Steel Bridge to Muck Forty

Below the Highway 17 bridge the Jacks Fork runs four miles southeast and then east, past Blue Spring, to Muck Forty Hole. Through this reach the river falls about 8 feet a mile1. The whole reach lies inside the national riverways2 (Chapter 10), and four public places reach the water: the Buck Hollow landing at the bridge, Bluff View on the left bank, the campground at Blue Spring and the sites at Baptizing Hole3 (Chapter 11). The valley is narrower here than above the bridge, and it has never held many people4. Plate A4 shows the reach turned on the page to follow the river.

The valley is close to a canyon, with no bottomland fields, and it stays that way to about the twenty-fifth mile5. Bluffs stand on the outsides of the bends and gravel bars fill the insides, and between them the river is a chain of long pools joined by short, rocky chutes. It runs on the Gasconade Dolomite, the formation that holds most of the caves6 of the upper river. Near Blue Spring a ledge of fossil algal reef, the cryptozoon reef, juts into the river at the waterline7 (Chapters 1 and 13). Two of the short faults mapped across the upper river carry the names of hollows in this reach, Buck Hollow and Belew Hollow8 (Chapter 1).

Above Blue Spring the river’s flow comes mostly from rain. In an average April it carries almost eight times9 what it carries in an average September, and a dry August can drop it below twenty cubic feet a second10 at the bridge (Chapter 14). Blue Spring adds about ten cubic feet a second, the first large spring on the river, and in a dry summer that raises the flow by more than a third11 at a single bend (Chapter 12). A narrow valley also floods high. The flood of record at the bridge came on May 8, 2002, at 27.68 feet12, and on November 5, 2024, the river crested at 25.14 feet, the second-highest13 mark the gauge has taken (Chapter 14).

Much of what has changed within living memory can be seen from the water. The resort cabins at the bridge have fallen in or been torn down, and the swimming holes at the bridge and at Blue Spring have narrowed14 (Chapter 15).

The miles in the headings are counted from the junction of the prongs along the surveyed channel. The Highway 17 bridge is at mile 7.0 and Blue Spring at mile 9.815. Left and right are as you face downstream. River left is mostly the north and east bank, though the horseshoe at Blue Spring turns it around for a few hundred yards.

Bend by bend

Steel Bridge

Bridge, landing and gauge · mile 7.0 · Plate A4; Fig. 21

Highway 17 comes down River Hill (Reach C) and crosses the river 3.6 miles north of Mountain View16. The sign calls the crossing Buck Hollow, floaters say 17 or the 17 Bridge, and Mountain View says Steel Bridge17; how one crossing came to carry so many names is told in Chapter 18. Buck Hollow Ford took the road between Mountain View and Summersville across the river’s rock bottom before the Civil War, and the county’s bridge of 1913–1418 replaced it. The ford, the fight over where the bridge should go and the bridges since are the subject of Chapter 8. The present bridge dates from 200519. The Buck Hollow landing, with parking and a short river trail20, lies a little below it on the south bank, and the bridge has been the usual put-in for the upper river for about a century21 (Chapters 9, 11 and 20).

The pool at the bridge is Buck Hollow Bluff Hole, long a favorite place for families from Summersville and Mountain View to swim and picnic22 (Reach C). Swimmers went in from the gravel bar at the foot of the hill and swam along the bluff23 (Chapters 15 and 19). For years gravel was dug from the pool after floods24. In the aerial photographs of 1995 to 2026 the channel under the bridge and around the bend to the landing has not moved, while the gravel bars beside the bridge and at the landing have grown and the open water between them has narrowed25 (Fig. 21; Chapter 15). Immediately below the bridge a swift, narrow, rocky chute is said to claim a lot of canoes26.

Gauge 07065200, “Jacks Fork near Mountain View,” has stood at the bridge since February 200027 and has recorded the river’s flow since October 200128. Its readings are the usual measure of the water on the upper river, and its record is the subject of Chapter 14. With little spring water to steady it, the river here warms and cools with the air. In 2012 it ranged from about 36 °F to about 90 °F, the widest range29 of any site measured in the riverways that year (Chapter 16).

