04/24/2022
An evening walk up Murray Hill
Rising more than 350 feet above the floodplain of the Missouri River near the town of Little Sioux, Iowa, Murray Hill is one of the more recognizable landforms of Iowa’s Loess Hills. Like most of the others in the thin line of hills that run from north of Sioux City to near St. Joseph, Missouri, Murray Hill is made entirely of soils from top to bottom. They were laid down in thin layer by thin layer by winds blowing flour-fine particles of soil that had been ground into near-nothingness by glaciers that slowly retreated from here 11,000-14,000 years ago.
From the flood plain, Murray looks broad in comparison to the shorter hills near it. Its flanks are prairie grass, waving green in the summer, tan the rest of the year. Trees that have taken over most of the other hills in the past couple centuries (Lewis and Clark wrote that they were “bald-pated” in 1804 when all were topped by prairie) haven’t taken hold on Murray except in some deep clefts.
When I first visited Murray Hill about 40 years ago, I parked on the gravel lot on the north side of the hill, and the top didn’t look that far away. However, as I walked up the trail from the parking lot, I realized that the ground rising ahead of me was not the true top of the hill. That was still a few hundred yards beyond the first rise that I had reached. As I walked up further, the same thing happened again….the top was still further yet.
Ultimately, the top of Murray is about 370 yards from my Honda and more than 130 higher too. The main trail that leads to the top has become a six-inch groove in the ground since I first visited here. Then, the trail was just a line of grasses bent flat to the ground by occasional visitors. This is what happens in the Loess Hills when a place becomes popular, people wear it down. Compared to the rock-tough hides of the Rocky Mountains and similar slopes across the world, the Loess Hills are fragile. Their soils can’t withstand the pounding of lots of feet. Odd, isn’t it? The very thing that attracts people to them is destroying them bit by bit.
In some places on the way to the top, where there had once been one trail, now fainter ruts parallel it. Perhaps some people don’t want to trod the main trail any further down so they go alongside of it, wearing down newer paths. I’m not sure their desire to save the main trail is helping the hill at all.
Walking on the trail after the first couple rises leads to a barbed wire fence protecting private pasture that covers the beautiful wide slope to the east of Murray Hill, which was named after a Scottish family that settled here in the 19th century. Inches from the barbed wire, an occasional sign and an electric fence reinforce the idea that visitors should stay on the public land. A couple post with metal oak leaves atop them mark the route of Brent's Trail, an 8-mile-long trace that starts at Murray Hill and wanders across public lands to the south.
Each step forward is a step up, providing broader and broader views of the flat floodplain of Missouri, which stretches far beyond what I can see. Rectangular farm fields patch the grounds down there. A farmer on one of the distant fields in a tractor tows a set of discs that raises a thin cloud of dust which the wind swiftly carries away.
Only a few sounds are here this spring evening….the grasses rustling against themselves while bobbing up and down in the wind, a bird calling out its territory or perhaps trying to appeal to a future mate and, nothing more.
A few information signs about prairie life stand along the way, mostly for people who haven’t been here before. Summiting here isn’t like reaching the top of Mt. Everest but still, you feel like nothing’s between you and heaven a few inches away…. and the view is grand.
Thin clouds, almost like gauze, rise from the distant skyline to blend into the sky but they’re enough to keep me from watching the moon break the horizon. Finally, as the sky darkens with the sun disappearing behind its own set of clouds to the west, the moon gradually appears as it rises through the gauze in the east. Long grey fingers of clouds begin to cross it as the evening darkens, showing the moon now, hiding it then. Finally, they part from it, now a bright orb in the sky that slips from bright to dark blue-gray.
I start downhill after photographing the moon as the clouds danced around it. The way dark isn’t in darkness yet. It’s just a gentle walk, the path still easily seen against the now-darker grasses. The wind has lessened into a breeze although cooler now with the warmth of the sun gone.
A few moments later, my opening and closing the car door is an intrusion in this world of only a few sounds. The car engine is out of place to all else here when I start it….and the crunching of the gravel is harsh, totally unlike the grasses rustling in the evening breeze…..as I re-enter the world where whence I came.
All photos © Mike Whye
