It’s easy to take weather forecasting for granted, especially given the difficulties with producing accurate forecasts, but at least we almost never get surprised by big storms. That wasn’t true in 1940, when an unusually warm November day turned deadly. In this episode, I tell the story of the Armistice Day Blizzard, a massive storm that plowed through the central part of the United States, shutting down cities and killing around 200 people. Thousands of people scrambled for makeshift shelter in downtown Minneapolis, while rural families took in hundreds of school children when buses got stuck in snow drifts. Duck hunters, though, were hit the hardest. The storm stranded hundreds of them in perilous conditions along the Mississippi River. Dozens died. The storm also brought out the best in many people, as strangers helped strangers, and ordinary people went to extraordinary lengths to rescue storm victims. This story is an except from my book Mississippi River Mayhem.

In the Mississippi Minute, I have a few thoughts about low water on the Mississippi, and—hint—I don’t see it as a tragedy.

Show Notes

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Transcript

Wed, Nov 15, 2023 9:10AM • 35:09

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

storm, river, wind, blizzard, boat, hunters, water, conrad, winona, cars, weather bureau, day, man, mississippi, streetcar, fell, stranded, minnesota, flew, people

SPEAKERS

Dean Klinkenberg

Dean Klinkenberg 00:00

As the storm system spun around, winds on its eastern boundary pulled warm air from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi Valley, while winds on its western side dragged in bitter cold from the Arctic. The temperature contrasts were stark. On the morning of November 11, hunters along the Mississippi left their houses wearing light jackets while a blizzard pummeled South Dakota.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:47

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg. And I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.

Dean Klinkenberg 01:19

Welcome to Episode 31 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. This time of year, mid fall in the start of hunting season, reminds me of a tragic story from the upper Mississippi about a major storm that caught people off guard when a beautiful day transformed into a really stunning tragedy. I think this is a story that more of us need to hear and know about. In my book, “Mississippi River Mayhem”, I wrote a chapter about this, The Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. So in this episode, I’m going to share that chapter that tells the story of that tragic day. If you’d like more stories like that, look for a copy of “Mississippi River Mayhem” wherever books are sold. You can even request a copy from your local library. They should be able to find it for you. As always, thanks to those of you who show me some love through Patreon. Your support keeps this podcast alive. And also thanks to those of you who have bought me a coffee. If you’d like to know how to do that, go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and from there you can buy me a coffee. So let’s get on with the episode.

Dean Klinkenberg 02:40

Weather forecasting is an inexact science. I don’t need to tell you that. Still forecasting has improved much more over the past few decades than most of us appreciate. Just ask the people who lived through the tragic Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. Until 1934, professionals at the weather bureau checked our gauges and instruments twice a day, typically at eight in the morning, then again 12 hours later. The weather experts then built forecasts, very general forecasts, based on those observations, again, twice a day. They didn’t have satellite images or computer models to work with and couldn’t send weather alerts as text messages. They recorded their observations in notebooks and distributed the forecasts via telegraph. In 1934, the weather bureau started compiling data on punch cards, and a few years later, they began distributing revised forecasts five times a day. Still, there wasn’t much of a sense of urgency about it. In 1940, the weather bureau offices stayed open no more than 15 hours a day. Which is why the weather bureau offices were closed when the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940 blew up. Because weather forecasting was so limited, few people in the Midwest paid attention when steady 45 mile an hour winds roared through the Pacific Northwest and rocked the Tacoma Narrows Bridge until it collapsed. Three days later, the storm moved over the Rocky Mountains where it bumped into another front and beginning around 6:30 in the evening, intensified like few landbay storms ever do. In the next 24 hours, the air pressure plummeted 29 millibars and the storm shifted north and raced across the continent at 35 miles an hour. Weather experts later labeled this storm “an extra tropical cyclone”. As the storm system spun around, winds on its eastern boundary pulled warm air from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi Valley, while winds on its western side dragged in bitter cold from the Arctic. The temperature contrasts were stark. On the morning of November 11, hunters along the Mississippi left their houses wearing light jackets while a blizzard pummeled South Dakota.

