Downstream from Lexington and Waverly, the MR340 course keeps unspooling through Missouri’s midsection, and this stretch brings racers past two more towns that shaped the river long before anyone thought to paddle it for sport: Miami and Glasgow.
Miami sits near Annie and Abel Van Meter State Park (mostateparks.com), one of the more remarkable stops on the whole 340 miles even though most racers never leave the water to see it. According to Missouri State Parks, the park preserves the remnants of a Missouria Indian village that once sat at the Great Bend of the Missouri River — a bend so distinctive that French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet marked it on a map in 1673. A hand-dug earthwork known as Old Fort and several burial mounds still lie within the park boundaries, and Missouri’s American Indian Cultural Center on-site interprets that history for visitors. It’s a reminder that this river had people living carefully along its bends for centuries before it had a race course laid over the top of it.
Further downstream, Glasgow is one of the course’s official checkpoints, according to Missouri River 340 (mr340.org) — sitting around mile 226 with a hard cutoff for slower boats, since the race’s pace boat (paddlers call it “the Reaper”) pulls anyone who hasn’t reached Glasgow by the deadline. For a racer who’s been on the water since Kaw Point, reaching Glasgow under the cutoff is as much a milestone as any scenic stretch of river — it’s the point where the race stops being a question of whether you’ll finish and starts being a question of how.
Neither town gets much attention once the fleet has passed — the water keeps moving, and so does the race. But for anyone following along from our stretch of the river this week, it’s worth knowing what’s actually out there past Waverly: a 17th-century river bend the French mapped before Missouri was Missouri, and a checkpoint town where a lot of this year’s field will find out whether they’re still in the race.
Next in this series: the course continues toward Franklin Island and Cooper’s Landing, on the approach to our own stretch of the river.
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