Risking the Steamboat Trace

I decided to risk the Steamboat Trace, despite knowing that it had been closed two years before due to the 2019 flood (a flood that’s name was invoked in every part of the trail since I reached the Mississippi). If an ATV could make it down it, as I was told, then I surely could on a bike. I just needed to make it to Nebraska City.

I was proud of myself for taking the risk. For the most part it panned out wonderfully. The official entrance was blocked off but the road got close enough to it that I could enter up the street. It was mostly flat, except for the recesses in the gravel where water once flowed. It was overgrown, so my calves got ripped up by plant life, but I whizzed down the trail, only slowing in places the gravel was too chunky since the rain had washed the finer particles away. When I got to the end of the first stint, I found myself trapped behind a barrier flagged with no trespassing signs. Well…there hadn’t been any signs like that when I entered it… I wriggled myself and my bike through the wire mesh and entered the town of Peru. I was a bit more sheepish now about continuing on the trail, since the signs said to keep out, so I started to try to take the road out of town, only to find it closed. I was frustrated. My only alternative was to take an extremely roundabout route back the way I came a fair bit and considerably further west before I could get to Nebraska City. I decided to grab lunch at the local bar and contemplate what I was going to do. I covertly asked the bartender what the deal with the Trace was. It wasn’t boarded. Up in the direction of Nebraska City, was it open? He too had taken an ATV down it. He said it was rideable, they were planning to re-open it in August, but the path to Brownsville was being abandoned due to the cost versus the number of people who used it.

I was relieved and got back on the Trace. There was a whole lot of jostling, hard bumps into divots and holes in the trail the entire way, and I was beginning to feel like my bags were weighing me down more than they should. When I emerged I had to take a series of gravel roads to a main road. I wanted to go to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center before I went to a hotel, assuming the Friday of a holiday weekend, they were likely already booked up.

I got back to paved road, to my great relief, but the drag had become too much. I didn’t think I could keep going. I stopped multiple times and got off my bike to see what the heck was happening. It felt like someone was holding onto my rear wheel. I had looked at it more than once, assuming that my fender was dragging against the wheel, since I’d experienced that before. Nope, the fender was fine. Finally, half way up a hill I decided I couldn’t keep going like this. I had to walk my bike. I decided that before I resorted to walking my bike that many miles, I’d take off all of my gear and get a better look at things. This was the right call. I saw the problem immediately. My bike rack broke! The rack had three prongs that met together above my axel to form a triangle, and one of them was no longer attached to the other two. I broke out my zip ties, macguivered the thing back together and kept going.

It was another few miles on blindingly white gravel roads in burning heat before I got to the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. Outside there was a scale model of the keelboat and I was allowed to walk inside. They knew exactly how to win my heart here. Right inside the door, on the bow of another keelboat replica, was a fiberglass statue of Seaman. There was a wide range of kid friendly exhibits including a video game where you used a rudder on that same display keelboat to avoid hazards in the river. That was a lot of fun and very difficult. There were exhibits on the medicine used on the expedition, as well as on the specimens Lewis and Clark sent back. Downstairs there was a huge map of the expedition, and I stopped and chatted with a few folks who were asking questions to themselves about how the expedition got through the mountains. I interjected and gave them the answer which led to a conversation about my bike trip.

There was a humorous interactive display on how difficult it was for the expedition to catch a prairie dog, where you pumped a lever to “pour water” into a 2D prairie dog hole to display exactly how much water you would need to find success. All of this was a joy, but the museum also had short hiking paths through the woods, one with a Missouri River overlook, another with a replica of the earth lodges the Mandans lived in in North Dakota, where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1804-1805. It was open to go inside, and there was a lot of explanation of what certain spaces were used for and why. On the way out I noticed a…work in progress, evidently a réincarnent group tried to build a replica of Fort Mandan here, but it looked like they gave up. Then, finally I saw a tiny grave marker for Pee-Dee the prairie dog. I went back inside to ask about the marker. Evidently the center had taken in a prairie dog that was injured and beyond rehabilitation. The woman at the desk told me prairie dogs usually only live a few years in the wild. This one lived to be nine years old!

I stayed at a hotel that night. The next day I would reach Council Bluffs, IA, right across the river from Omaha.