Dean Klinkenberg 05:02

November 11 , 1940 started as a day full of promise. In the United States, many businesses and schools were closed for the Armistice Day observance, the holiday that marked the end of World War I. Even as Americans mark the end of one war, Adolf Hitler had captured Poland and France and was moving against England. Mussolini was hell bent on occupying Greece. While many Americans feared another World War, along the upper Mississippi people were just trying to enjoy the last few days of nice weather before winter settled in. Some people took advantage of the holiday to go shopping. Others were eager to salvage something from what had been a disappointing hunting season. The fall of 1940 had been unusually mild, and because of that, the waterfowl hadn’t yet migrated south. Frustrated hunters wondered when they’d finally get the chance to get out and shoot some ducks. November 11th looked like it would be their lucky day. In the morning, temperatures reached upwards of 60 degrees along the upper Mississippi River, with the weather bureau predicting cooler weather and snow flurries later in the day. Many hunters left their home wearing only a light jacket. Light rain fell in the morning, then the weather rapidly deteriorated. A tornado touched down a mile west of Davenport, Iow. Some places got soaked with two to three inches of rain. The winds picked up. Still, the hunting was great. The best many hunters had ever seen, in fact. As the winds grew stronger birds, 1000s of them, flew just a few feet above the water. Raymond Rice remembered, “hundreds of mallards would come in flying against the wind. They could hardly move just going up and down and would land within a few feet of me completely exhausted and wouldn’t get up.” Those were some pretty easy pickins. Harold Hettifk recalled, “Shooting got good. Hunters were going for their limits”, which were big limits in those days. A lot of hunters couldn’t remember a time when they’d seen so many birds. 12 year old Bill Hawes was hunting with his father and a friend near Winona, Minnesota. He remembered, “about noon it looked like the weather was clearing with some blue sky showing the ducks were flocking into our decoys now and the shooting was terrific.” Hunters, lost in the moment, didn’t notice how much the winds were picking up. It would be a fatal mistake for many. Temperatures plummeted and rain turned to sleet. Then snow. Heavy snow fell in parts of western Minnesota and Iowa. Visibility dropped. Wind gusts stirred up massive waves in the river. The sky turns an eerie orange. Bill Hawes remembered clearly when the fun ended. He said, “the wind came out of the northwest and a temperature dropped like a stone. A flock of blue bills came over me and I found my gun was frozen up.” The shallow skiffs the hunters used to navigate the river were no match for the wind and waves. The window of opportunity to get off the river safely was quickly closing. All of a sudden Dad said, “Grab the decoys we’re getting out of here”, Jack Meggers recalled, “but we were throwing an awful lot of ammunition into the air and none of us wanted to quit. The sky was just full of ducks. Finally Dad said grab the decoys now or leaving without them. That’s when we began to see how bad it was getting. Visibility had dropped to just a few feet. It was getting worse as the snow fell heavier. By the time we finally made it to the shoreline”, Meggers said, “you couldn’t even see the shoreline.” Hawes and his father also caught a break, he wrote, “fortunately we were going exactly with the wind. I used an oar as a rudder and merely steered the boat the half mile to our landing. By the time we got there, it was dark and only 2pm.” Even though they made it safely back to shore, Hawes still suffered frostbite on his face and hands. Meggers and Hawes were among the lucky ones. Duck hunters by the hundreds lost their gear and boats as winds up to 80 miles an hour raced across the river and down shallow backwater channels. Waves rose as high as 15 feet on the Mississippi. Many hunters scrambled to create makeshift shelters to stay alive.

Dean Klinkenberg 09:37

In the Twin Cities meanwhile, ice accumulated before the snow fell. Traveling around town became virtually impossible. Cars stalled and people abandoned them in the street. Street cars and buses crept from stop to stop sometimes taking an hour to cover a single block. Hamilton Healed remembered, “Cars were lined up for blocks And the only time when we moved on the street car at all, was when motormen from cars behind came up with switch rods and scraped the ice from the rails.” The slow pace of travel gave Healed time to hop off the streetcar to call home and to buy some sandwiches. He finally walked into his house at six in the morning, over 13 hours after leaving downtown Minneapolis. Five year old Barbara McKernan and her six year old brother had been visiting an uncle and aunt in south Minneapolis when they set out with their uncle to get home to St. Paul. His car got stuck in snow so they huddled in a doorway on Lake Street as they waited for a streetcar to arrive. When one finally showed up, people crowded shoulder to shoulder. Still, the streetcar crept forward. “I wonder now how it was possible”, she said, “how could it have kept on going as fast as it did. The tracks must have been covered over and over with blowing snow.” Their uncle gripped their hands tightly on the streetcar. When they reached their stop in St. Paul, they huddled close together and sang as they walked the last mile to their home. She said, “I remember uncle buttoning us up as best he could and holding our hands. One kid on each side, the other hand in our pocket.” Their uncle, George Guise got them safely home, then turned around and went back to his job in Minneapolis. He was a city desk editor for the Minneapolis Tribune. Skipping work wasn’t an option for most people, including Bob Enerson. He said, “the job was very important to me because we were just pulling out of the depression and during it, I had been laid off three or four times from the Honeywell factory.” Gayle Lofdahl’s father, Clifford, worked at Honeywell in downtown Minneapolis. He stayed for his entire shift even as visibility neared zero. “When I asked him if he left work early”, she wrote, “He said that the economy was still emerging from the depression and workers just didn’t leave work early for a trivial reason like a blizzard”.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:06

