National Recreational River

Below Gavins Point Dam, the Missouri runs 98 miles without a dam, a levee, or a concrete bank armor to constrain it. These two NPS-managed districts — the 39-Mile District from Fort Randall Dam to Running Water, SD, and the 59-Mile District from Gavins Point Dam to Ponca State Park — are what most of the lower Missouri used to look like before the Army Corps channelized it in the 1930s through 1970s. The channelization project straightened the channel, eliminated islands and secondary channels, armored the banks with rock riprap, and installed thousands of wing dams and rock dikes to concentrate flow for barge navigation. It worked for navigation. It eliminated roughly 67 percent of the river's surface area and nearly all of its braided-channel character downstream.

Here in the NRR, the river still braids. Sandbars build and wash away between seasons. Cottonwood gallery forests regenerate in the natural cycle of flood and deposition that cottonwood seed requires. Piping plovers and interior least terns — both federally threatened — nest on the open sandbars in numbers found almost nowhere else in the Missouri basin. The birding is exceptional: over 200 species documented in the 59-Mile District alone, including some of the densest concentrations of migrating shorebirds in the central flyway. The 39-Mile District around Karl Mundt National Wildlife Refuge hosts one of the largest bald eagle concentrations in the lower 48. This is what restoration advocates mean when they talk about the Missouri's potential — and it is fragile, contested, and extraordinary.