The Katy Trail, Rails to River

The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, universally called the Katy, ran a line through the Missouri River valley that connected Kansas City to St. Louis and beyond. For generations the Katy carried grain and livestock and passengers through country that most travelers never saw from any other angle.

The railroad shut down its Missouri River corridor in the nineteen eighties, and the right-of-way was converted into a rail-to-trail path that is now one of the longest developed rail trails in the United States. The Katy Trail stretches about two hundred forty miles, following the Missouri River from near St. Charles in the east to Clinton in the west.

A substantial section of it runs through Boone County, and the trail passes through a landscape that feels unlike most of Missouri. The river bluffs rise steeply on the north side. The bottomlands spread wide and flat.

In spring the willows go green along the water's edge while the uplands are still brown. In fall the cottonwoods turn gold and the light comes low across the river in the afternoons. The Katy Trail passes through the town of Rocheport, about twelve miles west of Columbia, a nineteenth-century river town that survived the railroad era and the automobile era and now serves as one of the trail's most popular access points.

Rocheport has a tunnel, cut through a limestone bluff, that cyclists and hikers pass through with the particular pleasure of going from sunlight into cool darkness and back into sunlight again. Lewis and Clark traveled this stretch of the Missouri River in June of eighteen hundred four, moving upriver through the same bluffs and bottomlands. The journal entries describe the countryside with a precision that still reads clearly against the landscape the trail crosses today.