City: Springfield, MO

Category: Tours & Attractions

Telephone: (417) 833-2010

Address: 4872 North FR 125

Description: If you want to see the Ozarks underground without having to walk, this is the place! Propane-powered Jeep trains take you right through the cave, billed as “America’s Only Ride-Thru Cave.” (We have BIG caves in Missouri! Beat that, Texas!) This also is probably the only cave in the nation that is wheelchair accessible. On hot summer days, there can be a line, and if you have to wait, a good side trip to hike off the kids’ excess energy is Canyon Trail, a mile walk through the woods to the Sac River. The facility operates a research program that tracks, by the use of dyes, the flow of underground water. The program has discovered, through tracing rainwater and sinkhole drainage, that the cavern has a watershed of about 15 square miles. The program helps educate groups and schoolchildren about our Ozarks underground by demonstrating this drainage and by taking them into parts of the cave not normally toured. To get to Fantastic Caverns, take MO 13; exit off I-44 on Springfield’s north side. Go 1.5 miles north on MO 13, turn west onto Fantastic Caverns Road, and follow the signs. As we say in the Ozarks, you can’t miss it! Admission in 2009 was $21.50 for adults and $13.50 for children 6 through 12.