Quaker Mill Dam to Bailey’s Ford Park:
A smattering of hors d’oeuvres on a smorgasbord of a river, this very pleasant trip begins with gusto and ends with loosening its belt just before the belly-sprawl of Lake Delhi. Predominantly coursing through scraggly lowlands and a whole lot of sand, the highlight comes early in downtown Manchester itself, corresponding with its fabulous Whitewater Park, where a deadbeat dam was replaced by six reputable drops across 800′ that will splash a lap of water above your bow and paint a smile on your face.
Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆
Trip Report Date: March 30, 2026
Skill Level: Beginner if not running the rapids in Manchester. If running the rapids, then paddlers should have the necessary skills and gear to run Class II whitewater – or at least be accompanied by an experienced paddler who does.
Class Difficulty: Class I-II rapids at the put-in and Class II at Whitewater Park; otherwise, quietwater with occasional riffles and Class I’s.
Gradient:
≈3.75′ per mile. (Note: in Whitewater Park the river drops an exhilarating 11’ over a sweep of only 800′)
Gauge Recorded on this Trip:
Manchester: ht/ft: 4.3 | cfs: 195
Recommended Levels:
While a wee bit low, we recommend this level. Paddlers will need to read the water to avoid scraping/butt-scooching. Ideal levels would be nearer 4.5 or 250 cfs.
Put-In:
Quaker Mill Dam, 195th Street, Manchester, Iowa
GPS: 42.50796, -91.47395
Take-Out:
Bailey’s Ford Access in Bailey’s Ford Park off Jefferson Road
GPS: 42.44239, -91.4085
Time: Put in at 1:30p. Out at 4:00p.
Total Time: 2h 30m
Miles Paddled: 7.75
Wildlife:
Bald eagles, wood ducks, nesting geese, deer, killdeer, and kingfishers.
Shuttle Information:
7 miles by vehicle or bicycle. All paved roads – a rarity in Iowa!
Background:
Since this is the first entry for any segment of the mighty Maquoketa River, this “Background” is longer than usual. Feel free to skip ahead to the “Overview” if you don’t have the time or inclination for beer metaphors and river memoirs.
If the Driftless Area in northeastern Iowa were a brewpub and one were ordering a flight of beers to sip, the obviously hoppy Upper Iowa would be high on the list, followed by the crisp pilsner Yellow, the imperial stout of the Volga, and the pale ale of the Turkey. Few paddlers would request the boozy, woozy barleywine called Maquoketa. Certainly not as citrusy as the Yellow, pine-resiny as the Upper Iowa, easy-going as the Turkey, or as limited a release as the Volga, the Maquoketa should be raised, praised, and toasted more often than it is for what it is – delicious!
For starters, it’s pronounced Muh-KOH-kuh-tuh, a Meskwaki word for “bear,” back when the forested hills and many caves in the area provided an ideal sanctuary for black bears (since cut down for green-and-yellow Deere to roll over the landscape instead).
Like a good barleywine, the Maquoketa is robust and has a lot of body, but it can be surprisingly bitter, too. Flowing across five counties for roughly 150 miles, its many segments are varied and diverse. It’s also interrupted by three colossal dams, a minor one, and the remains of several former ones. For good measure, there’s a fabulous whitewater park in the small city of Manchester that is awfully fun, not to mention permissible sandbar camping from the City of Maquoketa down to the confluence, where the river is considered a “meandered” stream (i.e., public land). At a minimum, there are a dozen individual daytrips in six longish segments from Backbone State Park (where its two separate branches converge to become the mighty Maq) to the Mississippi River.
It’s not for nothing that of the eight total “Unique Natural Features” in the official DeLormé Atlas & Gazetteer for Iowa, two are along the Maquoketa River itself: Backbone Ridge and Maquoketa Caves, both in state parks. Tangentially, it’s also worth mentioning that even though there are only eight of these in the entire state of Iowa, half are located in Iowa’s Driftless area – a batted lash of the whole Hawkeye. As the joke goes, there are two parts of Iowa: the northeast and the rest of the state.
