June 18 - Loess Hills

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Woke up this morning to a thunderstorm. Drove about an hour to Harrah’s in Council Bluffs, IA.  (Not impressed with Harrah’s – a tired, uninteresting facility located on a fake “riverboat” on the Missouri River, permeated with an indelible odor of cigarette smoke.)

First walk today was at Loess Hills, a nature center about 15 miles away from Council Bluffs.  Due to lack of parking at Loess Hills, all walkers were required to take a “shuttle bus” from Harrah’s.  When we got in line we ran into Clyde and Raye from Anchorage who told us they had been waiting an hour already for a shuttle to Loess Hills. This logjam, we found out later, was caused by several factors:

1.    Flooding of the Missouri River caused I-29 to be closed so the buses had to take a longer route to Loess Hills. 

2.   Flooding also closed part of the walking trail near Harrah’s so the start of the other walk (Council Bluffs/Omaha) was relocated from Harrah’s to nearby Playland Park.  This required use of the Loess Hills buses to shuttle walkers to Playland.

3.    Lack of communication/coordination resulted in two of the four shuttle buses sitting empty and waiting at Playland instead of “shuttling” back to Harrah’s to bring more walkers to Loess Hills.

4.   The bus drivers did not know how to get to Loess Hills.  One of them drove right past the sign indicating the turnoff.

We waited 30 minutes at Harrah’s until a bus arrived.  It took our bus 40 minutes to get to Loess Hills.  (It would have taken 20 minutes if I-29 had been open.) When we arrived at Loess Hills it was still raining.  The trail was rated 3+, which is fairly difficult, so we elected to do the 5K walk, rather than the 10K.  

We started down the trail and after a few minutes we encountered a woman covered with mud and shouting, “Go back!  Don’t do this walk!”  We soon encountered a few others who were less muddy but had also turned back.

The trail reminded us of some of the ski trails at Kincaid.  There were a lot of steep ups and downs.  Unlike Kincaid, however, the soil was very clayey, and thus extremely slick. We were up high and saw some really spectacular views of the flooded Missouri River off in the distance. We proceeded very carefully and slipped a few times but did not fall.  We tried to walk on the vegetation to avoid slipping, but it was still very muddy and sklippery. One hill was covered with straw and some kind of netting, but the straw would slip on the mud when you stepped on it. 

After about 1 kilometer we came to a steep hill with no vegetation on the trail.  We made it up the hill and saw that we would have to go down an even steeper hill and then up another hill.  We could see slide marks in the mud where other people had slipped.  At this point we decided that it was time to turn around and go back.  It was not fun to be worried about falling with every step.   

By the time we got back, it had stopped raining, but a lot of other people had opted not to do this walk.  To be fair, a good number of people completed the 5K or the 10K and  claimed to have enjoyed it but many of them were covered with mud on parts of their bodies that would only get muddy if you fell.  Everyone who went any distance had very muddy shoes, and we had no choice but to track it onto the bus and through Harrah’s “lobby.”  (It took us an hour to get back to Harrah’s.)

Maybe this would have been a nice walk on a sunny day, but we did not feel safe when we went.

Rating:

Walk Route: D

Walk Documentation/Logistics: F