The crossword on the front cover of April’s Traveler is missing some boxes. I found this out when I walked into Holliday Landing’s office at Wappapello Lake and found that owner Rod Howard had written answers off the edges of the puzzle. After taking a good natured beating, I figured out what happened.

Charlie Slovensky created the puzzle in Microsoft Excel. When I converted the Excel file to a PDF to export it into Traveler’s cover layout, I set the print area too small, dropping off two rows of boxes down the right side and one row across the bottom. My bad.

Here’s a link to the complete puzzle, in pdf and jpeg formats. Clues are on Page 20 of the April print issue. Here’s a link to the solution.

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Other than that, it’s been a good week in the Ozarks. The redbud blooms are so thick and heavy in southeast Missouri, it’s a wonder they don’t break off some branches. Why do they call it redbud? Most that I see are a vivid shade of lavender.

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I’m beginning to notice cars park along the road shoulders and folks staring at the earth at the edge of the woods. They may be morel hunters, but I haven’t stopped to ask. That’s not a subject anybody wants to discuss, until they’ve brought in their finds.

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The U.S. Highway 60 community of Ellsinore made the national news this week when a young man landed a stolen Cessna there that he had flown from Canada. Tracey Holden, executive director of the Ripley County Chamber of Commerce, lives near Ellsinore and said the F16s corralling the Cessna woke her.

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Had a nice visit with Ray Joe Haskins while I was in Doniphan. Ray Joe wholesaled me a couple of his books, Bow & River Gigs, to have available for our office visitors, then told me about good times he had competing in team canoe racing around Missouri. He says the annual canoe race at Doniphan has dwindled, but there’s a movement afoot (afloat?) to make a bigger event of it.

The Missouri River 340 has been held in July of the last two years. That’s the only other Missouri canoe race I know about. If you know of others, please drop me an email at estyron@rhtrav.com.

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Speaking of office visitors, we’ve had several since Traveler established digs at 21B Vance Road in Valley Park. The office is generally open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays and by chance at other times. We’d love to see you, if you’d like to stop by. Call ahead to make sure we’re in. The phone number is 800-874-8423.

•••

There’s a great deal of optimism about this year’s float season among canoe outfitters we’ve talked to this spring. The weather’s been great, especially compared to last spring’s floods, and several report that reservations are coming in at a healthy clip. Though the economy’s down, floating, fishing and camping are affordable family activities.

•••

That’s all for now. Have a great Easter weekend.

By Emery Styron
Traveler Editor
If you enjoy Traveler, there’s a good chance you’d find Don Corrigan’s book, Show Me…Natural Wonders, a satisfying read.

Corrigan, a veteran St. Louis journalist and college professor, has the same kind of appreciation for the region’s natural environment that we often encounter in Traveler readers. But he has ranged much further and wider than Traveler Country in penning this 217-page volume, subtitled “A Guide to the Scenic Treasures of the Missouri Region.”

The book contains 90 essays, all with a meditative flavor, on his experiences in places that are either in or within sight of the Show-Me State.

Corrigan is partial to bluffs, having grown up exploring them with his buddies around his hometown of Belleville, IL. “Sit a spell on Easley’s bluffs” overlooking the Missouri River near Columbia, “and you just might catch a second wind,” he advises. Or “unfurl your tired body on top of a smooth, bare rock, table top bluff” overlooking Pickle Springs in the deep shade of Hawn State Park, and you’ll find “a ready refuge from “a scorching Midwest summer day.”

Corrigan describes 30 bluffs, in locations ranging from Trail of Tears State Park near Cape Girardeau to Weston Bluffs, north of Kansas City. Crags overlooking the Meramec as well as those overlooking the Mississppi in his native Illinois are included.
Traveler Country is rich with springs and streams, as all our readers know. Corrigan’s late, lamented Uncle Stanley was his boyhood guide to Alley Spring, Blue Spring, Big Spring, Greer Spring, Mina Sauk Falls and other Ozark water wonders. He revisits 20 of those places for the book, traveling as far as Roaring River in southwest Missouri.

Caves and caverns merit 20 essays as well. Traveler office assistant, contributor and resident spelunker Jo Schaper is acknowledged for her help in explaining the cave hobby.

Corrigan finds cavers to be “cool people, He focuses on commercial caves because they are the best introduction to the general public of “the splendid wilderness underground.” He recommends off season visits to avoid crowds.

“Just Special Places” is the final section of the book, a places for places that defy categorization.

Elephant Rocks is described as “once-endangered stone beasts” that are “now a protected herd in a visitor-friendly environment.”

Allred Lake Natural Area in the Boothell, Corrigan suggests, might be the “primordial swamp” that our early ancestors are thought to have crawled from to become land creatures.

“Seeing Allred, it’s easy to understand why some folks prefer the Genesis story to evolution,” he writes.

Corrigan has a knack to absorbing the flavor of these places and connecting it the rest of our lives.

A valuable appendix gives detailed directions to finding each of the places described.

Corrigan’s late co-adventurer, Ed Thias, illustrated Show Me…Natural Wonders with detailed pencil drawings that reinforce the contemplative tone of the essays. A noted St. Louis architect, Thias tutored artists at St. Louis Community College and had many published illustrations to his credit. He died this year.

Corrigan says research for the book took a lifetime, but the writing was done in about two years. Editor and co-publisher of the Webster-Kirkwood and South County Times in suburban St. Louis, Corrigan has served as media professor at Webster University since 1978. He is a graduate of Knox College, with a masters degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

He live in Sunset Hills with his wife, Susanne, and two children.

Frequent attendance at journalism meetings has provided Corrigan many opportunities to sneak off and explore natural wonders in all corners of the state.

Readers will be glad he did.

Show Me…Natural Wonders was published by Reedy Press of St. Louis in 2007 and can be ordered from http://reedypress.com and major booksellers.

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