Hawkeye Point 1670' - Iowa's High point                               May 31, 2019

To go for Iowa's highpoint, Hawkeye Point, we flew into Chicago, IL on the night of May 30. From Chicago, it was a 9-hour drive to the highpoint, located in the NW corner of Iowa! We broke up our travel across the state, exploring a few interesting locations. First stop: the Surf Ballroom, which is a historic rock & roll landmark located in Clear Lake, Iowa. The Surf is closely associated with a historic event called "The Day the Music Died." In the late night hours of February 2, 1959, early rock & roll stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson gave their last performances at the venue. Just hours later, they were on a chartered private plane (a Beechcraft Bonanza), heading to their next tour destination, when inclement weather and pilot error led to their plane crashing tragically in a cornfield. There were no survivors. Our next stops included visiting the Mason City Municipal Airport, where the plane took off from, and the memorial at the crash site, just a few miles north of the airport.

We arrived to the highpoint of Iowa (by car) just as the sun set, leaving us with just enough daylight to see the sites which included old farming equipment, a beautiful tile mosaic marking the highpoint, and poles (as pictured above), showing the locations and distances of all the other state highpoints. 

On the drive to our hotel, a few hours away, we passed by the Manson Crater, a relatively unknown impact crater site. The reason why? The crater was formed 75 million years ago and then, over millions of years of erosion and glacial activity, the crater got filled with glacial sediment and hidden from view. More on this in the Iowa Science Short. 

State high points rank: 42

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SUMMITS: Hawkeye Point slideshow

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