Cuivre River and the Gateway Arch
March 21, 2006
Managed to squeeze in another winter getaway. Tracey was planning to take the babies to Omaha (she ended up staying home due to weather) to see her friends, so Quinn and I put the Thule on the Town and Country and headed to Cuivre River State Park for some late winter/early spring camping. We had crisp, partly cloudy days to hike and camp in this Ozark-like state park. Cuivre River is part of the Lincoln Hills Section of the Glaciated Plains Natural Division and was missed by the advancing glaciers over the last 2 million years. Check out the maps at this link for more on the extent of glaciation in North America.
Saturday morning video 1 (1299 kb)
Saturday morning video 2 (1899 kb)
On Saturday afternoon, we walked all the way around (575 kb video) 56-acre Lake Lincoln. The daffodils were the only spring color, but there were lots of tiny shoots underneath the leaves. The forest floor was unusually clear because they do regular, controlled burns to keep the ticks down and help the other animals forage.
Here's a view of our the bluff our campsite was on top of from across Lake Lincoln:
Video of campsite from across Lake Lincoln (947 kb)
We zipped into St Louis to ride the Tom Sawyer riverboat and go up Saarinen's Gateway Arch at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The riverboat was fun, but the St Louis riverfront is an industrial zone, so it's not like cruising the Danube. It was interesting, though, to see the barges and the terminals where oil, grain, cement, etc are brought into and out of the country. The WWII minesweeper USS Inaugural, which saw service in Okinawa, has been wrecked there since the flood of 1993, which also devastated Des Moines.
Quinn was impressed with the Arch. He said it was much bigger than he had imagined (twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty). I am always moved by its grand simplicity and the fact that it was even built. This was my third trip up: 1970, 1988 and 2006. This time I paid more attention to the architectural aspect and learned that the Arch has no internal supports. In cross-section, it's an equilateral triangle consisting of concrete sandwiched between two welded stainless steel skins. So, it's hollow and sways only one inch in normal winds. Remarkable.
I'm particularly amazed at the elevator ride to the top. I LOVE that there are windows in the doors of the cars. You can see the inside walls of the Arch and the steel that supports the elevator. As you ascend, a gimbal system levels the car periodically, which is a little unsettling and charming at the same time. It's unique (but, as Quinn and I would say, so are a lot of other things). This is inside one of the cars:
The top is a room about the size of the inside of a bus, except the floor follows the curve of the arch. Here's the view through the tiny windows, facing west:
We didn't plan our return route until the day we left. The car had been acting up, so I decided to take I-70 west via Kansas City as the safest route home. This allowed us to stop at Graham Cave State Park. This is a cool Neolithic site with a lot of fun climbing and trails. The Dalton people inhabited the cave and were descendants of archaic native Americans (Paleo-Indians) who had hunted mastodon and other game in this area. The Dalton people adapted to the extinction of the mastodons by hunting smaller game and gathering nuts and berries. It's amazing that these isolated people were here hunting and having babies long before the pyramids were built.
The car trouble turned out to be the speed sensors for the transmission going out. This resulted in 300 miles of 5 mpg lurching (708 kb) all the way home Sunday. At least we made it. 870 miles, 16 hours over 3 days.