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!).