Ponca State Park

For 59 miles from Gavins Point Dam down to this park, the Missouri still runs as a river rather than a channel or a lake, braided around islands and sandbars. Congress made this stretch the Missouri National Recreational River on November 10, 1978, and in 1991 added a 39-mile stretch from Fort Randall Dam to Niobrara and the lower Niobrara itself. The two Missouri stretches are the only parts of the river between Montana and its mouth that are neither dammed nor channelized.

The park takes its name, as the town does, from the Ponca people. It was created in 1934, and the Civilian Conservation Corps began building it the same year. Its 2,100 or so acres are bluffs and forested ravines of bur oak and other hardwoods, with 22 miles of trail for hiking and mountain biking, some of it steep. In the summer of 1804 the Lewis and Clark party passed under these bluffs and noted the plum and gooseberry thickets.

From the Three State Overlook on the bluff you see Nebraska, South Dakota and Iowa and the river bending between them. The Missouri National Recreational River Resource and Education Center holds the park office. A Nebraska park entry permit is required, sold at the park, at Game and Parks offices and online.