Buck Hollow and Roadside Spring Cave

Hollow, creek and spring cave · left bank · mile 7.0

The landing and the bridge take their name from a real hollow. Buck Hollow comes in from the north at the bridge, carrying a creek that runs about two and a half miles and drains about two and a half square miles30, the largest side stream in the reach (Table D.1). The Stallman School stood near its head. Two miles beyond, across the flat, is Oakside, whose post office opened on March 29, 1890, with John L. C. Richards as postmaster, and whose church has a large cemetery31 beside it.

Near the mouth of the hollow, about 500 feet from the river, is a spring, Roadside Spring Cave. On December 29, 1980, it was the only water in the hollow’s stream, coming out of a thin ledge of dolomite at about 850 feet of elevation at about a quarter of a cubic foot a second. From the highway the opening looks about thirty feet wide and two or three feet high, too low to enter. The real entrance may have been missed, or the name may belong to another cave recorded in the wrong place32 (Chapter 13).

Camp Witbeck, Cardinal Acres and Whitbeck Hole

Former resort and pool · right bank, below the bridge · Whitbeck Hole about mile 7.2

The cabins of Camp Witbeck, renamed Cardinal Acres in 1941, stood in a row on a narrow terrace on the south bank a little below the bridge, each with a view of the river33. The resort’s history, from its opening in the early 1920s to the sale of 600 acres around the bridge to the United States in 196934, is told in Chapter 9. What remains is a cultural landscape of 5.4 acres, the largest group of cabins and cabin ruins the government owns anywhere in the riverways. In 2013 two cabins and two privies still stood among stone foundations, a seven-foot chimney, cisterns, the foundation of a pumphouse and old retaining walls, and daffodils and irises35 from the resort years still came up along the walls in spring. A Mountain View resident who does not remember the resort has walked up the path and explored the old cabins36.

Below the cabins, where the river bends back to the southeast at about mile 7.2, a small pool rimmed by a rocky bluff on the left has been called Whitbeck Hole37. It is a separate pool from Buck Hollow Bluff Hole38 at the bridge. The camp’s bluff was a jumping place39 (Chapter 19), probably the bluff at the bridge pool40, which a Howell County man called Buck Hollow Bluff. His wife’s family spent every Fourth of July at Buck Hollow from the 1970s on41; he was there for almost fifty of them and saw hundreds of people jump from the bluff.

Royal Hole

Pool · about mile 7.5 · Plate A4

The pool known as Royal Hole42, a short way below Whitbeck Hole43, is marked by backwater and rocks on the right. Wild goats, once common along the Current and the Jacks Fork, still lived near it around 1980. Royal Hole was on the park’s list of primitive campsites in 198144, and a short park road carries its name45. A resident who came to Mountain View from Oklahoma in 1979 marked a pool a little below the bridge as Blue Hole46, one of several on the upper river to carry that name (Reach C; Chapter 18).

The unnamed branch and the mussel bed

Side branch and riffles · left bank · about miles 7.6 to 8.4

A little over half a mile below the bridge the next creek of any size comes in from the north, draining about three-quarters of a square mile47. It has no recorded name.

Between that branch and McCubbin Hollow lay the richest mussel site found anywhere in the riverways in 2023–24. Six species were found there, five of them alive, more than at any other site in the park, among them the purple lilliput48, a small mussel critically imperiled in Missouri, whose larvae are known to grow on green and longear sunfish49. At a site near the bridge first searched in 1982, finding nineteen live mussels in 2017–19 took longer50 than at any other site on the upper river. The river’s mussels and their decline are the subject of Chapter 16.

Lily Pad Hole

Pool and springs · about mile 7.9 · Plate A4

The pool known as Lily Pad Hole, about 7 feet deep at low water52, lies under a high bluff on the left, with tall pines and cedars on the grassy slope above it and lily pads along the water’s edge. A good spring comes in on the left after running about a hundred feet down a small hollow from under a rock, and two small springs flow off the hill on the right; in summer they leave little more than slick rock to mark the place. A larger spring is said to roar out of holes in the bluff into a slough that reaches the river unseen through the thicket on the left51. At or a short way below the hole the river passes from Texas County into Shannon County53.

