Even before railroads began promoting Iowa’s Great Lakes region as a tourist destination in 1882, people from Des Moines traveled 200 miles by horse and wagon to hunt, fish and relax on the sandy beaches of the Okoboji lakes in northwest Iowa.

Things really got going when a 60-foot, toboggan-style waterslide was built near the shore in 1889. A roller coaster and a carousel were added in 1914-15. Paved roads in the 1920s, an airport in 1930 and a golf course in 1934 brought in more families and convention business.

By the 1950s, the baby booming, post-war families of Des Moines lawyers and business executives spent entire summers at “the lakes,” with heads of households driving four hours one way to join them on weekends.

Despite those long-standing ties, Des Moines media provided little coverage last month when devastating floods washed away significant chunks of high-value Okoboji shoreline.

This year’s flood was at least as bad as the one in 1993, when the Des Moines Register had eight people – reporters, photographers, columnists, feature writers and a farm editor – covering the Okoboji flood at the same time that much of the capital city was underwater.

This year, the only significant reporting I’ve seen about Okoboji flooding came from Arnold Garson, a former colleague at the Des Moines Register, whose family has spent summers at West Okoboji for more than 100 years.

Garson, a retired editor and publisher at Gannett Co., writes a knowledge-filled blog called “Second Thoughts” about Des Moines (where he worked), Lincoln, Neb., (where he grew up) and Okoboji.

He has written about the history of the area, how Okoboji was formed and named, who the early white settlers were and why the Spirit Lake Massacre happened in 1857.

Garson has also looked into the future and written about plans by a Chicago company, Invenergy, to build as many as 100 “towering wind turbines” in the area that would be three times as tall as the wind machines lining many Iowa highways.

More important: Garson, who covered Des Moines City Hall and the Iowa Legislature in the 1970s and the 1980s Farm Crisis, provided news coverage of this year’s flood.

On July 12, he wrote that he had “toured several miles of the west shoreline of West Okoboji by boat.” He reported, “higher banks seem to have been at particular risk” and included photos showing vertical collapses of 20 to 30 feet where residential yards had slid into the lake.

Earlier, on June 22, he wrote that the lake rose 15 inches in a 24-hour period as a result of one night’s rainfall. By then, he said, the water level in Okoboji had risen more than a foot above the record flood of 1993.

Separately, the Lakes News Shopper reported that 75 lakeshore properties experienced collapses with tons of dirt, rock landscaping and docks sliding into the lake.

Similar damage occurred from floods in 1993 and 2018, according to the Shopper, which added: “The root of these recurring issues dates to the 1930s when Dickinson County installed a temporary road at 230th Street near the dam, initially to combat low water levels.”

Garson wrote in a blog post on June 26 that the road and a low bridge slow flood waters from leaving West Okoboji Lake. Replacing the road and bridge with a modern structure would allow more water to leave the lake in flood times.

That proposal has been around for decades, he noted, but never acted upon.

This year’s flood shut down traffic on the lake in early June, when boats were limited to 5 mph, a speed limit designed to minimize wave action on shorelines. 

With little boat traffic on the lake, and with golf courses, bike paths and some resorts flooded, Iowa Public Radio reported that tourism during the July 4 holiday weekend was down 40% to 60%.

Tourism typically brings in close to $300 million a year, with summer visitors to Iowa’s Great Lakes area ranging from 40,000 to 60,000, Garson reported.

That won’t happen this year, but lots of families from Des Moines and other communities that value Okoboji are hoping things can be back to normal in 2025.