Ledges State Park

Story

Ledges State Park is a state park of Iowa, USA, located approximately 4mi south of the city of Boone. The park contains a sandstone gorge carved by Pea's Creek, a tributary of the Des Moines River. The gorge is 100ft deep in places, with concretions jutting from the cliffs.BackgroundThe area was designated one of the first of Iowa's state parks in 1924, and is today one of its most visited parks.The lowland areas of the park are regularly flooded by the Des Moines River. In the 1970s, the state created a dam to form Saylorville Lake on the Des Moines River. This action has resulted in repeated flooding of low-lying areas of the park for decades. A group called The Iowa Citizens to Save Ledges State Park was organized in 1972 in protest of the proposed Saylorville Dam. Its primary objective was to alleviate and/or minimize the harmful effects on Ledges State Park by the Saylorville Lake Project of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There were numerous conservation groups affiliated with the group, including the Ames Reservoir Environmental Study, the Iowa Conservation Commission, and the Iowa Wildlife Society.The repeated flooding has radically changed the appearance of the lower Ledges—the timbered areas have been greatly reduced, are often covered with silt and, in general, look devastated. This is quite a change from the time when Farwell Brown and his fellow Boy Scouts camped in the Ledges in the 1920s among the lush growth in the lower Ledges. Camping and picnicking in the lower Ledges were popular recreations until the frequent floods made that area of the park less desirable. Many of the picnic areas and picnic houses in the park's flood plain have been decommissioned in the past decade. Annual flooding has made maintenance of the buildings cost prohibitive and seemingly pointless.