Sodalis Nature Preserve

For this event, we will be walking the Sodalis Nature Preserve, located about 90 minutes west of Springfield in Hannibal, Missouri. We will be walking on a mix of paved and unpaved trails through this city preserve. We plan to walk about 5 miles in about 2 hours.

Being close to the Mississippi River, there is some elevation changes in this preserve. The higher portions are about 300 feet above the lower part of the trails. The paved trails are definitely easy in difficulty, but the unpaved portions I would put squarely in the moderate difficulty category. If you ever wanted to walk a trail where trekking poles would be useful, this would be the one. Overall, it's not a difficult trail, but there are spots where the incline/decline might cause us to breathe a little harder than usual. We can attest that this area is quite beautiful, and we believe worth the visit.

The Après will be listed as a separate event.

From their website:
Sodalis Nature Preserve is a 200-acre park property that was given to the city to preserve endangered bats. It is now Hannibal’s second-largest park.

More than 211,000 federally endangered Indiana bats hibernate in a former limestone mine that closed a half-century ago and in the cave network nearby. The bats that hibernate in Hannibal make up about one-third of all known Indiana bats (their scientific name is Myotis sodalis, hence the preserve name.)