McCubbin Hollow and McCubbin Spring Hole

Hollow, spring and pool · right bank · mile 8.4 · Plate A4

McCubbin Hollow comes in from the south, the larger of two hollows that reach the river within a few hundred yards of each other. Its creek runs a little over two miles and drains about two square miles54. The hollow is dark, rough and narrow, under three layers55 of growth: tall trees, shade-tolerant underbrush, and ferns and moss on the ground.

McCubbin Spring rises about a quarter of a mile up the hollow from under several slabs of rock on its right side. It is said to average about a million gallons a day, the largest spring on the river to this point. Its branch runs out of the hollow over a gravel bar into McCubbin Spring Hole. A small spring comes in at the edge of the river above the hole, and nearby is a shelter56.

A William McCubbin is said to have lived in the hollow and run a mill in the 1850s, placed both on the spring branch58 and on the river a little below Belew Hollow59. McCubbin’s Mill was still standing during the Civil War57, when a Union patrol came home by way of it in November 186360 (Chapters 5 and 6).

Belew Hollow

Hollow, cave and shelter · right bank · mile 8.6 · Plate A4

Belew Hollow, the smaller of the pair at about three-quarters of a square mile61, is short and steep, and its creek drops through it in two wet-weather waterfalls. Under the lower one is Belew Hollow Shelter, a half-horseshoe overhang about thirty-five feet wide and up to twenty feet deep, with a splash pool outside. In normal flow the hollow’s stream sinks into its bed upstream and comes out again from the back wall of the shelter. The base of the Roubidoux62 lies at the lip of the upper waterfall, so the two falls step from the Gasconade up into the next formation. Belew Cave, thirty-five to forty feet63 long, opens in the same stretch (Chapter 13).

Floaters on overnight trips64 have used the mouth of the hollow as a stopping place, and in 2023 mussel surveyors found three species near it65. One of the pools called Gar Hole has been placed near the mouth of Belew Hollow66 (Reach C; Chapter 18).

Simpson Hole

Pool and cave · about mile 8.8 · Plate A4

Simpson Hole is a good fishing hole in rocky water that suits smallmouth bass and goggle-eye. A small spring enters on the right, and nearby a shelter is marked by a large sycamore67 growing out of it. Simpson Hole Cave opens in the base of a vertical bluff in the same stretch, and anyone floating past can see its entrance, about thirty feet wide and twelve high. A caving party in 2007 found it heavily used, with the remains of a campfire, some broken formations and about two dozen pipistrelle bats, and suggested a gate68 (Chapter 13). Double Cave, named for its two large entrances and mapped in 198469, lies in the same stretch between the bridge and Blue Spring.

A little below Simpson Hole an unnamed branch drains a little over a square mile from the north. It is the largest creek in the reach without a recorded name70.

Beaver Hole and Slant Rock Hole

Pools · about mile 9.2 · Plate A4

Beaver Hole, also called Beaver Den Hole, is a good fishing hole bordered by a bluff on the right. Little Bottom Hole, with a bluff on the left71, lies somewhere above it; its place is not fixed.

Slant Rock Hole follows, and it is said to be the prettiest hole on the Jacks Fork. A high bluff stands on the right, and a large rock slants down into the water. The gravel bar on the left has long been a favorite place to camp72.

Bluff View and the Salvation Army camp

Access and former camp · left bank · about mile 9.5 · Plate A4

In the 1920s the Salvation Army kept a camp on the left73 bank74 here, a retreat for its national officers with several buildings. Bluff View, the park’s primitive access on the same bank, may stand on part of the old camp’s ground, though no deed has yet been found to show it. It is reached from the north side of the river by Route O and County Road 43775. By river Bluff View lies a quarter of a mile above the Blue Spring campground76, and by road it lies on the other side of the river from it (Chapter 8; Part Six).

Below the camp a shallow stretch runs past lily pads on the right toward the old ford, and red streaks of iron oxide77 in the clay show in the bluff ahead. In 2017–19 the river near Bluff View and Blue Spring held thirty-eight live mussels of four kinds, among them the only two live slippershells78 found on the Jacks Fork in 2017–19 (Chapter 16).