If the Driftless Area – that liminal space where glaciers did not bulldoze and demolish the landscape in the last Ice Age (call it “move slow and break things”) – is a place defined by what it doesn’t have, then delineating that negative space is even more, um, “meta.” As such, borders and boundaries are elusive and illusory at best. But for all intents and purposes, the Maquoketa demarcates the southernmost river in the Iowa quadrant of the Driftless Area but also the southernmost major river in the entire Driftless Area. (Its mouth is directly across from the fascinating though disturbing (and much disturbed) grounds of the Savanna Army Depot in Illinois and the stem of the Apple River due south.)
Like its northern neighbors, the Maquoketa is endowed with a wealth of limestone splendor; exposed bedrock from an ancient ocean lines the surface and punctuates the landscape with outcrops atop bluffs and boulders along the banks for mile after blissful mile. Like its riverine sibling to the south, the Wapsipinicon, the lower Maquoketa is awash in sand. Thanks to its modest gradient and enormous watershed, the Maquoketa is a relatively slow sip. It has numerous accesses that provide a wide array of trip experiences for paddlers to choose as well, from a mere 25′-wide delicacy beneath the breathtaking display of the Devil’s Backbone in Iowa’s oldest state park to the 250′ sprawl of sandy swagger near Spragueville.
In the indispensable guidebook, Paddling Iowa, author Nate Hoogeveen lays out four total trips along the Maquoketa, opening the taps below the Lake Delhi dam and announcing last call just before the Maquoketa dam, comprising 60 total miles. Respectfully, there are 30 good miles of paddling upstream of Delhi plus another 30 downriver from the City of Maquoketa. On and off for the last five years, I’ve personally paddled most of the river, a self-appointed and pretty ridiculous task considering the windshield time from Madison, WI, where I live, let alone the fuel/wear on my beleaguered Subaru. Some paddlers trek to the Ozarks or Boundary Waters to unwind and relax. Others drive back and forth to Iowa a million times to do work and recon. By “others” I mean this idiot, and by “work” I mean paddle against the wind and curse while bike-shuttling, because it’s Iowa – where it’s always windy, and somehow, no matter where you are, you’re always upwind.
We try to match our trips with the guidebooks that inspired them, even if that doesn’t coincide with the calendar of when we paddled the individual sections in question. But sometimes it doesn’t work out like that. And sometimes it takes just too much work to rework what’s already on the site to reconfigure future trips. With that in mind, this trip on the Maquoketa will be the first of several laid out over the next few months, and we’ll generally travel downriver.
My intention was to start at the very top and work my way down, but for reasons I can’t explain I lost all my photos from a trip at Backbone State Park to Dundee done on May 9, 2021. They’re just…gone. Given my poor reputation for cameras and whatnot, this will come as no surprise. But even I don’t willy-nilly delete whole folders of photos – not even after a barleywine or two. (Stranger still, I have the photos from a hike I took two days beforehand, but not of that paddle trip.) Such is life.
That trip had its moments for sure, but it wasn’t much to write home about (or redo). The Devil’s Backbone certainly is stunning and worth checking out, but it’s best to do as a flatwater paddle on the lake up and back, rather than a point-to-point river trip. Water levels inside the park’s interior are impossibly low most of the time; the lake is a fake lake; the dam requires a 900′ portage; and the sliver of river to Dundee is quaint but also prone to very shallow, rocky water. Definitely worth doing if you’re curious, but by no means must-do.
From Dundee down to Quaker Mill are 9 miles and change which, frankly, I have not paddled and probably won’t. Again, it’s over five hours and 300+ miles of roundtrip driving – and now $50 in Trump-signed currency to fill the tank. Besides, the going will be slow and rough at times, between low water levels, lots of sand and rock rubble, and downed trees. We wholly welcome and encourage anyone to paddle this trip, document it, and write it up to help fill in the blanks… Ditto Backbone State Park to Dundee. But as we also get older over here in Miles Paddled Command Central, the compulsion to dot ever i and cross each t to completion wanes in importance – especially for streams in states neither we nor most of our community live in. As life goes on, it gets shorter – and all the more reason to shine a light on the best of the best and leave the rest alone.
Overview:
Our trip starts with a veritable bang! Only a few paddle strokes from the developed landing at the Quaker Mill Dam access, paddlers will be whooshed down a clearly marked “tongue” of a ledge with a rapid/wave that registers a solid Class I+. Kayakers will want a skirt for this; open canoes should be fine. As hinted in its name, there used to be a dam here, built a century ago for the purpose of hydroelectricity. Hardly unique to this particular dam, its usage for generating electricity ceased long before its concrete bulwark was breached by floodwaters in 2008 (remember Lake Delton, here in Wisconsin?) and again in 2010. But rather than rebuild a failing technology that was outdated anyway, the Delaware County Conservation Board and Iowa DNR remediated the wounded river.
