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Places to go in Missouri.

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3 places

Gateway Arch National Park Lakes & rivers

Gateway Arch National Park

St. Louis, MO · Gateway to the West, Missouri

Gateway Arch is the most unusual national park in the country, a single 630-foot stainless-steel curve on the St. Louis riverfront that doubles as the nation's tallest monument. Ride the tram up inside one leg to an observation deck for a long look over the Mississippi River and the city, then walk the riverside grounds and the museum tracing America's westward expansion. At about 91 acres it is the smallest national park, easily seen in a day.

Meramec Caverns Caves

Meramec Caverns

Sullivan, MO · Missouri Ozarks

Cut into the Ozark hills outside Sullivan, Meramec Caverns runs more than four and a half miles through seven levels of limestone, and the formations earn the billboards: the Stage Curtain alone is a sheet of flowstone seven stories tall, lit up for the cave's sound and light show. Cool corridors open onto draped columns, a wine-table formation, and the Mirror Room, where a shallow pool throws the ceiling back at you and looks fifty feet deep. Book the lantern tour and you walk it the way the early guides and the Jesse James legend did, by flame instead of floodlight, with the limestone close enough to read.

Fantastic Caverns Caves

Fantastic Caverns

Springfield, MO · Missouri Ozarks

This is the one cave in North America you tour entirely from your seat, riding a propane Jeep-drawn tram down the bed of an ancient underground river for about a mile. The route runs beneath a low canopy of stalactites, soda straws, and cave coral past the Hall of Giants, a pair of massive columns named in 1867 by the twelve women who first explored here. A hunting dog found the opening in 1862, and the air stays a steady 60 degrees while the headlamps catch mineral pearls in the still pools below.