The Desert Hiding on Missouri Hilltops
I’ve lived in Missouri most of my life, and it still catches me off guard that we have cacti growing wild here. Not in a greenhouse. Not escaped from someone’s rock garden. Native prickly pear, growing on sun-blasted hilltops less than an hour from my front door, alongside collared lizards that look like they wandered in from Arizona and decided to stay.
These are our glades — open, rocky outcrops where the soil is so thin and the sun so relentless that forest trees can’t get a foothold. Dolomite and limestone bedrock sits just inches below the surface, baking in summer, freezing in winter. The plants and animals that thrive here are the ones that figured out how to live on almost nothing and like it that way.
Right now, mid-April, the glades are waking up. Wildflowers are threading through the rock crevices, and the collared lizards are emerging to sun themselves on warm stones. If you’ve never seen a collared lizard, picture something about a foot long with bright turquoise and yellow markings and an attitude that suggests it knows exactly how impressive it looks. They’ll run on their hind legs if startled, which is the kind of thing you have to see to believe.
I think about the Civilian Conservation Corps workers who were building trails and bridges through these Ozark hills back in April of 1930. On this day in that decade, crews were constructing the log buildings and stone structures at Lake of the Ozarks State Park — work so well done it earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. Those young men hiked past glades like ours, probably hot and tired, maybe not even noticing the strange little deserts on the hilltops. Or maybe they did. Maybe one of them stopped, wiped his forehead, and thought the same thing I do every time: how does this exist here?
That’s the question worth sitting with, and it’s one your kids can actually investigate.
If you’re looking for a project that gets everyone outside and thinking, try this. Find a glade or rocky outcrop — we have them here at the preserve, and they’re scattered throughout the Ozarks on south-facing slopes. Bring a notebook, a soil collection bag, and if you have pH test strips, even better. Have your kids map where the trees stop and the open rock begins. Collect a small soil sample from the glade and another from the shaded forest nearby. Test both for pH. Glade soils tend to run more alkaline because of that limestone and dolomite base, while forest soils are often more acidic from decomposing leaves. That difference, just a few feet apart, explains why completely different ecosystems can exist side by side.
Ask them why a cactus can grow where an oak tree can’t. The answer isn’t just about water — it’s about soil depth, root systems, and how fire used to sweep through these hills and keep the trees at bay. It’s geology, biology, and history all tangled together on one rocky slope.
The warblers are moving through right now too. If your family wants to chase spring migrants, the Greater Ozarks Audubon Society has a guided walk at Busiek State Forest tomorrow morning, April 18th, starting at eight. Bring binoculars and patience.
And if you want to see our glades in person — the prickly pear, the lizards, the wildflowers blooming between the rocks — the trails are open. Come walk ground that’s been teaching people to look twice for a very long time.
