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Meramec Caverns

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🕳️ Caves

Meramec Caverns

Sullivan, MO · Missouri Ozarks

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

Getting there

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Part of these collections

Curated guides that feature Meramec Caverns.

America's Best Caves22 places

America's Best Caves

Step out of the daylight into another world: the longest cave on the planet in Kentucky, a desert chamber big enough to swallow a stadium in New Mexico, an underground waterfall in Tennessee, and a living crystal cavern in Arizona. Some you walk, some you ride a boat through, and one you crawl with a headlamp. America's great caves and caverns, from the national parks to the lantern-lit show caves.