46 year old Ida Rehbein left home when the weather was still decent, so she didn’t see a need to layer up. As she walked from her home to her job in downtown St. Paul the wind turned bitterly cold and battered her relentlessly. An alert storekeeper saw her staggering down the street and pulled her inside which probably saved her life.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:25

The storm stranded thousands of people in the Twin Cities. The John W. Thomas & Company department store booked several rooms at the Radisson Hotel for its employees. It also set up overnight shelter on two of the stores floors to house people stranded by the storm. Around town people took shelter wherever they could. The lobby of the Radisson Hotel was according to Olive Olsen Early was “complete chaos”, she said, “everything available on which someone could sit or lean was in use. I had never been involved in such confusion.” The Scott Motor Company took in 20 people stranded by the storm, including a family with four children. The unexpected guests slept on chairs and benches and even inside a couple of cars and nearby restaurant provided food for them. They would all be in for a long night.

Dean Klinkenberg 13:18

The storm brought life to a standstill. In Minneapolis, 175 street cars went out of service. The street car company declared it quote “had worked for any man able to swing a pick and a shovel.” They had pressed every available plow into service to clear streetcar tracks but it wasn’t enough. Cars on the roads had compacted the slush, so the tracks had to be cleared by hand. Nearly half the long distance phone lines out of Minneapolis were down and power went out around town. Repair crews had to fight through tremendous snowdrifts and around abandoned cars to reach downed lines. Newspapers went undelivered. Nearly every road in the state was impassable and plows couldn’t get out to clear them until visibility improved. Even the post office would have to skip delivery for a couple of days in some places because mail carriers couldn’t get through. The Milwaukee railroads eastbound Olympian train that connected Seattle with Chicago got stuck just east of Granite Falls, Minnesota winter ran into a massive quarter mile long snowdrift. Passengers watched as the wind blew snow up toward the top of the rail cars they were sitting in. They spent the night stuck on board then transferred to another train on Tuesday to continue their journey. The storm didn’t paralyze everyone though. Hormel’s team of intrepid marketers continued undeterred. One advertisement boasted, quote, “many of you people were greatly surprised to find Spam men and girls trudging around in the blustering snowstorm.” Throughout the night, they approached people at random and asked if they had a Spam key which was a can opener basically, and a container to the popular can meant the lucky folks who said yes got a crisp new $2 bill, including Mrs. Agnes Fewel who said, quote, “I use Spam for sandwiches for my two sons I like it creamed and also in salads.”

Dean Klinkenberg 15:20

No one came by to help the hunters stranded along the Mississippi River, though, at least not during the night. The storm trapped hundreds on islands and backwater channels. Some huddled under overturned boats for shelters, while others crawled next to piles of driftwood or downed trees. They burned what they could just to stay warm, including pieces of their shattered boats. Survival depended on staying dry. “Anyone who went out that day fell in the water or got wet somehow, they were done” recalled Oscar Gerth, who was 24 years old at the time of the blizzard. Gunner Miller had been hunting near Winona when the storm blew in. He and three buddies started a fire with quote, “a shotgun blast into gasoline on wood.” They stayed warm by burning two dozen duck decoys they had chopped up. They were afraid to walk more than a few steps from the makeshift camp for fear of getting lost in the blinding snow. In the morning, they found two men frozen to death under a boat just 60 feet away. The storms reach extended well beyond the Mississippi Valley. On the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, high winds sank three ships killing 58 people.

