Day 25 – St. Louis to Weldon Spring, MO

Today was my first full day of walking in Missouri, bringing me through miles more of St. Louis sprawl before finally leading me across the Missouri River and onto the Katy Trail. I didn’t appreciate prior to departing how much of this trip, through these stages at least, would be defined by America’s great rivers, but most days have felt the presence of the Ohio, Mississippi, or now Missouri.

The Katy Trail (or its Rock Creek Trail sibling) will be my constant companion over the next week, eventually delivering me to the doorstep of Kansas. My initial reactions are mixed. Good! The Katy, a rails-to-trails conversion project, is pretty much entirely offroad, with excellent footing on hard-packed, crushed gravel. Bad! As it’s a former rail line, there are long, long stretches of straight-line, flat, almost feature-less vistas. I equivocate because, of course, there are always nice things to see, but they’re mostly small and fleeting, and the dominant panoramas prevail. Good! While I haven’t actually hit them yet, the route leads through a number of small towns, rejuvenated by the Katy traffic. They seem quite welcoming, at least based on what I’ve read. Potentially very bad! Wow, there are a lot of current section closures in effect, and that was before tonight’s non-tornado flooding. With some full walking days mapped out over the next week, based on a close adherence to the Katy, a couple of significant detours could make for some painful days.

The forecast, at least, looks clear enough for the next few days, but that may just be an exercise in false confidence. There was little in today’s forecast to indicate sirens would be blaring to announce a tornado warning this afternoon, and while that’s an order of magnitude higher than the run-of-the-mill thunderstorms I’ve encountered, it’s hardly unprecedented. Serious storms seem to pop out of nowhere here, making it more challenging to plan ahead (outside of just assuming there will be something blowing through to mess everything up every afternoon/evening, which frankly has been a fairly safe bet).

I’m staying tonight in Weldon Spring, which seemed like a nice, scenic area on the map.  There’s a golf course, a wetland, and lots of trails. As I arrived this afternoon, I started taking a closer look at the area and discovered something that caught my attention: “Nuclear Waste Adventure Trail and Museum. I enjoyed this google review: “Anyone willing to go here should have they’re (sic) head checked….what part of Nuclear waste pit do you not understand? You want to irradiate your self? fine, the world could use a few less idiots I guess.”

Reading through the place’s history, it originally sold 17,000 acres to the US Army to build the largest explosives factory in America. After WW2 ended, the factory became irrelevant and was shut down, with most of the land sold off. All of it, that is, except for 2000 acres, which became home to a uranium plant, producing yellow cake uranium ore until 1966. For the next two decades, it basically became a landscaping and maintenance site, with caretakers mowing the lawn, repairing fences, and killing three-eyed fish. Beginning in the late 1980s, though, the DOE worked to “remediate” the land, culminating in the construction of a 41-acre structure to contain the waste, surrounded by the flourishing natural area that I (and many others) am walking through. The DOE’s fact sheet raves that, “The cleanup and ecological restoration has made the Weldon Spring site home to a thriving community of prairie plants and wildlife in the planted, 150-acre Howell Prairie.”

Indeed, everything around here exudes a very healthy shade of green!