Hitchcock Nature Center

The Loess Hills are made of loess, a fine, dust-like soil created when glaciers ground rock into powder. As the last ice age waned, winds picked up this powder from the broad Missouri River floodplain and dropped it along the eastern bluffs, layer upon layer, until it built into deep, steep-sided hills. Only in a few places in the world does wind-blown loess pile this thick, and western Iowa holds one of the greatest expanses of it anywhere.

The result is a landscape that surprises people who expect Iowa to be flat: a rumpled ribbon of sharp ridges and deep hollows, cloaked in prairie on the dry, sunny slopes and woodland in the sheltered draws. The soil is fragile and prone to erosion, which is part of why preserving stretches like Hitchcock matters, protecting a rare and delicate landform along with the life it holds.

Hitchcock is best known among nature lovers for its hawk watch. Each fall, migrating raptors, hawks, eagles, falcons, and their kin, funnel down the Loess Hills ridges, riding the winds and rising warm air as they head south. From the preserve's high points, watchers count and enjoy the passing birds, and on the best days the numbers can be extraordinary.

The migration turns the ridges into a front-row seat on one of nature's great movements. Even casual visitors who happen by on a good day can look up to see raptors streaming overhead, and for dedicated birders the hawk watch is a fall ritual, a chance to witness the sky filled with birds on their long journey.

A tall lookout tower crowns one of the ridges, and climbing it rewards you with a sweeping view over the folded Loess Hills and out across the wide Missouri River valley, a panorama that captures just how strange and beautiful this landscape is. It is the preserve's signature vantage point and a fine place to take in the hawk migration as well.

Below the tower, miles of trails wind up and down the steep ridges through prairie and woodland, offering hikes from easy to strenuous. The hilly terrain gives the preserve a genuinely rugged feel, and the changing mix of grassland and forest supports a rich array of birds, wildflowers, and wildlife across the seasons.

The Loess Hills and the Missouri River valley they overlook lie within the historic homelands of the Ioway, for whom the state is named, and other peoples of the region, whose communities lived and traveled along the great river and its bluffs for countless generations. The prairies that cloak the sunny slopes are remnants of the vast tallgrass and mixed prairie that once covered this country.

Those prairie remnants make the Loess Hills a stronghold for plants and animals that have vanished from the plowed farmland around them, from prairie wildflowers to grassland birds. Preserves like Hitchcock protect not only a rare landform but a living piece of the prairie world, a window into the Iowa that existed before the fields.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.