Dean Klinkenberg 16:34

Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler Guide Books for people who want to get to know the river better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series set in places along the Mississippi. Read those books to find out how many different ways my protagonist Frank Dodge can get into trouble. My newest book “Mississippi River Mayhem” details some of the disasters and tragedies that happened along Old Man River. Find any of them wherever books are sold.

Dean Klinkenberg 17:10

As the snow stopped falling, and the winds slowly died down, bitter cold settled in. In the Twin Cities temperatures fell into the single digits which complicated efforts to reopen streets and businesses. 12 street cars got stuck on Hennepin Avenue neatly lined up in a row. Abandoned cars littered city streets making life difficult for plow drivers trying to clear them. A few buildings burned to the ground when snowdrifts blocked the paths of fire trucks. Cars couldn’t start because the wind had blown snow under the hoods and frozen hoses and engines. People looking for missing family members overwhelmed police, hospitals and morgues with phone calls. Estelle Smith was about to give birth but couldn’t get to a hospital on her own. Two police officers formed a makeshift chair by clasping their hands together, then carried her from her house to a police car. A grueling two block walk in the middle of the night through deep snow. The trip from her house to the hospital took 95 minutes. Less than half an hour after arriving, she welcomed a baby daughter into the world.

Dean Klinkenberg 18:21

Some good news filtered through with the bad. The Great Northern Railroad’s Empire Builder train finally made it to Minneapolis, just 27 hours behind schedule. The train had gotten stuck about 14 miles east of Willmar, Minnesota after hitting a big snow drift. Efforts to clear the tracks were complicated by strong winds that blew snow right back onto the tracks after it had been removed. Passengers passed the time by playing cards, reading and chatting. Residents of small towns throughout the region continued to shelter and feed stranded people. Some farm families even took in dozens of schoolchildren after their buses had run off the road. One farm family sheltered 20 school kids for three days. As the sun rose along the Mississippi River, rescue teams began frantic efforts to locate people stranded by the storm. One team found and rescued 17 men who had survived the night. Game wardens rescued dozens of hunters near Winona. Abe Kuhns, a bachelor farmer on Prairie Island near Red Wing Minnesota, and a hulking six foot four feet tall, got word that some hunters were stranded on an island near his home. He pushed off in his rowboat with a kerosene lamp and quickly discovered that he had to lie down as he rode to keep the boat from capsizing. He found four stranded hunters and got each one back to safety, even though he could only carry one at a time in his boat. When T.J. Sasser and hunting buddy realized how much the winds had kicked up, they loaded up their rowboat and pushed off. He said, “we knew our only chance was to ride with the waves downstream and edge to the Minnesota shore. Within two minutes my mittens had frozen to the oars. We were both sheathed in sleet. I was completely blinded by the storm and followed Carl’s directions, desperately trying to keep the boat from swinging broadside to the waves.” They got within 100 feet of the shore when a wind gust ripped the oars from Sasser’s hands and swamped the boat. He continued with his story, “right then the miracle occurred. what looked like a mountain of water literally hurled us at the shore. And as the boat went down, we were able to stumble in through breast deep water.” Sasser and his friend made it to a farmhouse where they thawed out.

Dean Klinkenberg 20:47

Harold Hettrick found an inventive way to get to safety. He tied all his gear inside his boat, then flipped it over and quote, “held on underneath in this air pocket, and waded out to deeper water towards shore where the wind picked up the boat and him and moved him to shore.” Once on land, a couple of people grabbed his boat and got quite a shock when they flipped it over and found a man underneath. One of his rescuers remembered quote, “he was literally a frozen ice stick. We couldn’t bend him to walk because his clothes were stiff.” They got him to a nearby house where he warmed up next to the stove.

Dean Klinkenberg 21:26

Not every effort worked out so well though. Rescuers bought a 38 year old Herbert Junneman, a barber from Robuchon, Minnesota, hanging on to the sides of a boat that had overturned before they could reach him though, Junneman’s strength gave out and he slipped under the water and drowned. Another team went in search of two missing St. Paul residents, Carl Iverson and Melville Roberts, who had been hunting on the Mississippi near Red Wing. They weren’t successful, but a local farmer Theodore Samuelson found them a short time later, Iverson was already dead, and Roberts was so close to death that he asked to stay where he was. I might as well die where I am, Roberts told Samuelson. He died shortly after that.

Dean Klinkenberg 22:18

Not far away from where Jack Meggers had been hunting, a father and his two sons got stranded on an island. The oldest son an athlete told his younger brother to jump up and down to stay warm. Every time the younger brother stopped jumping, the older brother punched him. This helped the younger brother stay motivated to keep jumping through the night. When rescuers found them the next day, the younger brother’s legs were frozen solid below his knees. He lost both legs, but he survived. His father and older brother didn’t make it through the night however. Winonians, Herman Pagel and Fred Nytes had probably taken a similar approach to surviving, although it hadn’t been enough to save them. When rescuers found the bodies, their hands were covered in blood and their faces were black and blue. Bodies of many of the victims were stored temporarily in Winona’s bus garage. Most were frozen so solid that authorities had to wait for the bodies to fall before they can search their pockets for identification.

Dean Klinkenberg 23:23

Rescue teams used every available method to search the area. Pilot Max Conrad flew his Piper Cub over the Mississippi River near Winona. His plane wasn’t designed to run in high winds. So just getting out of a hangar and into the air on November 12 was a feat. He said it quote, “took 10 people five hanging on each wing to hold the plane down before the wind caught it and it took off literally blown backwards.” The wind speeds were still dangerously high. The plane plotted along at just 20 to 30 miles per hour when it flew into a headwind. With a tailwind though the plane designed to max out at 75 miles per hour, topped out at 130. When Conrad spotted a stranded hunter he circled over them to guide rescue teams. Sometimes he dropped the bucket with supplies that included tins of food, matches and whiskey. Other times he’d fly low and signal the stranded men to follow him. Then he’d lead them to a spot where rescue teams couldn’t get to them. He flew from sunrise to 10 at night on the first day after the blizzard, then got up the next morning and did it all over again. During one flight on that first day, he passed over an area where he spotted a man who was standing in icy water up to his waist. The man waved then fell over. I flew back again Conrad recounted real low and this time I saw him plainly in the ice and right behind him a boat under the ice and next to it a body. Then when I was over him, I saw another body and when I reached the willows there was another man hanging onto the lower branches of one of them. Conrad had spotted Carl Tarras, his sons, Gerald and Raymond and Bill Wernecke. 17 year old Gerald was the one who had waved at Conrad’s plane. He was the only one in the group who survived. Later, he recounted what the group had done to try to stay alive. He, Wernecke, was cold. We boxed each other to keep warm. Bill died, I was holding him. After Wernecke died, the three survivors waded through a patch of willows, which is where they were when Conrad spotted them. Journalist Gordon MacQuarrie talked with Tarras while he was recovering in the hospital. MacQuarrie wrote, “he Terrace has not yet come to the full realization of what has happened, for grief is sometimes far in the wake of catastrophe.” Conrad’s efforts were heroic and foreshadowed what became a stellar career as a pilot. He would later set multiple speed and distance records including and around the world flight in 1961. That was then the fastest ever completed. Winona named the airport for him. Conrad wasn’t the only person who responded to heroically to the monster storm, however.

Dean Klinkenberg 26:22

People throughout the Midwest responded with remarkable ingenuity, generosity and persistence. Rural residents sheltered strangers. Thousands of people helped dig out cars and trains and when the work still needed to get done. City residents, the Minneapolis Star Journal reported, quote “struggled to work on the few street cars and buses that were operating, while others hiked, drove or arrived in the loop on skis. It takes an old fashioned blizzard to bring out the unbeatable spirit of Minnesotans”, the same newspaper observed. Total strangers joined forces to share the last available rooms. An oldster in an expensive fur coat rejoiced that he’d found a cot in a Turkish bath. Office girls sat up all night and crowded hotel lobbies. All without one word of complaint.

