Two brothers, two nephews and I enjoyed a beautiful afternoon on the Eleven Point River last Thursday. We put in at Whitten and floated to Riverton, with a stop at the lovely Boze Mill Spring.

Water was a little higher than normal for this time of year and a stiff wind blowing upstream made it a little hard to get started. We eventually learned how to travel with the current and found the going easier.

It was the first time in a canoe for young James Styron, who sighted a muskrat, several turtles and herons and a kingfisher.

We enjoyed getting acquainted with Mike and Wendy Jones, friendly proprietors of Hufstedler’s Canoe Rental at Riverton.

More photos from the float trip are on the Photo Gallery section of this site.

Emery Styron
Traveler publisher

The point I was trying to make and many missed is that we HAVE gun control all over the country and it is constitutional. Some of it is quite good, in fact. You can’t call the requirement for hunter education in hunting anything but gun control. And it is certainly a good thing.

We are going to have more gun control legislation as time passes. We’d best be in a position to have some influence in the writing of those laws. We won’t if we splinter over silly things like personal opinion on the appearance of some firearms. Nor if we paint a broad segment of society as being our arch enemies.

One letter writer pegged me in that regard. Indeed, I painted the whole NRA as being radical. That was wrong. I guess it is because the people who snipe at me for having a more “liberal” view always seem to point out that they are NRA members as if they represent the whole organization. 

Bob Todd, Traveler editor

Thunderbird Petroglyph, Washington State Park

It’s been an interesting week in Traveler Country.

I camped two nights in Washington State Park on the Big River between De Soto and Potosi and pulled a major camping boner at Babler State Park near Wildwood.

You wouldn’t realize driving down Missouri 21 what a vast, rugged jewel Washington State Park is. It has more than 2,100 acres of high ridges and deep valleys, bordering on the Big River. Native American petroglyphs estimated at 1,000 years old are just five minutes off the highway, along with fishing and swimming access on the river and great hiking trails.

There were only three sets of campers in the campground while I was there, plus the host: what appeared to be a homeless family, a roofer and his dog and a motor coach. There were no racoon problems as in Babler State Park. That may be due to the blare of televisions late into the night.

I moved the popup to Babler on Wednesday so as to attend the quarterly meeting of the Missouri Smallmouth Alliance at Powder Valley Nature Center. It was there I made an error no camper should.

I rolled into the campground about 4:30 p.m., checked in with the host. She said she’d find me and collect the camp fee. I set up the trailer, gulped down a sandwich and headed off to Powder Valley without actually registering my site.

When I got back to the park entrance about 10 p.m., the gates were closed and I had no code to punch into the electronic keypad. I could have contacted the St. Louis County police and asked them to call someone at the campground, but no one in the campground even knew my name since I wasn’t registered.

I rented a cheap motel room in Manchester and went out and registered the next morning. Glad I chose a $9 basic site instead of a $16 electric one since I didn’t even stay overnight.

The moral of the story. Be sure you register before you leave the campground.

Dave Hamilton, a furbearer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, was featured speaker at the Smallmouth Alliance meeting. He acknowledged that the otter population has exploded since the critters were reintroduced to Missouri 23 years ago and that on some streams and farm ponds, otters have been really hard on the fish population.

We’ll have more about that in a future print issue of Traveler, July or later.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

“How do you login and comment on this darn blog?” some have asked.

Good question, until now. We went into the administration section, checked a couple of boxes and lo and behold, a “Register” option now appears at the right under the Meta heading.

To log in, you must first register. Click on “Register” and you’ll bring up a box asking for your user name and email address. Enter those and click the “Register” button, and you’ll be immediately emailed a temporary password.

Go to your email inbox, retrieve your new password, then come back to Traveler Blog. Click “Login” this time, enter your user name and password. That will bring up a profile, where you can change the password if you like.

