Every time I explain the American Discovery Trail to people, I have to lead with this: it’s not a wilderness trail. Unlike walking in Europe, everyone’s assumption for long-distance walking in the US is that it’s passing through mountains and forests and bears, with only the most-occasional podunk village encountered for resupply. That’s understandable; the PCT and Appalachian Trails dominate the discourse. While it’s certainly an overstatement, or maybe a misstatement, to compare the American Discovery Trail and pilgrim roads in Europe, one similarity is that both quite deliberately pass in and out of villages, towns, and cities, actively seeking out places of historical and cultural importance, or at least food and shelter.
One of the most interesting parts of this, for me, is watching an entire city unfold, from the initial suburbs, to the farthest outskirts, and eventually into the heart of downtown. It’s not always the prettiest or most pleasant of walking. East Saint Louis springs to mind. Pilgrims on the Camino will often cite the industrial approach to Burgos as particularly unpleasant. Often, though, those sections are memorable and impactful. I’ve found the industrial walk out of Bilbao, for example, to be quite colorful and varied, even if it’s also filled with grimy structures in differing degrees of disrepair.
Over these two shorter days, I got to experience the walk into Des Moines, and it was an easy, mellow journey, made simpler certainly by the fact that I was splitting what would often be one stage for me into two smaller chunks. That wasn’t simply a matter of me getting lazy; I actually got to socialize with people for the first extended time in a couple weeks!
The first day began with a wet wake-up in the Chichaqua Hunting Preserve. Hunting season doesn’t begin for months yet, so the area was empty throughout my time there, making it a perfect spot for a night of free camping. Once the soggy tent was stuffed away and the pack secured, I was able to see what made this such a pristine hunting spot, as I soon passed a lake/wetlands area that was teeming with bird life, and a group of deer exploded from the reeds as I approached. With the sun just breaking the horizon in the background, it made for a marvelous morning vista to set the day in motion.
Four kilometers in, I was joined by Fritz, a friend and photojournalist from outside Des Moines, who had previously joined me in Delaware, West Virginia, and Ohio on different stages of the walk. (You can see his write-up and photos from those walks here.) We carried on southward. I had left the American Discovery Trail in Maxwell, laying out this alternative approach into Des Moines for one special reason. July 25, Saint James Day, had just passed, and with this being the first Saturday since then, the Iowa chapter of the American Pilgrims on the Camino was making their annual pilgrimage to Santiago. Santiago, Iowa. Amazingly, there’s a town of that name with a nice little church situated not too far outside of Des Moines, which makes for a perfect target for a chapter hike. So, my plan was to walk south to Santiago, meet the group there, and then join them back to Bondurant, before continuing onto Des Moines from there.
The route seemed great when laying it out on gps. In the end, it was shorter than the ADT’s approach to Des Moines. A good chunk of it remained off-road, on footpaths and rail trails. Of course, something that shows up as a trail on the mapping software can mean very different things in reality. It proved to be everything I had hoped for through most of my walk across Chichaqua, but then Fritz and I passed under the highway bridge and found ourselves in waste-high grasses, often with broken tree branches lurking just beneath the surface, trip hazards problematizing the already uneven (and obscured) footing. The faintest rumor of a footpath slithered through the grass, but it proved increasingly elusive as we pushed deeper.
The immediate consequence of wading across a sea of grass was a good, thorough soaking of our feet and lower legs. A secondary effect was that, instead of comfortably beating the Iowa pilgrims to Santiago, we arrived in their immediate aftermath, jumping headfirst into their shell ceremony–when new pilgrims are gifted a shell, the symbol of the Camino de Santiago, before setting forth on their pilgrimage. This wasn’t a problem in and of itself; it beats waiting for a half-hour, for sure. But as they welcomed us in and started asking me some questions about the ADT and pilgrimage, I felt something crawling on my leg. One tick. I snagged it and endeavored to crush it without breaking stride in the conversation. A little further on, I felt that tickle again. A second tick. The show must go on. But from that moment, I could only wait to run into the bathroom and perform a thorough inspection. First, though, we wanted to do some photos in front of the church. None of this is a criticism of the Iowa folks! If I had raised a concern, they would have immediately hit the pause button to let me take care of business. Sometimes you end up in a situation of dueling politenesses, but only mine was fully informed on this occasion, and thus it operated with lethal precision.
Eventually, the tick checks were completed. I beat Fritz three to two. Hooray?
From there, we walked with the group along the Chichaqua Valley Trail, another long, well-marked, totally paved bike track, in this case pushing northeast from Des Moine for many miles. No matter where you are, it’s easy to fall into conversation with pilgrims, and it was a pleasure to get to talk Camino for an hour, before we arrived in Bondurant. Fritz and I headed back to his and Joanne’s home in Winterset, completing the first half of this walk.
The approach to Des Moines began in earnest the following morning, as we resumed the walk on the Chichaqua Valley Trail from Bondurant with Joanne’s help on the shuttle front. The bike trail was busy on a Sunday morning, with riders rolling past us on the long, straight track. It was perfectly fine, of course, but I was happy to leave it in tiny Berwick, turning south onto the Gary Lea Wilson Trail. While still paved and oriented towards bicycles, this had one major virtue–it didn’t move in a straight line, instead curving constantly in conjunction with the meandering Fourmile Creek. That change alone made it a delight.
Our formal transition into Des Moines’s outskirts began with drinks at McDonald’s and then carried over with the introduction of auto traffic, as we joined Hubbell Avenue heading southwestward into the city. While the sidewalks were, to put it kindly, intermittent, sufficient lawns kept us off the road as we moved through neighborhoods with a substantial Hispanic/Latino population. Soon after a mandatory photo shoot with Annie and Eric, the spokescows for AE Dairy, we transitioned onto Grand Avenue, the major East-West thoroughfare cutting across Des Moines.
I had been marveling at the Iowa State Capitol from my first view of it, and proximity did not diminish that. The gilded dome glitters like a treasure, surrounded by four other domes. It sits on a hill in the town center, and from the upper steps one can see the entire Des Moines downtown area unfold, with a small collection of towers poking up further west. It’s a clean, relaxed, easy-to-navigate center, with our passage on a Sunday obviously helping with that. It’s designed with Des Moines winters in mind, as many of the central blocks are chained together with sky bridges, allowing one to cross a sizable chunk of the city center without ever being subjected to weather’s cruel hands. In one short stretch, we passed Thai, Peruvian, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Vietnamese, and Italian restaurants. And, of course, designer coffee.
The Des Moines River splits the downtown and we crossed it on the Women of Achievement pedestrian bridge, the waters churning underneath as they crossed a small dam through the center. Before long, Grand Avenue led us into the city’s Sculpture Park–a marvelous grassy area filled with art of all kinds–some majestic, some cliched, and some that was mildly unsettling. While that was our planned endpoint, we were feeling good, so we pushed on for another five kilometers, passing through some historic neighborhoods with handsome architecture, along with the city’s art museum. And with that, we were done, leaving me on the verge of joining my next rail trail, the Clive Greenbelt, where I’ll pick back up on Tuesday, after a day’s rest.
If you were going to pick a city to walk across, based on ease of mobility and comfortability, you could do a lot worse than Des Moines. I was impressed by how livable Des Moines is, with a lot of the amenities that a person in Portland might expect, without the traffic or real estate prices. The most striking thing was the abundance of greenery. Based on this 2020 city accounting, of the 57,000 acres of land in Des Moines, 17,000 of them are ensconced in tree canopy–nearly a third of it! Trees are abundant, wherever you look.
