Boosters love to tout the unique geology of the Loess Hills right in the Council Bluffs backyard, but most tourists driving through still just see rolling hills and keep heading to Omaha. Do locals actually take advantage of this natural asset, or just post about it on Facebook?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentBorn and raised in Council Bluffs, and I will die on this hill (pun intended) — the Loess Hills are genuinely one of the most geologically rare landforms on the PLANET. There are only two places on Earth where loess deposits reach this scale and thickness: right here and along the Yellow River in China. That is not local PR spin, that is actual science. The problem isn't that the hills aren't remarkable, it's that we are absolutely terrible at telling people about them. Our signage is a joke, our trailheads look abandoned, and the one visitors center I took my kids to had a display that looked like it was last updated in 1987.
Nope. Hard disagree on the 'just local PR' framing. Spent 20 years working in conservation in Iowa and the biodiversity in those hills is legitimately significant. Rare plant communities, remnant prairies, species you won't find hardly anywhere else in the state. The fact that casual tourists drive past them doesn't make them less remarkable. It makes tourists less remarkable.
The Loess Hills have been featured in National Geographic. They were called one of the Midwest's most unique landscapes by the Nature Conservancy. This isn't Council Bluffs making stuff up — this is outside experts validating what we've known forever. I'm so tired of this Midwest inferiority complex where we assume that if something isn't famous it must not be worth anything. Chicago didn't invent the only worthwhile nature in this half of the country.
My grandpa used to take me out to the hills when I was maybe seven or eight years old, off some gravel road past Crescent I can't even remember the name of anymore. We'd just sit up there and look west at the river valley as the sun went down. He'd say 'nobody knows about this and that's how we like it.' Honestly? He wasn't wrong. Some things are better when they stay a little secret.
Anyone saying this is just PR spin has clearly never actually hiked out past Hitchcock Nature Center on a clear October morning. I don't want to oversell it because frankly I want fewer people out there ruining my quiet, but it's legitimately stunning. The way the ridgelines layer out toward the Missouri valley looks like something from a landscape painting. You people in this thread who've never gone need to stop theorizing and just go.
I want to push back on everyone saying locals don't use them. The Loess Hills Prairie Seminar draws people every single year. The Wabash Trace is constantly busy on weekends. My neighbor trains for half marathons out on those trails. The problem isn't locals ignoring them — it's that the STATE and the city do not invest in infrastructure to make them accessible to people who don't already know where to go. Fix the access roads, add decent parking, put up interpretive signs that aren't faded beyond reading. Then talk to me about marketing.
I'll be real with you. I've lived here 41 years and I maybe visit the hills a few times a decade. Not because they aren't nice but because there's always something else going on and honestly I kind of take them for granted. That's probably the most honest answer to this question. We don't appreciate them enough. None of us do. Reading this thread is making me want to actually go this weekend.
Fun fact for anyone who thinks these are just regular hills — loess deposits like ours formed from glacial windblown silt after the last ice age and they can stand at near vertical angles because of how the particles bond. That's literally why the bluffs look so dramatic. You cannot find terrain like this in Iowa anywhere else. My high school geology teacher made us write a whole paper on it and I thought he was nerdy but honestly I think about it every time I drive past. Shoutout to Mr. Hendricks, wherever you are.
Unpopular opinion maybe but I think calling them a 'gem' is 100% chamber of commerce energy. Like yes theyre pretty but so are a lot of rolling hills in Nebraska and Iowa. People act like tourists are gonna bypass the Rockies to come hike in Council Bluffs lol. I moved here from Denver two years ago and I get that locals are proud but the bar for 'underrated natural treasure' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
okay genuine question for people who actually live there — is there like a good trail map or app or something? I'm in Omaha and me and my partner have been wanting to explore the hills for literally two years and every time I look it up I find like three different websites that all contradict each other about which trails are open and I just give up and we go to Platte River State Park instead. this is exactly the infrastructure problem people are talking about
The hills formed from deposits left by Lewis and Clark actually, which is why they're historically significant on top of being geological. Pretty sure that's why the area got so much attention back in the early 1800s.
Is it wrong to choose not to have children just because you don't want to?
110 comments
Would you still eat meat if you had to kill the animal yourself?
109 comments
Should we genetically edit babies to remove diseases if we can?
108 comments
Are dating apps genuinely harder for men or for women?
108 comments