At the top of that page, beside “riverhillstraveler.com Blog” is a link that says “View site.” Click on that and you’ll be back at the blog. At the bottom of any entry is a link to submit comments. Once you are logged in, you can fire away.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

I am camping this week at Babler State Park, just north of Eureka off I-44. It’s an adventure, as usual, this time with wildlife. More about that in a bit.

Our old Coachmen pop-up didn’t see any use last year. We bought it used, year before last and things didn’t go well. In a blaze of enthusiasm, we took it out every chance that arose. Each one was a disaster.

We got windblown and rain-soaked in Nebraska, and had to take shelter at a motel in Omaha.

We broke a spring on the way to Mark Twain Lake in northeast Missouri. The tire rubbed on the wheel well lining and nearly caught the trailer on fire. I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend on my back underneath the pop-up in a campground so crowded it looked like a Mideast refugee settlement.

The next time and the time after, it rained again. We felt personally responsible for flood conditions just for dropping the tongue on our trailer ball.

Last summer, when we mentioned camping, our kids brought up softball and swimming lessons and church camp. It was clear they’d rather stay home and clean their bedrooms than suffer another soggy weekend under mildewy canvas.

This time it’s just me. I’m camping by night and selling ads by day. I stopped by the supermarket in Wildwood for a loaf of bread and some salad before going to camp last night. While I changing clothes in the trailer, I noticed movement inside the mini-van. I scrambled out half dressed to find a racoon raiding the grocery supply.

Even if a racoon is Traveler’ mascot, I didn’t take it kindly. The critter made off with a loaf of bread and punctured the plastic bag in a new box of cereal with one of its claws.

I had a salad instead of sandwiches last night and took my chances with the cereal this morning. All in all, it’s great to be camping again. Babler is so beautiful and serene, it was hard to make myself leave this morning. After a day of fighting traffic and making calls all over the western side of the metro area, I can’t wait to get back out the park and eat supper under the stars.

By Emery Styron, River Hills Traveler

My wife stopped at our backyard garden Saturday afternoon, noticed the green onions were about eight inches tall, and pulled six or eight out of the ground to go with supper.

That got me thinking about the way we eat these days. The onions were savory and delicious and the only thing on the table that night that didn’t pass through way too many hands and processes on the way to our stomachs.

This morning, I had a simple breakfast: Granola from a bag inside a box, cranberry juice from a plastic bottle, yogurt from a plastic container with a foil seal and an orange. There was a pile of waste when I finished. Only the orange peels were biodegradable. Had I eaten at a fast-food restaurant there would have been a paper bag, napkin, plastic tableware, etc. to dispose of, too.

Things have gotten way to complicated. It’s so much more tasty and satisfying to pull an onion out of the ground, wash it off and eat it than to buy a bag of them at the store, not knowing what they’ve been fertilized or sprayed with, or how many hands have touched them, or how much petroleum it took to produce them.

We’ve gotten too far from those basics in our thinking and in the way our food is produced. Many people don’t associate chicken nuggets with walking, squawking birds or hambugers with bawling, ornery cattle. Nuggets are a manufactured, chickenish product made from birds that may have never set foot or beak on real soil. Burgers and steaks, despite their more rugged image, come mostly from confined feeding operations. Processed food tastes even worse when you think about how it is produced.
How do we get back to the basics? Hunting or fishing is one way. You kill an animal and you eat what you can. What you can’t eat you return to the soil or leave for other animals. There will be some packaging, storage, transportation, etc., but those can be minimized if you do your hunting and fishing close to home.

Foraging is another way. This is the time of year when morel-hunters enjoy nature’s bounty. I have good memories of taking my wife blackberry-picking in southwest Missouri years ago when she was nine-months pregnant. We drove the car close up against the loaded roadside bushes near Shoal Creek and she filled her lap with luscious berries.

Gardening also shortens the food chain and feels good. I don’t know why I feel so proud of a crop of tomatoes or onions. I only watch. Nature does most of the work.

There’s no trip to the store. No plastic bag to recycle. No preservatives or pesticides to worry about unless you put them on yourself. There are weeds to pull and bugs to pick off, but that’s part of the fun.

