Blanchard Springs Caverns

(888) 757-2246

Dripstone National Recreation Trail

Dripstone National Recreation Trail tours are available year-round. Tickets for children's and adults' admission prices are sold in the Visitor Information Center, where the Dripstone National Recreation Trail tour begins. With a tour guide, you'll ride an elevator two hundred feet into the earth and find yourself in the gigantic Cathedral Room.

There are certain facts about the caverns that you should know in preparing for your tour. Throughout the year the temperature is a constant, cool 58 degrees F, so a sweater or light jacket is always comfortable. Humidity is close to 100 percent.

This scenic tour covers four-tenths of a mile in an hour. It is not a strenuous walk, and two seating areas along the trail are provided for orientation talks your guide will give regarding interesting features encountered along the trail.

Only fifty stairsteps must be negotiated on the entire tour. Persons with disabilities may use alternate trails, bypassing some formations.

You can take comfort in the fact that your safety has been a main consideration in the planning and construction of trails. Paved, comfortably wide paths are bordered by masonry curbs. Overall lighting is reinforced by interpretive lights which the guide turns on to display particularly beautiful or interesting formations.

Bats are rare in this portion of the cave, but you may be able to see tiny cave creatures such as salamanders and crickets.

You're only human if you have a momentary impulse to touch or take something from the caverns home with you. Please think how quickly the beautiful formations would disappear or be ruined if thousands of visitors followed that impulse.

From the Dripstone National Recreation Trail, you can enjoy practically every type of calcite formation found in limestone caves. Everything from delicate, hollow soda straws to massive flowstones and stalagmites. The trail takes you through two major rooms in the upper level of the cavern system. The Cathedral Room is long enough to hold three football fields and still have space left over. The many snow-white formations in the Coral Room are pure calcite, or calcium carbonate, the mineral that makes up limestone.

The limestone rock from which these incredibly varied formations develop was laid down in an ancient sea more than 350 million years ago. We can only speculate on how old the formations are. Take, for example, the impressive Giant Column which towers about seventy feet high. It was probably formed by a stalactite, lengthening from the ceiling, and a stalagmite rising from the floor. No one knows how many thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of years it took for dripping water to deposit the calcite and other minerals that you see in the column's color.

Depending on the amount of water that seeps into the caverns from the surface, formations sometimes grow as much as an inch or more in a few years, or as little as a fraction of an inch in one hundred years, or not at all during dry epochs.

In addition to the Giant Column, other features that will capture your attention and stir your imagination are the Indian Feather leaning against its companion flowstone; the Coral Pond with its fragile lace-like patterns formed by dikes and terraces beneath the shallow water; draperies, popcorn crystal, stalactites, stalagmites, a natural bridge of gravel, and huge piles of breakdown - slabs that fell from the ceilings ages ago.

Features of the Dripstone National Recreation Trail

Opening of the first tour in 1973, completed ten years of planning and development. An additional four years of work brought about the opening of the second trail, the Discovery Trial, in 1977.

Throughout the Dripstone National Recreation Trail, one walks amidst features of indescribable beauty, which are older than the pyramids.

Here in silence, punctuated only by the dripping water, nature has truly created a masterpiece. In quiet pools of water, almost every kind of cave formation is reflected.

A vast amount of dripstone is found in this portion of the Caverns for two reasons. First, this section is higher than the other, allowing air-chemistry changes which cause the dripstone to form, and second, this portion is older than lower areas, giving the features more time to develop.

For more information or tour reservations, write or call:

US Forest Service, 1001 East Main Street, Mountain View, AR 72560
Long distance toll free 1-888-757-2246; locally (870) 757-2211
e-mail: r8.ozark.bsc@fs.fed.us