Mark Twain National Forest and the Current River

Mark Twain National Forest is Missouri's only national forest. It covers approximately one point five million acres across nine units scattered through the Missouri Ozarks, and like most things in the Ozarks, its character is defined less by dramatic elevation than by the quality of its water. The forest sits over a karst limestone landscape where springs emerge from the ground with a clarity and temperature that the surface world cannot explain.

The Current River, which flows through the heart of the Ozarks and is protected as part of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the first national riverway established in the United States, maintains a temperature of approximately fifty-eight degrees year-round, fed by Big Spring, one of the largest springs in the United States. On summer afternoons when the air temperature reaches ninety, the Current River runs cold enough to require a wetsuit for comfortable extended time in the water. This temperature differential, between the hot Ozark summer and the cold-spring-fed river, is one of the primary reasons the Ozarks became a regional recreation destination in the late nineteenth century.

The forest's name changed over time. The federal government proclaimed both the Clark National Forest and a separate forest named for Mark Twain on the same day in nineteen thirty-nine, and in nineteen seventy-six the two were combined under the single name Mark Twain National Forest. Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the name Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, a small town in Monroe County, and spent his childhood in Hannibal, on the Mississippi River's west bank. His pen name came from the river: mark twain is the leadsman's call for two fathoms of water, the minimum depth considered safe for Mississippi River navigation. The forest named for him sits inland from the river that made his name, in the Ozark uplands his fiction mostly left behind.