A Hearty Welcome To The Loess Hills!
They ramble north and south along the Missouri River. They rise in the spring in frilly greens and arch in glorious red/orange finale in the fall. They are home to a special kind of people, gentle folk who respect and tend and love the land.
They are Iowa's best-kept secret. The Loess Hills.
Formed from wind-blown soil called "loess", the sometimes-pointed, sometimes-rounded dunes are often topped with natural prairie grass and dotted with cottonwood, bur oak, box elder, willow and the ever-encroaching cedar. The bluffs stretch carefully along the extreme western edge of the state, from Plymouth County in the north to Freemont County in the south, a wonderland of deep prairie grasses and forests.
Prints of coyote, deer and raccoon and the flight of turkeys and turkey buzzards join with yucca plants and prickly pear cacti to make the area particularly unique.
The distinctive design of the hills began 12 to 14,000 years ago when the "sea" in the Missouri River valley, formed by retreating glaciers, dried up. Fine particles blew inland to shape the hills, much as drifts are formed during a blizzard. Some of the "drifts" reached a height of 200 feet.
The rugged range of yellow-brown soil, in the central portion up to ten miles wide, rises abruptly from the flatlands on the west and melts into the rolling plains on the east. The bluffs extend 200 miles, past Sioux City and into Akron in the north, gradually tapering off into a thin band in northwestern Missouri, near Mound City.
Although loess of little depth can be found in other parts of Iowa, a similar geological structure of such magnitude can be found in only one other area of the world, northern China.
Today, the slopes of this mysterious, rockless garden are farmed by terracing and contour farming to prevent erosion, to which the nature of the soil makes it most susceptible. Cattle graze in the valleys and on the sides of the hills, too steep for the corn, beans, oats or wheat crops commonly grown in the fertile soil. Sometimes in the early morning light, the silhouette of a cow and her calf atop a lonely hill can be seen - and remembered forever.
The hills disclose their quiet mystery to any who are willing to meet them. Take an hour or two from the rush of a city day, relax and travel down winding roads rich with the grandest country in Iowa.
Carole Johnston, Author