Why doesn’t St. Louis have a paddling park?

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If tentative plans solidify, St. Louisans will be within a day’s drive of one slice of the 2028 Olympic Games. Los Angeles is set to host the bulk of the world’s elite athletes that year, but the Olympic canoe slalom racers (a.k.a. whitewater paddlers) will converge in Oklahoma City. That’s because public and private entities there began investing decades ago in a large, downtown-adjacent paddling complex known as the Boathouse District, which now includes the RIVERSPORT whitewater park. Los Angeles is on the cusp of formally partnering with them.

This event is expected to be a lucrative one for our neighbor to the west, though seen in context, it’s the icing, not the cake. A 2018 study reportedly found that the Oklahoma City Boathouse District has an annual impact of $23 million. Folks flock there not just for kayaking, canoeing, rafting, rowing, and stand-up paddle boarding, but also for non-water sports such as climbing, for corporate team-building, for watching movies while floating in inner tubes. RIVERSPORT is what’s known as a “pumped” park, meaning it’s entirely manufactured; other examples exist in Charlotte, North Carolina, and most recently, Montgomery, Alabama. A second kind of paddling park is the “in-stream” variety, which alters existing rivers so that they conduce to paddlesports. Dayton, Ohio has one; Tulsa, Oklahoma has just followed suit.

St. Louis has neither kind. Some leaders in the local paddling community, though, are thinking about how to change that.

“I think it’d be a great thing for St. Louis,” says Roo Yawitz, owner of Big Muddy Adventures and president of the River City Foundation, which supports local outdoor recreation. “Conditions here seem to be just as good as those in these other cities. I would love to be part of a group of people who looked at this opportunity and tried to see whether it’s feasible.” Meanwhile, Joe Sartori of the Missouri Whitewater Association says that he and some associates are applying for an RCF microgrant that would raise part of the $15,000–$20,000 necessary for engaging a consultant to do feasibility studies and propose designs at a handful of sites.

It’s a bit surprising St. Louis doesn’t have some kind of paddling park, given our heritage. The place was founded by French paddlers (Laclede and Chouteau) on the bank of the Mississippi across from the ruins of ancient paddlers (the Cahokians). It has been a waystation for some of American history’s most famous paddlers, both real (Lewis and Clark) and fictional (Huck Finn). And today, we’re the finish line for the world’s longest nonstop paddling race (the MR340) and just a short drive away from superb and federally protected Ozark paddling rivers (the Current, the Jacks Fork, the Eleven Point). So yes: Paddling is a thing here.

But we haven’t leaned into it in the way that many other cities have—and, as a result, haven’t reaped the economic benefits.

In Charlotte, for instance, the U.S. National Whitewater Center—which, like most paddling parks, is run by a nonprofit—reported 1.2 million visitors and a net gain of $7.6 million on its most recent tax return. That’s interesting for two reasons. First, such success did not at all seem inevitable when the center opened two decades ago; attendance was lower than expected and it was swamped with millions of dollars of debt in its first few years. Second, only about 17 percent (or 200,000) of those recent 1.2 million visitors went whitewater rafting, according to the center’s leadership. Instead, the site has become a destination for outdoor recreation of many types, as the filing states: “The campus offered over 50 miles of trails, and hosted 12 festivals, 94 music events and 358 yoga sessions at no cost to the public.” The center also boasted of having held 102 race events as well as swiftwater rescue training for first responders from across the U.S.

RIVERSPORT OKC has diversified its offerings too, points out its executive director, Mike Knopp. “If you build it just for whitewater enthusiasts, it’s never gonna work,” he says. “A lot of our mission is instilling an outdoor culture. We’ve been as much in the culture-building business as anything.” And just like in Charlotte, skeptics abounded in Oklahoma City, Knopp says, when he began beating the drum for a paddling park there. “People thought we were crazy,” recalls Knopp. “Now we’re making a statement about OKC as a new destination for outdoor adventure, which is still mind boggling for people who’ve lived their whole lifetimes here.” He observes that risk is inherent in the process, but at some point, you have to make a bold move, adding: “I think you definitely need a champion in your community.”

Sartori, for his part, is hoping the microgrant comes through from RCF, which will announce awardees at the Gateway Outdoor Summit on Nov. 22. At most, it would infuse $5,000 into the project; local paddlers would need to raise the rest for feasibility studies and designs. Sartori says that as a facilitator of the process, he’ll go with the flow of community consensus, but he suspects that an in-stream park utilizing an existing waterway is more realistic than a pumped whitewater park because “it’s less of a capital investment.” One spot on the Meramec looks particularly promising, he says, declining to disclose its location. But Sartori’s intention is to submit a handful of potential sites and the cobbled-together consultant’s fee to Scott Shipley, a former olympian kayaker and president of S20 Design & Engineering, the firm that helped conceive of the paddling parks in Charlotte, Oklahoma City, and Montgomery, among many other locales.

Asked whether some kind of paddle park would even be feasible near our ever-flooding big rivers—the Mississippi and the Missouri—Shipley says he doesn’t know, having never studied it. “There are floodplains and a lot of good sites are probably already taken,” he says. “I wouldn’t hitch my wagon to that being the only place. But it would certainly be the most symbolic.”

If ever St. Louis opted to go the more ambitious (and expensive) route of creating a pumped park, any whitewater currents themselves would not really be representative of the region’s waterways, where rapids are few. But the same holds true of Oklahoma City, and they went forward anyway.

Yawitz has likened St. Louis to the ugly duckling of outdoor recreation: an outdoorsy city that doesn’t realize it’s outdoorsy. Just drive down the highway, he argues, and notice all the kayaks and mountain bikes attached to vehicles. “We don’t have whitewater around here, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do this,” Yawitz says. “It can be its own destination, and we could have some kid learn how to whitewater kayak in St. Louis and get a gold medal, because I guarantee you: There are hordes of kids in OKC and Charlotte and Montgomery who are out there and getting after it.”