Rocheport has spent the last couple of decades turning up on lists of Missouri’s best small towns, and the Katy Trail is most of the reason why. Budget Travel named it one of America’s Coolest Small Towns; Southern Living has called it one of its Best Tiny Towns; and Missouri Life ranked it fourth among the state’s prettiest small towns in 2017. A quiet river village of a few hundred people, it got a second life when the rail bed became a trail and the cyclists and walkers started coming through.
The trail enters Rocheport at mile marker 178.3, at the foot of the limestone bluffs above the Missouri River. Less than half a mile west, near mile marker 178.7, is the only tunnel on the whole 240-mile trail: a 243-foot bore cut through solid rock for the MKT railroad, blasted through in 1892 and finished in 1893. It opens onto a river view that has landed in a lot of travel photography over the years.
At the trailhead, at 700 First Street, is Meriwether Cafe & Bike Shop. It rents bikes by the hour or the day and serves coffee and scratch-made food, and it’s the obvious first or last stop of any ride out of town. From the trailhead, a spur climbs to the blufftop at Les Bourgeois Vineyards, steep in a couple of spots but worth it for the A-Frame and its view over the river. Ride east from town instead and the trail runs toward McBaine and, farther on, Hartsburg, roughly 25 miles of bluffs, bottomland, and the occasional bald eagle over the water.
Rocheport sits in the middle of all of it, at mile 178.3, with a handful of bed-and-breakfasts, a general store that serves meals and hosts live music on weekends, and the trail running right through the center of town. For a place this size, that’s a lot of reasons to stop.