seven amazing distilleries, and they do X. The next day, they call it the Bourbon Trail, and it automatically becomes three X, even though they didn't change anything. They just started talking about it in a new way. And then people from all over the country want to go to Kentucky and bike or drive or do whatever, you know? I think there's the opportunity for Missouri to do that. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but it's all there already. In the fall we opened a store. So, now we have the outfitting side ofthe business and a retail presence. The store is called the Guide Shop, because the guides built the store and stocked it, and are working at it and stuff like that, partly because we don't have anybody else but guides. We are already an outdoor recreation city that doesn't know it. You see it all over the place, whether it's people out on mountain bike trails or driving around with boats on their cars. And I think that St. Louis has a really great range ofoutdoor recreation opportunities. You can wake up on a sandbar on the Jacks Fork and have dinner at Busch Stadium, eating a hot dog, watching a Cardinals game. We need to get outside here and do awesome outdoor stuff. And then other people around the country will hear about it and want to come here and do the same.
van with a canoe strapped to the top ofit and walks in with some calf-high neoprene boots that were covered in mud. It was our third day ofever being open. So, the floors were, like, brand new, and he tracked mud into the Gramophone, walked up to the bar, ordered a beer, and we started chatting. And that was the beginning ofmy now decade-and-a-half-long friendship with Big Muddy Mike. I think two years later, he finally got me to go out on the river with him. We went over to Mosenthein Island, which is now like a second home. Mike wanted to gather driftwood for a fence that he was building around his house. So, it was kind oflike a Tom Sawyer mission. We were picking up massive pieces ofdriftwood, putting them back in a canoe, ferrying back to North Riverfront Park and then ferrying back. We did multiple trips back and forth. It wasn't necessarily a river trip, but we were out there on the river, and it was great. I felt like I had left St. Louis and I had gone and had an adventure, even though I hadn't been more than 20 minutes from my house. That was the "aha" moment.
A lot of people ask us, "Where is everyone else?" Once they realize that they're having a good time and that paddling on the Missouri or the Mississippi is an awesome thing to do, they immediately wonder where everyone else is. And it's like, "Well, earlier today you didn't even think you could do this." The rivers are an asset to this city that can never be taken from us. We talk a lot on these trips about how Fortune 500 companies can come and go, and the city takes a big emotional hit when we find out that some company got bought out by some other company and things like that. There are things to St. Louis that are permanent, and the rivers are those. We already have the opportunity to have these rivers be something we all feel good about, about why we choose to live in St. Louis. You can see other cities doing that with their natural resources. But we don't do it here. It's like we're leaving it on the table.
The Bourbon Trail is an interesting thing. It's like, one day, Kentucky has
SCAN THIS CODE or visit nature.org/ mopodcast to hear the full conservation with Roo Yawitz on It's in Our Nature.
THIS PAGE Heading out on the Mississippi River to Mosenthein Island with Big Muddy Adventures. © Doyle Murphy/TNC
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