Next best thing is to buy at a farmer’s market or hook up with a local farmer whose practices you know.

Those are some of my thoughts on food. What are you eating and thinking?

By Emery Styron, publisher
River Hills Traveler

Let’s talk about the issues that matter to Missouri outdoor users. River Hills Traveler has never been bashful about taking editorial positions in our printed editions. Traveler Blog is a new way to extend the discussion and invite more people to be a part of it.

Here are some of the topics we’re commenting on. Whether you agree, disagree or would like to talk about something else, we’d like you to be a part of the discussion.

IS IT REALLY PROGRESS AT HUGHES MOUNTAIN?

At Hughes Mountain Natural Area near Irondale, the Missouri Department of Conservation bulldozed the old parking lot and built a new one at a new location. But the sign and all published directions still lead to the old lot. Very bad timing to doze the old before there’s directions to the new. And the old location was much better anyway.

MARBLE CREEK A JEWEL, BUT CAN YOU GET THERE?

Marble Creek Campground in the Mark Twain National Forest is on the Forest Service chopping block. Our writers have called this place a “jewel.” Should public access to Marble Creek be saved?

CAN GUN-LOVERS TOLERATE OPPOSING VIEWS?

In the April 2007 Traveler, Editor Bob Todd weighed in on the firing of journalist Jim Zumbo, who lost his job on the Outdoor Channel for saying in an on-line column that military-type rifles look like terrorist weapons and don’t belong in hunting. It seems that Zumbo’s main sponsor, Remington, came unglued, and the National Rifle Association along with it.

Bob opined that Zumbo’s view reflects the perceptions of much of the public, and that Remington and the NRA, should be grateful for the heads-up instead of being outraged.

This plea for empathy and understanding between pro-gun and anti-gun folks angered some of our readers who are NRA members. We had a few subscription cancellations and hot letters to the editor, some of which are published in the May issue along with other’s supporting our view.

You can read the letters in the print Traveler, but you don’t have to wait a month to get your response in print. You can express your opinion right here on Traveler Blog.

LOCAL CONTROL BEST DEFENSE AGAINST CAFOs

Traveler’s commentary in the May issue focuses on CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations). We think a blow for the environment was struck in late April when two bills on CAFOs in the Missouri Senate came to a screeching halt.

One was Senate bill 364 which would bar local counties and governments from control over CAFOs. The bill not only said control would be at the state level, but provided hog factories with protection against nuisance lawsuits. It even contained provisions for state tax credits for these giant feeding corporations.

The bills seemed headed for passage until the Missouri Rural Crisis Center and Missouri Coalition for the Environment rallied some opposition groups and individuals to let the senators know what citizens think.

Basically, opponents think the plan was to take licensing of these operations to Jefferson City where the process would be out of sight of local folks. The corporate farm interests would rather leave it at the state legislature level where their lobbying and political contributions are less visible and more efficient. If they have to buy off county supervisors, that’s going to be more work and harder to hide.

Passage would greatly weaken the voice of those who would have to live with these operations as their neighbors. The law would have said you could not even complain if the operation damaged your property (nuisance law suit) and on top of that, the state would be encouraging these operations with tax credits!

Well, 364 died.

In its place, the Senate came up with Bill 570, which dropped the ban on lawsuits and the tax credits, but still would not let local communities adopt health ordinances or anything else to regulate CAFOs more strictly than the state – which means local control wouldn’t exist as a practical matter.

The good news is the opposition to 570 was also very strong, and instead of seeking passage, the Senate turned the bill into one calling for a
study after this session is past.

The organizations that fought the bills says the battle may not be over, however. Wording could still emerge in other bills, and there’s still the House. And the interim committee’s recommendations next year.

The idea of sidestepping local control is billed as something to save the family farm, but the operators of CAFOs are agricultural giants.

WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND?
Join the discussion.

Emery Styron, publisher
River Hills Traveler