Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – Midwest Region
It’s on the Missouri River border
DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge sits right where Iowa meets Nebraska, about 25 miles north of Omaha along the Missouri River.
The refuge covers 8,365 acres of bottomland forest, tallgrass prairie, and wetlands, all built around a seven-mile-long oxbow lake that used to be a bend in the river itself.
The Army Corps of Engineers straightened the channel in 1960, and the old curve filled in to become DeSoto Lake. What flies over it every year, and what sits buried beneath it, makes this place worth the drive.
Wikimedia Commons/Keith Gerstung
Lewis and Clark camped here in 1804
William Clark wrote about this stretch of river on Aug. 3, 1804, noting the wildlife and recording the expedition’s first sighting of a badger…