The Blue Spring bluff

Caves, pinnacle and tunnel · left bank, above the spring · Plate A4

A short way above Blue Spring the bluff on the left is broken by a cleft, and the cleft has cut a pinnacle of dolomite loose from the bluff behind it. Cavers call the pinnacle a rock island. A small saddle behind it is the abandoned course of a hollow that once ran straight into the Jacks Fork. A large sinkhole opened over the ancestral Blue Spring system and captured that hollow’s water79, and as the ground collapsed the cleft formed and left the pinnacle standing alone. Two small caves pierce it. Flue Cave has a window about forty feet above the river and a chimney, the flue80, that rises to the top of the island. Blue Spring Natural Tunnel runs thirty feet through the pinnacle. It is dry, the remnant81 of a larger cave from before the rock around it wore away.

Across the cleft is Hospital Cave, which has three entrances. One is a small opening in a steep draw, entered by a wide break in the bluff and hard to find82 without knowing it is there. The cave is 375 feet long. About a hundred feet in, a flowstone squeeze has been polished smooth “from the passage of many bodies,” and a steady wind blows through it. An upper level holds soda straws. The cave is an older outlet83 of the water that now comes out at Blue Spring: as the system cut deeper it found a new way out, and Hospital Cave was left dry above it. Its name rests on a Civil War story, the earliest record of which is a hand-lettered sign seen in the 1930s84; people on the river still tell it, and some doubt it or give the cave another use85 (Chapter 13).

Loop Cave86 opens in the same bluffs and can be seen from the river: a wide entrance about twenty-one feet across and six feet high, divided by a pillar of rock, and so dry inside that it would make “an excellent shelter.” At least fourteen cave entrances open within a quarter of a mile of Blue Spring, and there are probably more87.

Blue Spring Ford

Ford · above the spring · about mile 9.7

The old Blue Spring cut-off road crossed the river at Blue Spring Ford. By one account it linked the old Lead Mines Trail with the Virginia Warriors Path, the road later known as the Springfield–Van Buren road88. The ford is still driven at low water by high-clearance vehicles89 (Chapter 8; Part Six).

Blue Spring

Spring, swimming hole and campground · left bank · mile 9.8 · Plate A4; Figs. 16 and 22

Blue Spring is the landmark of the upper river. The Jacks Fork swings around the bluff here, about 240 feet high91, in one of its tightest bends. The spring rises at the foot of the bluff on the outside of the bend, and a large gravel bar fills the inside of the horseshoe, where the campground90 sits.

The spring. The water comes out of a cave at the base of the cliff, through a pile of fallen rock that nearly hides it from the river. The cave mouth is about sixty-five feet wide and perhaps twenty-five feet high. Inside the mouth are the broken remains of a concrete dam, which by one account was dated 193893 (Chapter 13). Beyond it the rise pool lies deep blue under a ceiling fifteen to eighteen feet above the water, probably twenty feet deep or more92. A floater passing one July, probably in 1934, saw “a pool of goblin blue in a v-shaped cleft of the floor” and three blind fish94 in it (Chapters 9 and 13). At low water the spring runs about ten cubic feet a second, close to seven million gallons a day, the second-largest95 spring on the Jacks Fork after Alley (Chapter 12).

The spring’s water falls as rain on about fifty-six square miles of upland, much of it to the north-northeast, where no water runs off on the surface97 and the sinkholes cluster96 (Chapter 12). A large sink past Bell Flat known as the Drop-In is said to have fallen in early in the twentieth century, and one sinkhole nearer the river has water running through its bottom. After a gully washer, it is said, cornstalks98 have come out of Blue Spring when no corn was growing nearby. Blue Spring’s recharge area holds more open land and less public land99 than almost any other spring’s in the riverways (Chapter 17).

The swimming hole. The pool along the outer bank below the spring has long been a favorite swimming hole, with a big rock100 at its edge for jumping (Fig. 16; Chapter 19). Between the aerial photographs of 2014 and 2020101 the gravel bars filled the inside of the bend and the deep water narrowed to a channel against the rock and the bluff (Fig. 22). How that happened is the subject of Chapter 15. The narrow run below the spring can be difficult102 in a loaded canoe (Chapter 20). From 1991 to 1998 state biologists sampled the crayfish of this stretch every year, and snorkeling around the bluff walls and boulders of the deep pools they often saw big spothanded crayfish103 where their sampling frames could not reach (Chapter 16). The spothanded crayfish lives only in the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas and is one of the larger crayfish of the state, up to about four and a half inches long. It breeds in September and October, the females carry their eggs and then their young through the spring, and most live about two years104. Fish taken from the river at Blue Springs in 1939 and kept at the Field Museum in Chicago number more than two hundred, most of them northern studfish, rosyface and bleeding shiners and Ozark minnows, with a few hornyhead chubs, stonerollers, rainbow and greenside darters, a northern hog sucker and a blackspotted topminnow105. Blue Spring is also one of the few springs in the park big enough to change the river’s temperature106 below it.

