Canoes pulled up on a gravel bar below a wooded limestone bluff on an Ozark National Scenic Riverways stream.
NPS / public domain
Missouri · Region

The Ozark Riverways & the St. Francois Mountains

Big Spring and Alley Mill on the Ozark Riverways, Johnson's Shut-Ins, Elephant Rocks, Fort Davidson at Pilot Knob and Onondaga Cave on the Meramec.

8 places to explore

The region splits in two for anyone driving it. The western half is float country. The Current and Jacks Fork run clear and cold out of giant springs through Shannon and Carter counties, protected since the 1960s as the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, with Eminence and Van Buren as river towns. The eastern half rises into the St. Francois Mountains, knobs of ancient granite and rhyolite, where MO-21 runs through the Arcadia Valley past Elephant Rocks, Pilot Knob and Taum Sauk Mountain, the highest point in Missouri, and the Black River pours through the shut-ins.

These hills were Osage (Wazhazhe) hunting ground, and the Osage Nation counts Onondaga Cave among its sacred sites in Missouri. Scots-Irish families from Appalachia followed in the early 1800s, then, in the 1880s, the railroads and lumber companies that stripped the pine and left the hills poor. Conservationists pushed back: Missouri made state parks at Big, Alley and Round springs in 1924, the CCC built at all three, and a fight in the 1950s kept dams off the Current.

Two things belong to this region alone. One is springs on a scale few places match, with Big Spring averaging close to 290 million gallons a day. The other is Pilot Knob, where Sterling Price's 1864 raid stalled against an earthwork that Black freemen had helped build.

What to See in The Ozark Riverways & the St. Francois Mountains

8 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Geology & Rock Formations

A line of huge rounded pink granite boulders on bare granite bedrock at Elephant Rocks State Park.

Elephant Rocks State Park

Graniteville

A train of rounded granite boulders 1.5 billion years old near Graniteville, weathered in place into a tor, beside the quarry that faced the Eads Bridge piers and paved the St. Louis levee.

View details →
The East Fork of the Black River pouring through gray volcanic rock at Johnsons Shut-Ins in autumn.

Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park

Lesterville

The East Fork of the Black River squeezed through chutes and potholes in ancient rhyolite, and a valley rebuilt after a mountaintop reservoir gave way before dawn on December 14, 2005.

View details →
A lighted walkway winding past stalagmites and flowstone in a large chamber of Onondaga Cave.

Onondaga Cave State Park

Leasburg

A Meramec River show cave entered first by boat from a millpond, split by barbed wire in a property war, saved from a dam that would have drowned it, and held sacred by the Osage Nation.

View details →
A view across golden glade grasses and bare winter woods toward the rolling St. Francois Mountains from Taum Sauk Mountain.

Taum Sauk Mountain State Park

Ironton

Missouri's highest point at 1,772 feet, an easy walk from the lot, and a rugged loop to the state's tallest waterfall in the worn roots of 1.5-billion-year-old volcanoes.

View details →

Natural Areas

The turquoise pool of Big Spring at the foot of a wooded bluff in summer.

Big Spring (Ozark National Scenic Riverways)

Van Buren

A spring at the foot of a dolomite bluff south of Van Buren averaging about 289 million gallons a day into the Current River, dissolving out a cave as it flows, beside a CCC lodge.

View details →

Historic Sites

The red Alley Mill beside the rushing blue-green outflow of Alley Spring under summer trees.

Alley Spring and Mill (Ozark National Scenic Riverways)

Eminence

The red 1893-94 roller mill on the Alley Spring branch west of Eminence, built to make wheat flour in corn country and turned by a turbine fed by the spring rather than the river.

View details →
Two iron cannons on the grass below the grassy earthen walls of Fort Davidson at Pilot Knob.

Battle of Pilot Knob State Historic Site (Fort Davidson)

Pilot Knob

The hexagonal earthwork in the Arcadia Valley where some 1,500 Union defenders broke Sterling Price's assault in September 1864, then slipped out at night and blew the magazine behind them.

View details →

Industry & Mining

The red frame Dillard Mill beside the rock dam and millpond on Huzzah Creek, with green fields behind.

Dillard Mill State Historic Site

Davisville

A red gristmill on Huzzah Creek, built by Emil Mischke from 1904 to 1908 with steel roller mills and a turbine, the center of a guest lodge from 1930, and still run for visitors.

View details →

Scenic Drives through The Ozark Riverways & the St. Francois Mountains

Scenic Byway

Route 66 Across Missouri: St. Louis to Joplin

About 316 miles of Route 66 from the Chain of Rocks Bridge around St. Louis, through Pacific, Devils Elbow, Springfield and Carthage to the Kansas line.

316 mi · 7.25 hrs

Stories from The Ozark Riverways & the St. Francois Mountains

History

The Galena Float

For half a century sportsmen floated the James and White rivers from Galena to Branson in flat-bottomed boats run by hill guides, until Table Rock Dam drowned the trip in 1958.

3 min read
Geology

The Gulf and the Spring

Near Thayer a cave roof fell in and left a canyon, and the creek that drains into it comes up nine miles away as one of the great springs of the Ozarks, in Arkansas.

3 min read

The Ozark Riverways & the St. Francois Mountains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

← Explore more of Open Road Guide