Downstream from Glasgow, the Missouri keeps unspooling toward home — and this stretch is the one where the MR340 course finally starts feeling like ours.
Glasgow sits at river mile 226, one of the race’s official checkpoints, with a hard cutoff that pulls slower boats off the water. From there, the next fixed point on the course is Franklin Island, at river mile 195.2 — a paddlestop and “Reaper Pace” checkpoint, meaning the sweep boat is watching the clock here too. That’s roughly 31 river miles of mostly quiet water: sandbars, bottomland timber, and not much else between the two towns.
Franklin Island isn’t really an island anymore, and that’s most of its story. The Missouri River once cut a channel along the north edge of the property, splitting it off from the rest of Howard County. A flood-control levee closed that channel for good in 1952, and the Missouri Department of Conservation bought the land in 1978 — 1,626 acres now managed as bottomland timber, permanent grass on the levees, and a couple hundred acres of crop fields left partly unharvested for wildlife, according to MDC’s area page. If you’re driving rather than paddling, it’s easy to find: two miles north of Boonville on Highway 40, or two miles east of New Franklin on the same road.
The area’s human history runs deeper than the levee. French trappers named nearby Bonne Femme Creek, and the Lewis and Clark expedition camped near where it meets the river — one more entry in the long list of things this stretch has in common with the rest of the corridor. Early settlers, many of them tobacco farmers from Virginia and Kentucky, came up the river to land like this before the channel was narrowed and straightened and the levees went in for good.
For MR340 racers, Franklin Island is a paddlestop, not a required checkpoint stop — boats can resupply there if they need to, but the real deadline is at the Reaper’s pace. For the rest of us, it’s a working conservation area: fishing for catfish, crappie, and black bass, deer and turkey hunting in season, and a handful of no-frills campsites, open 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily per MDC.
From Franklin Island, the course keeps sliding downstream past Boonville and into our own stretch at Rocheport — river miles 182.6 to 188.0 — before reaching Cooper’s Landing at river mile 170. That one’s next.
Correction, July 31, 2026: An earlier version of this article called Cooper’s Landing “the last stop before the river reaches our own stretch at Rocheport.” The order is reversed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers puts Rocheport at river miles 182.6 to 188.0 and Cooper’s Landing at river mile 170, and river miles are counted up from the river’s mouth — so they fall as you paddle downstream. Racers pass Rocheport roughly fifteen miles before they reach Cooper’s Landing. The closing paragraph has been corrected.
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