Tucked along a panoramic stretch of the Des Moines River in southeast Polk County is a park that feels many miles away from the state’s largest metro area. Buffered from the usual traffic sounds by dense woods and isolated stretches of natural landscape, Yellow Banks Park exudes an almost zen-like allure, with 150-foot high yellow-colored banks overlooking a laconic, winding bend in the river that reaches from the Minnesota border to the southeast edge of the state.
The yellow loess soil deposited by the Des Moines River along its banks gives this 576-acre park its name. From the entrance, you descend — literally, as the winding road takes almost a 300-foot drop in elevation — into a world that retains much of its ancient aura. Home to various peoples over the millennia, the earliest residents arrived in the Paleoindian period about 13,500 years ago. They hunted now-extinct bison, mammoths and mastodons. Hunting, fishing and growing crops, coupled with foraging for wild plants, provided sustenance for locals from the archaic period through the early 1840s, when settlers and the U.S. Army drove the indigenous peoples out of central Iowa.
Polk County Conservation acquired the park in 1980. Since then, hundreds of artifacts have been discovered and preserved.
The park also offers fascinating glimpses into natural history, where a glacial end point and a geological drift plain converged, leaving behind a productive bluffland with a range of natural resources, including a deep-wood river and a prairie savanna. This park in a quiet corner of the state’s most populous county takes visitors to the intersection of nature and history.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2023 issue as a part of Peak Iowa, a collection of fascinating state stories, sites and people.
