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…
Photo: Ronincmc / CC BY-SA 4.0
Caves
Meramec Caverns
About
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.
Highlights
The Stage Curtain, a seven-story sheet of flowstone lit for the sound and light showSeven levels and more than four and a half miles of mapped passageThe Mirror Room pool that reflects the ceiling and reads fifty feet deepLantern tours that trace the cave by flame, plus the Jesse James hideout legend
