The Eleven Point River and the Wild Heart of Mark Twain National Forest

The Mark Twain National Forest covers about one and a half million acres across nine separate units of the Missouri Ozarks, making it the only national forest in the state and the largest single federal landholding in Missouri. Its eastern and southern units anchor the landscape that most people picture when they think of the Ozarks: rugged limestone and dolomite hollows, clear springs, cedar glades, and rivers fed by water that has filtered for decades through karst bedrock.

The Eleven Point River is among the best of these. Designated a Wild and Scenic River under the original nineteen sixty-eight Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Eleven Point runs about forty-four miles through the Mark Twain's Irish Wilderness and Greer Spring areas before crossing into Arkansas. The river emerges from dozens of springs, the largest being Greer Spring, which discharges about two hundred twenty million gallons of water per day into the Eleven Point from a cave system whose full extent has not been mapped. The water temperature stays near fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit year-round, cold enough for rainbow and brown trout.

The designation under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was significant because it came in the same year the act was created, nineteen sixty-eight, making the Eleven Point one of the original protected rivers in the national system. Congress acted partly in response to a proposal to dam the river for flood control, a threat that conservation advocates had spent years fighting. The dam was never built.

The Glade Top Trail, a nationally designated scenic byway that runs along the ridgelines of the Mark Twain's Ava-Cassville unit to the west, offers a different landscape entirely: cedar glades and oak woodlands opening onto views of the Springfield Plateau that extend for miles on clear days. Both the river country and the glade country are in the same national forest, separated by sixty miles of Ozark topography.