Lake Macbride State Park

In the depths of the Great Depression, Iowa City boosters and the conservationist Jay 'Ding' Darling set out to protect the wooded valleys of Mill and Jordan Creeks before farming and development swallowed them. Darling, a newspaper cartoonist who later ran the U.S. Biological Survey and designed the first federal Duck Stamp, is often called the father of conservation in Iowa, and this park is one of the landscapes his advocacy saved. It opened to the public in June 1937.

The park is named for Thomas Macbride, a botanist who spent forty years at the University of Iowa and served as its president, and who preached the value of wild land long before it was fashionable. The original lake was smaller; in 1955 the state enlarged it to roughly 900 acres, giving the park the long, branching shoreline that makes it feel so much bigger than its map.

Some of the best things at Lake Macbride were built during the Depression by young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal work program that put a generation to labor in America's parks. They quarried and laid the stone shelter and the beach building in the 1930s, and that unhurried, hand-fitted masonry, low and solid and settled into the trees, still anchors the park today.

It is worth slowing down to notice. The CCC's parkitecture, native stone and heavy timber meant to look as if it grew from the ground, is a signature of the era, and Lake Macbride has a fine, well-kept example of it right where families still gather to picnic and swim. Walking up to that beach house is a small trip back nearly a century.

Lake Macbride is a no-wake, quiet-water lake, and that is the whole point of it. Without ski boats and jet skis churning it up, the water stays calm and the fishing stays good; anglers pull rare spotted bass, muskellunge, walleye, channel catfish, and a long list of panfish from it, and a canoe or kayak can drift the coves in near silence. A concessioner rents boats in season for those who arrive without one.

On land, more than seven miles of trail lace the timber, and the prettiest of them is a crushed-limestone path that runs about a mile and a half between the beach and the lake's dam, easy walking with water views most of the way. Spring and fall bring ospreys, waterfowl, and shorebirds through on migration, and in winter the trails go over to cross-country skiers and snowmobilers.

The park sits just north of Solon, tucked between Cedar Rapids to the north and the Coralville and Iowa City area to the south, so it makes an easy half-day escape from either. Because it is Iowa's largest park, the two arms of the lake are a real drive apart, and it pays to decide first whether you are coming for the beach, the boat ramp, the trails, or a quiet picnic, then aim for that part of the shore.

Come in the warm season for swimming, though the beach has no lifeguard, so keep an eye on your own group. Bring what you need for a day outdoors, since services are limited, and let the place set your pace. Lake Macbride rewards the unhurried visit: a slow paddle into a cove, a walk to the CCC shelter, an evening watching the light go long across the water.

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