Statewide Iowa — (RI) — Iowa’s first state park was founded one-hundred years ago and the Department of Natural Resources plans one-hundred events throughout 2020 to mark the occasion.
The kick-off was held on New Year’s Day with so-called First Day Hikes at more than four-dozen state parks. Todd Coffelt, chief of the DNR’s Parks Bureau, says a record of more than 43-hundred people turned out for the January 1st hikes.
Attendance was the highest since the annual events began in 2012 and the number of hikers was three times last year’s turnout, thanks to warmer-than-normal temperatures. The largest attendance was at Walnut Woods State Park in West Des Moines with more than 400 hikers. Coffelt says the year ahead will be filled with an array of different events that are designed to highlight the unique qualities of each park’s features.
Coffelt recommends Iowans visit the website,
iowadnr.gov, to determine how many of the 100 events they’ll be able to attend.Backbone State Park in Delaware County was Iowa’s first state park, founded in 1920, and there are now a total of 68 state parks and four state forests, in addition to 20 more county-managed parks that were originally founded as state parks.
KIWA Archive photo