The surrounding landscape is similarly recovering. (It can’t be a coincidence that riparian is so close in sound to repairing, can it?) Nearby are two other streams, Honey Creek and Coffins Creek, that converge into the Maquoketa River from opposite banks at nearly the same spot. This watery matrix was a mess during those floods, so engineers had to “re-meander” the natural flow. It was also the end of March for our trip, so everything looked scrappy and scraggly anyway; come summer, the look and feel might be less “sketchy.” But chances are the stream here will be shallow and sandy any time of the year. At low levels, walking can be expected.
Tree-lined banks lead to a high bank topped with the backside of a housing subdivision. A moment later, an attractive steep sandy bank flanks the right side of the river. The intimacy of the moment vanishes as you approach town proper. There’s a primitive concrete access at Tirrill Park on the left in a quarter-mile straightaway due south. The river will then bend left below the bridge at Highway 13 (incidentally, the same Highway 13 that would take you over the Volga River in Osborne and the Turkey River in Elkader, were you to travel north). You might notice a surreal scene of aluminum canoes draped over tree limbs of Salvador Dali watches, behind the left bank near a park. Rivers also have persistence of memory, do they not? There’s a story there for sure! Past this is an excellent access also on the left, behind which are a shelter, shower, restrooms, and even a pavilion. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Whitewater Park!
Here, too, a deadbeat lowhead dam had been doing nothing for decades and was replaced in 2015. Every scrap of info about the park coming from whomever states that the drops (six total) are all 18″ tall. That seems “Midwest modest” to me, especially the first plunge that is easily 2′ high, but far be it from me to break out a measuring tape. Each drop is spaced an average of 150′ from one another, the river arcing gracefully to the right (south) in a sweet sweep of 800′ total – or a smidge longer than two football fields (including end zones). All of the drops have been thoughtfully engineered with laminar flow in mind – a fancy physics term for the direction of water being mostly uniform from here to there. (The opposite of this is called “turbulent flow”; think the crowds at Canoecopia spilling out of rooms in between presentations.) Each drop is underlaid with a concrete slab on the river bottom pointing downward in a steep diagonal. What this means in terms of safety is there are no backrollers or holes, no reverse hydraulic. However, that does not mean you can’t play in the waves or do tricks. Quite the opposite, in fact.
But we just plowed through like a couple toboggans crashing through snowdrifts. And then emptied the unwanted ballast once we were done. Kayakers need to wear skirts for this; canoes should have something covering the open bow deck. Easy access and a pedestrian path on the left allow for paddlers to get out, walk back, and run the fun all over again. It’s not nearly as technical as the whitewater park in Wausau and only half the length. But unlike Wausau, it’s free to use and open 24/7. For “lightwater” paddlers, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Scraggly surroundings return soon enough, past the railroad bridge, more houses, a city dog park. There is another official access, on river-right, off Schram Drive. As far as I can tell, the only advantage to this access is it lets you end here and avoid paddling past the wastewater plant and Highway 20 bridges (beneath which Scotty ran aground on some godawful rebar or rock that left a gouge in his plastic hull deep enough to warrant stitches). Something approximating uplands or ridges appears along or the other banks in this second half of the trip. Not coincidentally, the wildlife viewings improved here, too. Generally, where there isn’t sand, sand, and more sand, the river bottoms are submerged bedrock and result in accelerated velocity and spritely riffles, a Class I now and again.
Following an atypical eastward stretch for half a mile, the river bumps north for a moment and leads to another access, here on the left, at Pin Oak Wildlife Area. From here it’s only 1.75 miles to the takeout, arguably the most aesthetic stretch of the short trip due to the general lack of development. You’ll pass some kind of obelisk from a bygone dam on the left bank and a series of zesty Class I’s, which in turn are followed by an attractive wall of exposed limestone on river-right that lines just above the water for a hundred feet or so like a mural-mosaic. Sandy banks about 8′ tall scrim the left side, while a gentle ridge rises above on the right. Giant piles of sand/gravel lie like lumps above the right bank past a quarry operation. After this, the river swells in width, gets deep, and loses all current – courtesy of the Lake Delhi Dam 8.5 miles downstream!?! The 200′-wide lake prelude sloughs in a southeast straightaway to the takeout at Bailey’s Ford Park, on the left. The takeout is excellent – tons of parking, a campground, potable water and bathrooms, etc. But our trip ends on a whimper.