The settlement and the campground. Blue Springs was once a small settlement around the spring, in Sections 31 and 32 of Township 28 North, Range 6 West, on the road now numbered OO. On July 4, 1887, the Current River Land and Cattle Company held a large picnic at the spring. The company then ran more than 500 cattle on the range and had lately shipped in sixteen Hereford bulls by railroad from Flint, Michigan, and it hoped to buy Blue Spring, but the purchase fell through108. By the late 1930s the place was promoted as Blue Spring Park, a tourist development with “a very fine deep spring”109 as its chief attraction. In 1969 the site was ranked third choice for a Park Service living-history development showing the Ozarks around 1910107, and nothing came of it.

A large rock house across the river from the spring is said to have been built by a man named Brown, who had patented a process used in oil drilling; around 1980 a park ranger110 lived in it. By one account Brown was tied to a tree and left to die in the 1950s111. By 1977112 the park had a campground, picnic area, comfort station and ranger station at Blue Spring. Today a backcountry campground lies inside the horseshoe at the end of County Road 493113, which runs down to the river from Highway OO (Chapter 11; Part Six).

The Blue Spring of the Jacks Fork is a different spring from the far larger and deeper Blue Spring on the Current River east of Eminence (Chapter 18).

Work Shanty Hole

Pool · about mile 9.9 · Plate A4

The first hole below Blue Spring, known as Work Shanty Hole, is small and shallow. A good spring enters at the river’s edge below the Brown house, and a slough lies on the left114 out of sight of the river.

Baptizing Hole

Pool, spring cave and backcountry campsites · about mile 10.0 · Plate A4

Baptizing Hole lies around the bend below Blue Spring, with a high gravel bar on the right, a bluff on the left and several rocks in the pool. It is a good fishing hole. A small spring comes in midway along the left side; in spring it can be seen plainly, and in summer it can be heard115 but takes some effort to find. The spring comes out of the bluff and cascades over boulders into the river. Baptizing Hole Spring Cave116 lies in the same stretch (Chapter 13).

A fork of the Blue Spring road leads down to the hole, and a ford here once led across the river to a gravel road to Summersville by way of Routes O and 17117. The wide, level bank drew church and group picnics118; the gatherings and the name119 are the subject of Chapter 19. People who know the upper river still call it Baptizing Hole, or Baptism Hole120. The park keeps two backcountry campsites at the end of a short road, counted with Blue Spring’s121 (Chapter 11).

Muck Forty Hole and Hughes Hollow

Pool and hollow · about mile 11.0 · Plate A4

A bluff on the right at a bend in the river marks Muck Forty Hole, a good fishing hole, with a small dripping spring122 at its upper end on the right. Hughes Hollow, a small hollow on the federal maps draining about a third of a square mile, comes in from the north123 at about the same point. The pool is named for John “Muck” Reece, who is said to have fallen out of a johnboat there one night while gigging by pine-knot light and come up claiming he had sunk forty “foot”124 (Chapter 18). The name Bay Mill Hole has also been placed beside it, at springs on the right bank125, perhaps an older name for the pool or for one next to it; no mill has been found to explain the name, and the name is not known locally126. The pool’s own name is written both Muck Forty and Muck 40127.

Places not yet placed

Bachers. A single backcountry campsite with a river landing, also called Bacher Landing, lies at the end of about three miles of gravel128 road below Baptizing Hole. The park counts it with Blue Spring’s129 sites (Chapter 11). The name is presumably a family’s, with the apostrophe130 dropped as federal mapmakers drop them131; which Bacher family has not been traced (Chapter 8).

On to Reach E

Below Muck Forty the river runs through Hughes Hollow Hole, long and shallow, past the mouth of Daveys Hollow132 and into the Jacks Fork Natural Area, the beginning of Reach E and Plate A5. Rules for the river are in Part Six.