In our neck of the woods: Missouri Springs

Several weeks ago, Trish and I drove to southern Missouri to spend a night at the Wildwood Springs Lodge, a one-of-a-kind resort built in 1922 and lovingly restored for the purpose of having live concerts in the lobby. We've seen numerous concerts there, like Amazing Rhythm Aces, Leon Russell, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Foghat, Head East, Poco, and many more. This time it was North Mississippi Allstars. Great fun in a grand resort that's over a hundred years old (FIRST AND SECOND PHOTOS).

Anyway, as we were leaving the next morning, we stopped at Maramec Spring Park. The park is built around an astounding natural freshwater spring, where 100 million gallons (363 million liters) of water flow straight up out of the ground each day, creating the Maramec River (THIRD PHOTO).

To get a better feel for what this gushing water looks like, check out this 30-second video I recorded (Trish shows up at the end of this video): https://youtu.be/tvAToTwsqSc?si=-WTGep9TbrJAQhI9

Missouri has about 4,500 recorded springs. The top ten largest of these combined spit out over a billion gallons of water each day. This fresh, clean water coming from below ground is typically at about 57 degrees F (14ºC), even during the scorching days of summer.

Because of this perpetually cool water, some of these larger spring sites have been chosen for trout hatcheries. Trout are not native to Missouri, and they could not survive in the warm water of most of our rivers, but they do well in the cold water near these large springs, and trout fishing is popular in these areas.

Maramec Park has one of the trout hatcheries, and it produces a lot of trout, about 500,000 rainbow trout per year. The FOURTH PHOTO is from one of the trout-rearing pools near the spring's source: