Missouri Trip

I’m back from my trip to Missouri.  I did get to do a little hiking.  The area around Pilot Knob, Mo. has a fair number a trails at Johnson’s Shut-ins, Elephant Rocks, and Taum Sauk Mountain State Parks.  Only having one afternoon to spend I selected three trails at Johnson’s Shut-ins to check out.  I started down the Johnson’s Shut-ins access trail and turned on to the Horseshoe Overlook Loop Trail.  This loop trail is about 1.5 miles long.  The lead in trail has several switch backs, moderate level, going up the hill side and then the loop follows around the top of the hill, easy level.  The overlook of Horseshoe Valley is worth the hike.  I returned to the Johnson Shut-ins Trail and it runs about 2.25 mile with a mix of easy and moderate level terrain.  After leaving the main area of the park I drove to the parking lot on the other side of the river.  This gives you access to the Scour Trail.  The Scour Trail leads to a Shelter that overlooks the Scour that was caused by a failure in a man-made lake atop a near by mountain.  The flood that created the scour also took out a section of the Ozark Trail in this area.  When the Ozark trail was being restored they built this trail.  About a mile of the Scour Trail runs with the Ozark Trail.  Just a note the Ozark Trail includes about 350 miles of trails from St. Louis, Mo. south to Arkansas.  The Scour Trail is a loop trail of about 1.5 miles, mostly easy level hiking.  

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 25th 2010 at 16:17 and is filed under Hike Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.