What we liked:
There is much to admire in Delaware County conservation and its stream stewardship. The one-and-done drop at the Quaker Mill Dam launch site is admirable in its own right. (Click appropriately to read more about the mitigation as well as its history.) But the whitewater park in downtown Manchester is another matter altogether. To be fair, blueblood whitewater paddlers might tsk about calling this “true” whitewater, due to none of the drops being technical or difficult or ranging higher than Class II. If kids are going down in tubes, well… But for “lightwater” paddlers, these six drops in 800′ are spectacular! Moreover, it’s the stewardship of the river and the community relationship it draws that positively shines. Because, to be real, who wants to stare at a stagnant cesspool? Nobody (except maybe two curmudgeonly bachelor farmers who are allergic to any kind of change about anything). Everyone else, locals and visitors alike – be they from other parts of Iowa or coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois (along with our tourist revenue) – are drawn to the primitive music of moving water and the kinetic dance of rapids. Add paddlers shooting down chutes and flumes and playing in the waves – this truly is no different than the whole “if you build it, they will come” phenomenon whispered in nearby Dyersville, home of the Field of Dreams. It is the epitome of ruin-to-renewal.
Stoughton, WI – are you listening? Manawa, WI? Any small town with a deadbeat dam wondering how to revive the local economy in an ecological way? Consider Manchester, IA.
What we didn’t like:
If you’ve been “spoiled” by the Maquoketa’s prettiest portions further downstream lying unevenly between its last two dams in Monticello and Maquoketa, respectively – which, to put into perspective, constitute about 1/3 of the river’s entire length – then the sandy, scrubby lowlands in the Manchester area might feel dull or unbecoming. Indeed, you wouldn’t even recognize this as the same Maquoketa River. But even if you didn’t know the long, dreamy stretch of the river downstream, here there’s way too much eyesore riprap along the banks, lots of houses, not much in the way of topography or geology, and nearly a mile of flatwater before the takeout.
And let it not go unkvetched: the wind was a menacing nemesis. Sure, how else do you get a sunny day in the upper 70s in March without strong southerly winds? And this 8-mile trip flows mostly south with an occasional jog going east. But that hardly matters. God alone could bestow a veritable round river in Iowa, a perfectly perfect sphere of 360 degrees, and still – still! – you’d be facing headwinds the whole time. How? I don’t know. But that’s how it is. Always.
If we did this trip again:
At the risk of mixing messages, I’m glad that Scotty and I did this trip, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to do it again. On account of a long there-and-back drive and having never paddled this segment of the river, we settled on an 8-mile paddle. Had I known then how short this trip would feel, we’d have begun at the Lindsey Bridge landing at 165th St for a more reputable 13-mile trip. Oh well.
As for the trip we did, there isn’t much going on between the whitewater park and the takeout other than one modest “mural” of exposed rock outcrops, a ridge or two, and a couple Class I’s. Thus, I’d try my luck starting further upstream, either at 165th Street or even in Dundee and end the trip at the Schram Park or Pin Oak accesses. (Note: the river would need to be higher than usual to have enough water to begin up in Dundee especially.) Venturing further downstream is strongly discouraged, unless you want to share the water with motorboats and jet-skis, be surrounded by development, and have zero current, on account of fake Lake Delhi and its ginormous dam. I swear that Lake Delhi is Iowa’s attempt at Lake of the Ozarks.
Ultimately, this part of the Maquoketa River is all about the whitewater park in Manchester. Totally worth going out of your way for, totally somewhere we’ll come back to and do again – and again after that.
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Related Information:
General: Delaware County Tourism
General: Manchester Whitewater Park
Guide: Paddling Iowa by Nate Hoogeveen
Guide + Brochure: Northeast Iowa Resource Conservation & Development
Outfitter: Avis Kayak Rentals
Video: Driftless Kayaker
Wikipedia: Maquoketa River
Photo Gallery:
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