker (right) than what they collected in late-July (left…obviously…).

Speaking of the middle hive, we didn’t get any honey from it, but that’s partially because we didn’t have another queen excluder, and we don’t have that many supers. Since we didn’t get anything last year, Brooke was ready to throw in the proverbial towel (until she caught the swarms), so she’s still pretty hesitant to make any investments in these hives. Given this year’s haul, maybe she’ll change her mind! It’ll probably depend on if any of these survive the winter, though!

Posted on

State Park #29: Lake Wappapelo State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Having not traveled far with the kids this summer, we opted to throw in a classic man-made Missouri lake beach excursion onto the trip. Lake Wappapello State Park is about 20 minutes outside of Poplar Bluff, MO and features camping, fishing, boating, hiking, and a beach area. It isn’t all that dissimilar from Long Branch State Park near Macon, MO, which we’ve visited a few times just before school starts. Lake Wappapello feels a bit bigger, though, and aspects of the park seem a bit more spread out.

Lake Wappapello, like many (all?) of the lakes in the Missouri State Park System, resulted from a river that was dammed for either electricity generation or recreational purposes. Given the fertile Mississippi River basin farmland down here, you can imagine that there were communities that were not all that pleased with the prospect of the lake going in, but ultimately the lake went in and it has been here ever since.

Still, weirdly, there weren’t many people there! We went to the beach, first, and saw another couple eating breakfast at a nearby picnic table. We drove around to the marina to see about renting canoes for an hour or so. They ended up being $50 a day to rent, and we didn’t want them for that long, so we skipped them this time. Still, they have 3 canoes to rent and one of them was spoken for. There was a pontoon being put in, but otherwise only two other trucks/trailers in the parking lot putting in. This was at 9:15 on a Saturday morning in early-August: prime time to get in a camping trip, some boating, some fishing, etc. before school starts and before the Fall hits. It was just surprising to feel like we had the park all to ourselves!

The beach itself felt a bit smaller than Long Branch’s. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it probably can’t handle a crowd like Long Branch or even Thousand Hills (I never really visited that beach, so could be wrong there…). The depth of the water was very reasonable for kids, where 75% of the swimming space was 4′ or less in depth. I went out about as far as I could and the water only got up to my chin, so we’re talking maybe a little more than 5′ of depth at the most?

Behind the beach, there were multiple picnic tables, a pit toilet (with decent space for changing clothes), a water fountain and a spigot for washing off sand from feet, and a small playground. The parking lot was bigger than could probably support the beach, honestly, so I’d be very curious to see what it’s like on a “busy day.”

We didn’t drive through the camping area, but there were campers around. Compared with the other parks we’ve visited on this trip, it sure seems like it should be a pretty popular location for this region, and has some fun opportunities to check out: it was just surprising that there weren’t more people there!

Posted on

Garden Update: 09.07.25

I didn’t get anything posted in August (a lot was going on!), and since the garden is dying down, I figured I’m running out of time to talk about it. There are only a few things left to focus on, at this point, but overall, we think it was a solid year!

It hasn’t rained much in the past few weeks. It has also been unseasonably mild, temperature-wise, so I think the plants just know it’s time to wither away. There are still some green tomatoes on a few vines, but they’re pretty small and don’t show any sign of developing further.

A few weeks ago, though, we were getting some good hauls! We had a lot of good slicers this year, so we had our obligatory BLTs for a few weeks in mid-August. Brooke thinks we got at least 3 bags of tomatoes processed and frozen, so while more would have been nice, we still did pretty well.

The sweet potatoes are just about all that remains of the big plot. The zucchini died off about a month ago, and the squash never amounted to anything. I think we ended up with two squash, but beetles got to them both pretty quickly, and they didn’t get much larger than an apple, so not as successful as we’ve had in the past.

The eggplant, though, did alright! We probably ended up with 8 or 9 eggplants about this size?? They all looked pretty good! Brooke made baba ganoush once, but otherwise, she dehydrated them and mixed them in with various ground meat meals in the past few weeks. We’ll probably plant them again in the future, since they didn’t take up much space, and we actually got some fruit out of them.

Brooke processed the sorghum two weekends ago, just like she did the last time she grew them. She ended up getting about a quart and a half of sorghum extract. Not really all that much, but it’s still in keeping with our quest to make sweet things off the land.

Peppers are also one of the few remaining things we’ve got growing. The “banana peppers” ended up being hotter than we’d anticipated, so Brooke is letting them all turn red and then dehydrating them. We’re going to smoke some of them so we can make smoked paprika, which sounds pretty good to me!

The soup beans are the other thing that took over the bean plot. Again, we didn’t get much from our green beans this year (we got enough, but it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop here in 2025…). The soup beans, on the other hand, are doing just fine as always!

In that same plot, we had some cantaloupe growing. Of the 9 or 10 that ultimately grew, only one of them was viable (the others rotted or never really got big enough to ripen). The one we got was pretty good, though I’m not convinced the space those plants took up was worth the one cantaloupe.

And last, but not least, Brooke dug up (dumped out??) her laundry basket of potatoes and….this is what she got! We ate these last week and, honestly, they were pretty good! Again, was it worth it to use a laundry basket for what amounts to a dollar or two of new potatoes? Meh. Still, the process worked! Maybe I didn’t water them enough, or maybe they were so deep down in the soil that the water didn’t percolate down far enough?? We’ll try potatoes again next year, but probably without as deep a path for the water to take.

