Below Hermann, the Missouri River gives MR340 racers one long run with nothing required in the middle of it. Hermann is an official checkpoint at river mile 98. The next official checkpoint is Klondike, at river mile 56. Between them lie 42 river miles, two paddlestops, and no place a boat has to stop.
Two counting systems run through this course in opposite directions, and it is worth restating which is which. River miles are the Army Corps of Engineers’ numbers, counted up from the river’s mouth, so they fall as a boat moves downstream. Race miles count up from the start at Kaw Point. Hermann is river mile 98 and race mile 269.5. Klondike is river mile 56 and race mile 311.5. Every figure below says which one it is.
Two gates, eight hours apart
Hermann’s cutoff is 8 a.m. Friday. Klondike’s is 4 p.m. Friday. A boat that clears Hermann at the last legal minute has eight hours to cover the 42 river miles to the next gate, with no checkpoint in between to measure itself against on the way.
Klondike is the last cutoff before the finish. Past it there is only St. Charles, river mile 29, race mile 338.5, and the end of a 338.5-mile race. Anyone still moving through Klondike on Friday afternoon put in at Kaw Point on Tuesday morning.
The gaps between checkpoints tighten as the course goes on. Kaw Point to Waverly is 74 river miles. Waverly to Glasgow is 67.5. Glasgow to Jefferson City is 82. Jefferson City to Hermann is 46. Hermann to Klondike is 42, and Klondike to the finish is 27. That is arithmetic off the race’s own checkpoint list, and it means the gates come closer together the further into the week a paddler gets. Hermann to Klondike and Klondike to the finish add up to 69 river miles between them, which is the last fifth of the race.
New Haven and Washington
The two paddlestops on this reach are New Haven and Washington. A paddlestop is not a checkpoint. A racer can pull in for water, food, or a ground crew and get back on the water without a cutoff clock waiting there. Some boats use both. Some use neither. The distinction is worth keeping straight this late in the week: a checkpoint is a gate with a deadline bolted to it, and a paddlestop is a place to stop.
Washington’s other business, the one it is known for, is pipes. A Dutch immigrant woodworker named Henry Tibbe began producing corn cob pipes there in 1869, and he and his son Anton built the operation into a company. Others followed him into it. By the early 1900s there were about a dozen corn cob pipe plants around Washington, in Franklin County, and the town took to calling itself the Corncob Pipe Capital of the World.
One of those plants is still running. Missouri Meerschaum marked 150 years in 2019 and produces roughly 700,000 pipes a year, shipping to customers in about 70 countries. A dozen plants became one. The one still ships.
The cob is the product. The kernels are what is left over, and they go to feed — some of them to Pinckney Bend Distillery, a craft distillery in New Haven, the other paddlestop on this stretch. A pipe plant and a distillery, working opposite ends of the same ear of corn.
Klondike, river mile 56
Klondike Park was a quarry before it was a park. The Tavern Rock Sand Company bought a portion of the property in 1898 and opened Klondike Quarry, working it for silica sand. Mixed with soda and limestone, silica sand makes glass. The quarry is where the sand came from. Glass is where it went.
St. Charles County Parks restored the site to a natural condition. It is a park now, with hiking, cycling and access to the Katy Trail — the same trail that runs through Rocheport, about 130 river miles upstream.
This paper has written that pattern before and will not belabor it here: the river made these places, industry remade them, the industry left, and what it left behind turned into something people walk on. Klondike is the tidiest example on the whole course, a sand quarry that is now a park on a rail trail.
None of which is the point on Friday afternoon. For a racer, Klondike is a checkpoint with a 4 p.m. cutoff and 27 river miles still to paddle. A boat that clears it has covered about 92 percent of the course, which is a lot, and is not the same thing as being done.
Next
Part 9 takes the course from Klondike to the finish at St. Charles, river mile 29 — the last 27 river miles.
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