Things to do in Clear Lake

The Surf Ballroom

460 North Shore Drive, and the reason people who've never set foot in Iowa know the name of this town.

On 2 February 1959 the Winter Dance Party played here — Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, plus Dion & The Belmonts and Frankie Sardo — to a crowd of over a thousand. Just before one in the morning a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza took off from Mason City bound for Fargo, the nearest airport to their next date in Moorhead, Minnesota. It came down a few miles out. All four aboard died, including the 21-year-old pilot, Roger Peterson.

The building you walk into is the one that was here that night — opened 1 July 1948, after fire destroyed the original the year before.

It's run by the North Iowa Cultural Center and Museum, went on the National Register in September 2011, and was designated a National Historic Landmark on 13 January 2021 — Iowa's twenty-seventh. It is emphatically not a museum piece: it books around thirty shows a year, and the Surf Music Experience Center opened next door in September 2025 with an immersive ninety-minute exhibit.

Call before you go. Parts of the ballroom and museum close for concerts and private events, and that's the single most likely thing to spoil a visit. Hours, tickets and what’s on are on their site — and the Experience Center is unusually well set up for accessibility, with assisted listening, ASL-interpreted shows and sensory-friendly sessions on notice.

Half a block west, Three Stars Plaza is a fifteen-foot sculpture of three records stacked on a spindle. At night it glows blue and plays their music softly. It's free and it's always open.

The crash site

This is the one visitors ask about most, and it catches people out because it isn't in town and it isn't signposted from the highway.

Getting there: from Highway 18, north on N 8th Street for 4.7 miles as it becomes Grouse Avenue. Where the pavement curves west, take the gravel road east — 310th Street — then turn immediately north onto Gull Avenue. Half a mile north brings you to the T-junction with 315th Street. About eleven minutes from the Surf.

You'll know it when you see it: a giant pair of black horn-rimmed glasses marks the trailhead. Park across the road at the Don McLean parking area — free, with restrooms and bottled water by donation.

From there it's half a mile on foot along the fence line to a stainless steel guitar and three stainless records marking where the plane came to rest, made by a fan named Ken Paquette in the late 1980s. A second memorial to Roger Peterson was added in 2009.

This is private working farmland and access exists because the landowner allows it. Stay on the fence-line path, keep out of the crop rows, take your rubbish with you, and leave any tribute at the memorial itself. There's no fee, no gate, no staff and no shelter — it's an unpaved field track that turns to mud after rain and disappears under snow, so wear the right shoes and dress for it.

It's quiet out there and it stays with people. Go in the morning if you can.

If you're making a day of it, Music Man Square in Mason City is twenty minutes away — Meredith Willson's boyhood home and a full-size replica of the 1912 streetscape from the film. Seasonal, March to October, closed Sundays and Mondays. Mason City also has the last remaining hotel Frank Lloyd Wright designed anywhere in the world, still operating, with tours.