Cycling Tips & Stories

Doug coined a term for the Green Hills Region: “The Nozarks.” These pockets of steep, heavily forested hillsides are more Ozark hills and hollers than north Missouri farmland.

It was Tim Riekena, a member of the group and a teacher at Chillicothe Middle School, who really started the effort to put north Missouri’s trails on the map. An avid outdoorsman, he wrote a series of trail columns for the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, focusing on a radius 20 to 30 miles around Chillicothe.

“I was trying to find what was close, places where I could ride and hike,” he says. “In most books, 80 percent of what they covered was south of the Missouri River in the Ozarks. While the Ozarks are beautiful, they are just too far away.”

In time, readers started encouraging Tim to write a book. He expanded his coverage to anywhere north of the Missouri River and was amazed at what he found. Little-known trails crisscross the northern half of Missouri in state parks, city parks, Corps of Engineers land and remote Conservation Department wildlife areas.