Dean Klinkenberg 27:14

The blizzard remains one of the most disruptive in the history of the Upper Mississippi Valley. The storm buried some places under as much as 22 inches of snow. In the Twin Cities, the wind blew snow into drifts that average 10 feet high but got as tall as 26 feet. Air pressure for the levels more typical of a hurricane than Midwestern storm. Weather spokesperson William M Labovich noted that the blizzards aftermath wasn’t all bad, as the region needed the moisture after a dry fall. Labovich was also directly affected by the storm. It closed all the roads near his house, so he had to walk three miles to get to work. Gradually, the region’s transportation system got back up and running. Railroad and airplane services came back first. Local buses and streetcars gradually resumed service. Reopening Minnesota’s 11,350 miles of roads took longer. The state employed over 500 plows and 4000 so called blizzard busters, the plow drivers plus 1000s of men with shovels, many of whom worked 26 hours without a break. Within 48 hours, they had all of those roads open again, although some were just a single lane wide. The highway clearing effort cost the state an estimated $260,000 which would be about $5 million today. The storm killed between 150 and 200 people. Dozens of duck hunters died and hundreds more suffered frostbite. Livestock were also hit hard. The storm killed a million turkeys just three weeks before the Thanksgiving holidays. The turkeys were unlucky. Their feathers became waterlogged from the heavier rain that fell at the front end of the storm. When temperatures plummeted, they froze. “Many birds I saw were so packed with ice they were as big around as barrels”,, observed William A Billings, professor at the University of Minnesota and an expert in the turkey economy. Pheasants also suffered high mortality rates, although there was a sliver of good news there too. Wayne Miller’s neighbors collected frozen pheasants they had found near their homes in Emmet County, Iowa. Miller stacked the pheasants in the hayloft of the family barn. It turned out that most of the pheasants were not in fact dead. As their bodies warmed, they flew around inside the barn, much to the surprise of Miller. Quote, “It was quite a sight when all those pheasants flew out of the barn.”

Dean Klinkenberg 29:55

The Armistice Day Blizzard brought an end to Iowa’s apple industry. Farmers replaced fields of neatly planted rows of Red Delicious and Jonathan’s with corn and soybeans. The big storm also permanently changed weather forecasting. Before the storm, residents of the Upper Mississippi Valley got their forecasts from the Weather Bureau’s Chicago office which closed at night. After the storm, the Chicago office remained staffed 24 hours a day, and local meteorologists in the Twin Cities could issue their own forecasts. One big thing didn’t change though. The reality that we judge the severity of storms primarily in terms of how they affect us. “There is nothing to indicate that the weather gets any worse or any better by and large from century to century,” wrote the editorial board of the Minneapolis Star Journal. The fact is that we judge blizzard and flood and hurricane not by their ferocity, but by the extent to which man gets in their way, and is caught unprepared to cope with them. Few people were prepared for a storm as great as the Armistice Day Blizzard in 1940. But given the advances in modern weather forecasting, no such storm would likely sneak up on us today.

Dean Klinkenberg 31:27

And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. While low water on the Mississippi has been all over the news again this fall for the second year in a row. We’ve been running through a period of drought here for a little bit. And it’s making life a little difficult for people that operate barges and are trying to ship corn and soybeans to the international market. Just a little perspective, there was a period during the 1930s when the Mississippi stayed low for several years in a row and the country went through severe drought. So these are natural variations in the river they happen from time to time. And at points to in one way the fragility of river shipping anyway, you’re highly dependent on the moods of the rivers and how much rain you’re getting. So during floods, barges can’t move, during periods of low water barges are hampered. Meanwhile, trains continue to run. But low water also has some benefits for plant and animal life along the river. For example, bald cypress and tupelo trees need a period of drying out for their first seeds to take root and grow. So you’ll often see clusters of bald cypress and water tupelo that are about the same height, since they all kind of took root in grew during the same period of low water. Periods of low water can also expose pieces of the river’s bottom. Back water channels will turn into bridges between islands and the mainland. Wide sandbars open up especially along the lower Mississippi. Gravel bars emerge where one can find fossils and lithified mud, which is these little chunks of millennia old clumps of dirt that have hardened into stone. These are great times to walk on the bottom of the river without needing any scuba gear and appreciate just how variable the river bottom can be. How wavy it is. The dunes and changes in elevation, but also the changes in composition of what’s on the bottom of the river. I like to walk the dry channel between between Duck Island and the mainland and Columbia Bottom conservation area north of St. Louis. But maybe you have your favorite spots to walk on the bottom of the river. When the river is low like this, that also exposes wind dams, those structures built by the Corps of Engineers to focus the current and try to maintain a navigation channel. So when you drive along the river at a time like this, it’s very easy to see just how much we have altered the river. So what are some of your favorite ways to enjoy the Mississippi during periods of low water? Drop me a note at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/contact. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you help keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler Guide Books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series at certain places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time.