Oct 22nd - Looking at Springs

I went over and had breakfast with the campers this morning. I didn't talk to any of them, just had some of the pancakes and bacon that was being served for breakfast.

After breakfast we drove around to look at some of the springs in southeast Missouri. Big Spring near Van Buren, Missouri. A couple of statistics that I found very interesting are its average daily flow, over 250 million gallons per day; and that it carries away 175 tons of dolomite/limestone every day.

 You can make her out Kathy is on the left, in front of the cave. On the right is a photographer and a couple who apparently getting married at the Spring today. The path up to where I was standing is about 4' wide. it consists of a combination of flat top rocks and level areas cut into the stone cliff. The drop down to the water was probably 50', but it looked like it was a LOT further. On the other side the cliff went up several hundred feet.

 After our trip to the spring we went back to Van Buren and had lunch at the Mercantile Restaurant. It used to be a mercantile store. There are photos on the wall showing shelves full of stuff.

 After lunch we walked by the Carter County court house on our way down to the Jolly Cone for ice cream.

After the ice cream we drove to Mammoth, Arkansas to see Mammoth Spring. What a downer. It is a pond that has two outlets but no inlet. You can see some disturbance from the water entering the pond from the spring, but not much. There is a LOT of water flowing through the outlets. It flows a little over 200 million gallons a day. They also advertise an aquarium and a fish hatchery. The aquarium is maybe 12 tanks 4'x4'x4' with fish in them hardly have room to swim. The hatchery was supposed to be open until 3:30 but when we got there at 3:10 it was already locked up.

Bottom line is that while Big Spring was worth the short trip, less than 30 miles, Mammoth Spring was definitely not worth driving the additional 70 miles from Big Spring.

Maramec Spring, even though it doesn't flow nearly as much as either of these two, was far more enjoyable.

On our way back we took a slightly different route to check out the location of Blue Spring. It is only about 25 miles from the camp. We may go look at it some other time but we were just to tired today. It is a 1.5 mile walk from the parking area to the Spring.

Tomorrow after church I am not doing anything for the rest of the day. I am TIRED, but it is a good tired. No one pushed me/us during the week, except us. It is easy to see that Dave and Sue, the camp owners/operators are really pleased by our efforts. They have souvenir shirts, hats, jackets, etc for sale. Dave told us to just take whatever we wanted.

It isn't quite 8 yet so I may veg out while watching a movie and then hit the hay.

Good night and may God bless you and yours.