Klondike is the last checkpoint the MR340 puts on the water. It sits at river mile 56, and below it the course runs twenty-seven more river miles to the finish at St. Charles, river mile 29.
Both of those are river miles — the Army Corps system, counted up from the river’s mouth, which is why they fall as you paddle downstream. By race distance, Klondike is mile 311.5 and the finish is mile 338.5. This is the last time the series will need to sort those two out.
That 338.5 is the whole course, and it is just subtraction: Kaw Point sits at river mile 367.5, St. Charles at 29. The checkpoints in between, in the order they come — Kaw Point 367.5, Waverly 293.5, Glasgow 226, Jefferson City 144, Hermann 98, Klondike 56, St. Charles 29. Nine parts, one stretch at a time, and this is the one with no next stretch in it.
Five hours for twenty-seven miles
Klondike’s cutoff is 4 p.m. Friday. The finish at St. Charles closes at 9 p.m. Friday. A boat that clears Klondike at the last legal minute has five hours to cover the remaining twenty-seven river miles — a little better than five miles an hour, on the fourth day, into the evening.
That schedule is not written for the front of the field. It is written for the boats still moving on Friday afternoon, and it is most of the reason the Reaper exists. Klondike is forty-two river miles below Hermann, the Gasconade Post’s town and the checkpoint before this one, and once the sweep boat clears it there is one leg left and nowhere else to be pulled off the water. A boat makes St. Charles by nine or it does not.
The oldest town on the river
St. Charles was founded in 1769 as a French trading post. It is the oldest settlement on the Missouri River and the first permanent European settlement on it — older than every town this series has run past, the start line included.
It was also Missouri’s first state capital, from 1821 to 1826, before the seat of government moved upriver to Jefferson City, which this same course passes at river mile 144. Five years of a new state were run out of a building on the St. Charles riverfront, and the building is still there, preserved as the First Missouri State Capitol State Historic Site.
That is worth holding onto while watching a paddling race end there. The finish is a working riverfront in a town that was already fifty-six years old when Rocheport was platted in 1825.
May 14, 1804
William Clark and roughly forty-two men docked at St. Charles on May 14, 1804, and stayed six days. They were waiting on Meriwether Lewis, who had business to finish in St. Louis. St. Charles was the expedition’s final outpost before it headed west — the last settled place on the list, and the only one they sat still in for the better part of a week.
Clark spent part of the wait hiring. Pierre Cruzatte and François Labiche both joined the Corps of Discovery at St. Charles, as boatmen and interpreters. Two men signed on during a six-day delay, at the last town, and went the whole way.
So the race ends at the place the expedition started up the river from. Racers put in at Kaw Point on Tuesday morning and ride 338.5 miles of current down to St. Charles in something like three and a half days. The Corps left this same riverfront going the other direction, upstream, and was gone a great deal longer than that.
Our own stretch sits inside the same record. Clark noted pictographs on the Manitou bluffs at Rocheport — river miles 182.6 to 188.0 — on June 7, 1804, twenty-four days after the expedition docked at St. Charles. The MR340 field reaches those same bluffs about a day and a half after the start, running the other way.
River mile 29
The finish is at the Lewis & Clark Boat House & Museum, 1050 S Riverside Dr., St. Charles, on the west bank. The riverfront there carries a commemoration of Lewis and Clark, set near the approximate site of the expedition’s campsite, and the boat house stands nearby.
So the last thing a racer sees of this course is a boat ramp and a museum about the people who left from it. The course measures 338.5 miles. The race is named for 340.
Who finished, in what, and in how long is a separate story, and it belongs to whoever is standing on that bank at nine o’clock Friday night.
The race ends at river mile 29. The river does not. That number means twenty-nine more miles of Missouri to run before it reaches the Mississippi, which is where the Corps of Engineers starts counting.
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