There’s a chance I’ll post one more thing for the end of the season sometime in the next few weeks, but there isn’t much more to develop for Summer 2025’s garden season. Here’s to looking toward Summer 2026!

Posted on

State Park #28: Morris State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Like I said in the previous post, we were knocking off a bunch of state parks this year since we couldn’t really travel far for a traditional family vacation. There were multiple parks within driving distance of Poplar Bluff, so we centered our focus around there. One of the options was Morris State Park, which, again, a). doesn’t include camping, and b). appears to not be a heavily attended park.

To be fair, we didn’t check attendance measures until later (apparently got something like 8,500 visitors in 2024, whereas Van Meter State Park got 47,500…), but it became evident as we started on the 2.7 mile trail (I say “the” because it was the only one). There was a sign when we first got going that mentioned poison ivy being a thing, but we took that as, “well, it’s Missouri, so of course it’s a thing??” We quickly found, though, that there was poison ivy growing on the trail itself, which wasn’t ideal.

What was growing on the trail wasn’t too bad, but small little plants growing up will eventually create problems for visitors. There were larger plants off to the sides that we took care to avoid, but there were three or four large branches/trees down, crossing the trail, that forced us to move off-trail a few times, complicating our journey and increasing the chances we’d hit the poison ivy.

Still, the trail itself was pretty good, or at least, if a). we were there in October, and b). if the parks service would come by to remove the downed branches, it would be a pleasant hike with some limited elevation changes and decent views. The park is settled near a peach grove, so it was pretty obvious we were hiking right next to a semi-open field with some trees in it. We also heard tractors off in distance, so it was an oasis of woodland clearly located within farmland.

Honestly, we weren’t all that impressed. The state park website plays up the fact that, geologically, Crowley’s Ridge (upon which some of the hiking takes place) is a raised portion of the ground that used to be lining the ancient Gulf of Mexico, then millennia of ice age meltwater continued to shape the area into what it is now. Impressive, I suppose, but ultimately, it’s kinda just a hill with some trees on it (sorry, geologists….).

So yeah, if you’re in the area and want to give it a look, I’m not going to say skip it….but none of us were particularly impressed, especially given the lack of maintenance on the trail!

Posted on

State Park #27: Big Oak Tree State Park

This post is part of an ongoing series summarizing each State Park in Missouri that our family has attended. We hope to visit each of 54 State Parks before the kids graduate from high school.

Brooke and I went to Alaska earlier this summer (I know, I know, I haven’t posted the details yet….getting there….), and given the kids’ other time constraints and camps, we didn’t really have the opportunity to travel far or for very long with them this year. Soooooo, we opted to knock some state parks off the list kinda like we did in 2020! Brooke took off Monday so we could get a jump on the trip, so we headed toward the bootheel to hit parks we otherwise are highly unlikely to cross in our usual travels.

First up on the list was Big Oak Tree State Park. A theme you’ll notice over the next few posts is that these are a). not heavily attended, and b). don’t include campgrounds (hence their lack of attendance). If anything, it made for a somewhat relaxing visit where we could take our time and explore a bit! On the other hand, it also meant that there weren’t a ton of things to see.

The “claim to fame” for Big Oak Tree State Park is really the history of it. Meg has been reading from a State Park coffee table book we got from our donation to KBIA a few years ago (support your local public radio stations, folks…), so we get a bit of the history as we’re heading into each site. This one was interesting in that it’s one of the older pieces of land set aside for state parks, largely because we had the collective wisdom to deforest a lot of the region in favor of farm land along the Mississippi River in the early 20th century. This ended up affecting the ecosystem to a substantial degree, but thankfully they saw fit to save at least some acreage of the old growth trees so we now have a sense of what the swampy forest would have looked like had it been left along 100 years ago. While more land was ultimately purchased around the trees, only about 80 acres of the original forest land remain, containing trees averaging 120+ feet tall. It’s currently designated as a National Natural Landmark!

There are (were?) several state and national record-holder trees on the site, though few remain now, unfortunately. There were at least four there for awhile, but severe weather events and old age have taken down some of them over the years. They’ve got signs along the boardwalk trail indicating where the trees once stood, and in some cases, even if the tree fell, they left it for visitors to see.

One of the really interesting things we saw was the bald cypress trees. I guess we must not have many up near where we live, but apparently the root systems of cypress trees include these little “spires” that grow up from the ground?? They look like stalagmites in a cave. The effect in a natural swamp like this is that they end up holding the soil together so it doesn’t wash away as quickly. Fascinating!

Another weird quirk of the site is that the original plans were to included a man-made lake in the center of the space, so they built levees, added pumping systems, and tried stocking it only to find they were fighting constant battles with the Mississippi River floodplain. Costs were too high, so they abandoned that project. Still, they found that water collected in sloughs outside the levees and those actually did alright with keeping more native fish, and the levee itself served as a decent hiking trail around the area.

We hiked about 1.5 miles along the boardwalk trail, and it was a pretty flat and easy trip. The main issue we ran into was that there were cobwebs at points, especially later on, that got kinda annoying. Again, it was clear that the trail wasn’t visited all that often, yielding the opportunity for stuff to keep growing and not get knocked down.

All in all, it was a good “first stop” on the trip. Pretty light and easy, an interesting story behind the park, and the weather was shockingly good for early August (highs around 80 F?? Can’t beat that!).