(Radio Iowa) – Red Haw State Park is reopening its campground next week, more than three years after a powerful tornado tore through the southern Iowa park near Chariton.

Chad Kelchen, a district supervisor with the Iowa DNR’s Parks, Forests, and Preserves Bureau, says it’s been a challenging process to make repairs, and clean up and haul away the many hundreds of downed trees. Kelchen says campers and picnickers will notice some changes at the park.

“With the tornado coming through the campground like that, we were forced to rearrange the campground,” Kelchen says. “We’ve actually subtracted sites, making the sites a little larger and a little easier to get into. We have a few pull-through sites that overlook the lake now, and we have 52 sites in total, with the majority being electric sites.”

Red Haw State Park in 2025 (DNR photo)

The tornado struck on March 5th of 2022 and it was a whopper, rating as an EF-3 — with winds approaching 165 miles an hour — reducing wide sections of dense forest to an absolute mess.

“The tree damage was so severe that some of those trees were not safe to take down. We had to bring in specialized equipment, specialized labor forces to do that,” Kelchen says. “Then things like underground cables were ripped up by tree roots being pulled out of the ground by the winds. There was a lot of unforeseen damage that we found. The further we got into cleaning it up, the more that we found.”

Over the past three years, several events at the park have rallied dozens of volunteers to help remove debris and restore order.

“They were crucial,” he says. “That’s a small park with a single staff person in it, so bringing in those extra hands really helped us bring the debris out of the timbers and plant the new trees and all that we’ve done to bring the park back up and ready to go.”

While an untold number of trees were lost in the twister, Kelchen says they’ve planted many hundreds more since 2022, and they’ll continue doing so.

“I think we planted 1,000 trees in the timber, and then 50 or 60 in the campground to get us started,” Kelchen says. “Tree planting will be something that will occur each year in a smaller scale, just so we get a diverse year class and a diverse species we expect in the campground and in the area surrounding.”

The park features a 70-acre lake and more than four miles of grassy trails. The campground is slated to reopen July 1st.