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.
We returned from Pittsburg, KS from Taylore’s wedding back in August of 2016 and, at Brooke’s suggestion, we looked for a Missouri State Park near that region that we otherwise wouldn’t visit for a very, very long time. She ran across Prairie State Park, which happened to be just over the Kansas/Missouri border.
In all honesty, it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much to do there. They’ve got multiple hiking trails, including one we went on that, literally, involved walking through a field. There are some backpacking trails that are a bit longer and further out, but again, given the terrain, I’m not sure that it would be all that “hilly” or otherwise difficult to make good time on a long trail. Shade was certainly at a premium out there…
The “claim to fame,” at least so far as we could tell in our limited time there, was that this open field we were hiking through also contains bison and elk. When we first drove in, the sign informed us that there were free roaming elk and bison moving through the area and, while we didn’t see any, unfortunately, we did see signs of them…
…but with multiple buffalo patties around, it was clear that large animals move through the area frequently. They were easily identified by their similarity to their other bovine brethren (and the fact that we saw tons of the elk variety in Colorado and it looks nothing like this).
We also saw multiple spots in the grass that clearly used to bed some kind of large animal. It wasn’t obvious to us whether we were seeing elk or buffalo “beds,” but they must have been recent, as the grass looked like it would pop back up given enough time.
Overall, it was a nice, brief little stop. They’ve got camping, but we didn’t see much of a shower house available: only a single in-ground outhouse near the picnic area. It looked like mostly primitive camp sites and, although they actually looked pretty nice and spacious, only one was reserved for the coming days. I suppose August isn’t exactly prime camping season.
We want to go back and see some bison up close, though! Perhaps another time, when we happen to be down in southwestern Missouri!