If you’ve ridden the Katy Trail downstream from Rocheport toward Columbia, you’ve probably stopped at Cooper’s Landing — the little cluster of docks, string lights, and river noise wedged onto a sliver of land between the trail and the Missouri River near Easley. For 30-plus years it’s been the closest thing our stretch of the river has to a town square: a bait shop turned marina, campground, music venue, and rest stop for everyone from Katy Trail cyclists to MR340 paddlers grinding through the night.
This fall, it’s doing that job out of a brand-new building.
Owner Richard King, who took over Cooper’s Landing from its previous owners in the late 2010s, spent three years working through county approval before construction on a full rebuild finally broke ground in 2025. The project tore down the old, flood-worn main building and replaced it with a two-story structure built to survive the water instead of dreading it — concrete, glass, and steel construction, with foundation “water stops” designed to keep the river out, and removable 14-foot aluminum floodgate panels stored on-site that can be locked around the building’s openings when the water rises. Architect Stephen Bourgeois put it plainly to the Columbia Missourian: “It’s a building that’s really not supposed to be there” — sitting, as it does, inside the 100-year floodplain.
It’s a hard-earned design. Cooper’s Landing has flooded and closed for repairs repeatedly over the past decade, including a flood that hit just days after King took the place over. He told the Missourian the rebuild “was probably one of the most challenging things I’ve ever been involved in,” but that the wait was worth it: “We’re so ready to get in that new building.”
Construction wrapped after about ten months, and the new building opened this year with indoor restrooms and showers, an expanded general store, a full-service bar, an upstairs event space, and a second-floor deck looking out over the water — a step up from the plywood-and-plastic-sheeting version longtime visitors remember. According to Inside Columbia, King says the point of all of it was never to change what Cooper’s Landing is: “We don’t want to change anything we’re doing. We’re always going to keep supporting local food vendors, small businesses, artists and musicians.” Of the new building’s odds against the next flood, he’s confident: “the river can’t take this away.”
For Rocheport-area folks, Cooper’s Landing has always mattered as a downstream landmark — a paddling and pedaling destination, and the last real supply stop before Katy Trail riders or river paddlers reach Columbia. It’s also a fixture of race week every summer, when MR340 paddlers pull in for a break roughly two-thirds of the way through their 340-mile grind to St. Charles.
Fall programming is already back underway at the rebuilt site, including a Conservation Expo this September and the Biscuits, Beats & Brews food-and-music event moving there in October, per Inside Columbia. If you haven’t pedaled down since the rebuild, it’s worth the ride.
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