Kevin Mason is many things.

He's a professor at Waldorf University in Forest City.

He has a Ph.D. in rural and environmental history.

He's a researcher and writer.

A blogger, a documentarian, a camera operator, outdoor enthusiast, and to the core, an Iowan.

Today, he has taken his research to Walnut Wood State Park in West Des Moines.

He's in the middle of a project to document the development and history of all 83 state parks in Iowa.

This is part of a bigger research project for me on public lands where I go through Documenting all of the state parks in Iowa may sound like an ambitious task, but it's nothing new for Kevin.

In 2021, he made his way from Montrose to mini walk on a total of 371 miles all by foot.

I have a better idea of what I'm trying to work on.

Where last summer, it's like, I don't know.

I had no idea what I was doing.

So what compelled this history professor to take his research for a hike.

So the idea for the walk across Iowa started actually during the Iowa State Fair in a garage on the north side of Des Moines, the rural neighborhood at my sister's house where I was talking with her partner, who's a high school social studies teacher, and he because he got to read this book, Albert Lee wrote this journal in 1835 with this military expedition called The Dragoons that went across Iowa.

We should do it.

And it became kind of this running joke.

There's a lot of things like this tend to be.

But in my training as an environmental historian, one of the things stuck out in my mind was that I was changed more than perhaps any place on earth.

98% of Iowa's land surface changed from 1835 through the conversion of agriculture until now.

What if I went and tried to retrace the route of the 1835 Dragoons, which in doing so created this incredible source base that gives us a snapshot of what Iowa looks like in 1835.

At the moment before Americanization and the conversion to agriculture begins.

And so I just decided to go for it.

Hello, Kevin here with notes on Iowa.

And today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about day four of my walk across.

Big things that stood out to me, the series, The Importance of the River was really driven water.

It had been a very hot previous eight days as I made my way from Prairie City For 21 days, Kevin set out along the Des Moines River to retrace the historic route.

Rain, heat and country roads all turned into unique challenges, all while trying to record his observations.

Captured video, fly a drone and log and document the route.

There was a part of this that was about me proving to myself that I could do it and that this was a thing that I was going to be committed to seeing all the way through, no matter what that might look like.

So I made it.

I had a crazy idea.

I started.

After his journey, Kevin found a new appreciation for the changes which define the past, present and future of Iowa, and that appreciation continues to expand.

It's selfish to say, like, it's kind of doing this for me, and then it really became about other people.

A lot of the time.

I remember as done by Eddie Ville on this gravel road, and I just walked up this giant hill, and it was kind of the point where, like all right, I'm just out here walking.

And this guy stopped.

We ended up having this conversation and he kind of turned to me after we're talking.

And yes, I've lived here my whole life and I've never thought about any of those things, but I'm going to go check out the Buxton location where that coal mining town used to be, because you told me it was just over here and opening those doors.

And that's a real conversation in real time.

But opening kind of that up, that's been one of the parts of this that's been something I didn't really expect at all.

People really care about the places they're from and the history that's close to them.

It forces me to really be careful in my research, be respectful of people's viewpoints, people's experiences.

And so it forces me to constantly be keeping in mind that it's not just some abstract thing I'm talking about, that the past is real and it influences the moment we're in and that people remember these things.

And that's where I think like Notes is actually going is I know I want to just keep pushing myself to learn new things, to better understand this place, and then to communicate that to other people.

That could look like a lot of different things in the future.

And I'm sure it will if I'm lucky enough.