Washington State Park

The carvings came first. Missouri State Parks attributes them to people of the culture archaeologists call Mississippian, who lived around here about A.D. 1000 and held ceremonies at this place, and it calls the park's petroglyphs the largest group yet found in Missouri. For their number and quality they were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. Two sites are open. At the main one, across Highway 104 from the road to the CCC Ridge Shelter, a level paved path leads to a covered shelter and a wooden deck above the carvings; the smaller one is beside the interpretive center. Stay on the walkways and decks, never step on the rock.

The first land for the park was donated in 1932, and Company 1743 of the Civilian Conservation Corps, an African American company, built most of what stands. Taking their lead from the carvings, the men called their barracks Camp Thunderbird. They built a stone dining lodge with a thunderbird carved into its chimney and hand-forged iron hinges on its doors, and worked on 14 buildings, among them an octagonal lookout shelter. In 1936 they built the 1,000 Steps Trail, a 1.25-mile loop whose big stone steps climb to an overlook shelter made to look like a natural outcrop above the Big River valley. The park's National Register citation praises their stonework.

Their lodge, Thunderbird Lodge, is now the park store and the check-in for cabins and floats. Shallow pits along the Opossum Track Trail are old diggings for barite, called tiff here.