Loess Hills

Proposed National ParkIowa
A cut bank of wind-laid loess in the Iowa Loess Hills, with prairie grasses abovePhotograph: James St. John, CC BY 2.0
All proposed National ParksLoess HillsNo active campaign
Location
Iowa
Current protection
Loess Hills State Forest, Preparation Canyon State Park, Stone State Park
Status
No active campaign
Tier
Tier 2 · National Monument
In the book
Not featured in Undiscovered America

Why should it be a National Park?

There are two places on earth where wind-blown silt piled up deep enough to build its own mountain range. One is Shaanxi Province in China. The other is a two-hundred-mile band along the western edge of Iowa. When the glaciers melted, meltwater carried rock flour down the Missouri River valley and left it on the flats; in winter the flow dropped, the mud dried, and the wind picked it up and dropped it on the eastern bluffs. It did this for roughly ten thousand years. The result is a wall of hills rising two hundred feet above the floodplain, sixty to two hundred feet of loess deep, covering something like 650,000 acres.

Almost all of it is private, and that is the whole problem. The study took the easier road and recommended a reserve because a reserve asks nothing of landowners, but the deepest loess on the continent outside China is a national landscape sitting in private hands, and the Park Service has assembled parks out of exactly that before. Great Smoky Mountains was bought farm by farm with donated money. Indiana Dunes took sixty years. A Loess Hills park would be built the same way, from willing sellers and easements, and it would take as long as it takes.

The history of National Park Campaigns

The Loess Hills, among the deepest wind-deposited loess formations on Earth outside China, received a congressionally directed NPS study under the Loess Hills Preservation Study Act of 1999. The special resource study recommended National Reserve status rather than a National Park, and no park bill has followed.

Distinct National Park attempts
0 (study only)
Other designation attempts
2 (National Natural Landmark 1986; 1999 study and National Reserve recommendation)

Sources

  • NPS, The Loess Hills of Western Iowa Special Resource Study
  • Senate Report 106-66
  • Loess Hills Alliance materials
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  1. 1986

    Portions of the Loess Hills designated a National Natural Landmark.

  2. 1999

    The Loess Hills Preservation Study Act (S. 776; Sens. Grassley and Harkin) authorizes an NPS special resource study, with up to $275,000 authorized.

  3. c. 2001–2002

    The special resource study recommends National Reserve status, not a National Park; no park bill follows.

  4. Present

    Protection remains a patchwork of state forest, state parks, county preserves, and Nature Conservancy holdings.