SierraScape October - November 2010
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by Becky Denney
Conservation Committee Chair

The 4th Annual Race for the Rivers features the Mighty MO, Boats, Bikes, Pirates and People!

The Race for the Rivers Festival at Frontier Park, St. Charles was the place to be on Saturday, Labor Day Weekend 2010. If you chose instead to race and were on the Missouri River in a canoe or kayak, I salute you!

With the help of the willing festival crew our tent was quickly up, the Sierra Club banner and info set out facing the Katy Trail and I was ready for hobnobbing with passersby. The Frontier Park setup made it easy to find the food and drink wagons, music stage and festival headquarters. It was especially easy to find the Pirate Tent. These Pirates had a fondness of fencing and rowdy jousts with each other but were kind to amateur photographers and question askers such as myself.

I admit that once the paddlers started coming in I was drawn to the fog horn and the gently waving red flag signifying the finish line for the racers—who were sometimes clear out in the middle of the Missouri River. But in-between there was time to discuss some of the problems of the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers as well as watershed work and cleanup that is ongoing. Discussion with reps from groups such as The Confluence Greenway, Missouri River Relief and River Des Peres were at least as meaningful to me as to other attendees.

The Greenway Network offers this river race and festival on the floodplain smack between the Mighty MO and the Katy Trail as an event centered on clean water education, restoration and recreation. The racers in the Clean Water Challenge put in at Weldon Spring and paddle to Frontier Park just past our red flag. The paddlers in the Race for the Rivers itself put in at Washington, Mo, paddle to St. Charles on Saturday, put in at St. Charles and race to the Confluence on Sunday.

Join me next year at the Race for the Rivers—August 27, 2011.