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!