Boone, IA

This young lady just looks so happy to be on the water.

There was quite a group at Boone Waterworks access this September day. There was a glorious scattering of color in the hills, the sun glittered on the water.

This is a great stretch of river, with high bluffs on either side. Just downriver is the Kate Shelley high bridge, named for the young woman who saved a train from a washed out bridge near the river. She crawled across the Des Moines River bridge during a raging storm in the dead of night in 1881.

Kate was given a lifetime free pass on the railroad, made postmaster of Moingona, and became the first American woman to have a bridge named after her, one that a flood will never touch.