At the Mouth of Cliff Cave
If you walk the Spring Valley Trail in South St. Louis County, you eventually reach the head of a ravine where water flows straight out of the bedrock. This is the entrance to Cliff Cave, the second-longest cave in St. Louis County.
The karst topography of Missouri—where limestone and dolomite slowly dissolve over millennia—creates these massive underground networks. Cliff Cave features over 4,700 feet of surveyed passage. The constant 57-degree temperature inside the cave has attracted visitors for centuries, from Native Americans who utilized the natural spring, to French fur trappers in the 1770s who reportedly used it as a riverside tavern.
But the most visible history at the cave entrance dates back to the years following the Civil War. In 1866, the Cliff Cave Wine Company was established, and they soon purchased the land to use the cave as a massive, naturally climate-controlled wine cellar. The stonework you see framing the entrance today is a remnant of that era, when the cave had a storage capacity of 100,000 gallons of wine.
Today, the cave serves a different purpose. The heavy iron gate spanning the entrance was installed in 2009. It allows the stream to flow out and the resident bat population—including the endangered Indiana bat—to fly in and out, while keeping human traffic out of their sensitive habitat.
The area immediately outside the cave remains a quiet, shaded spot where the stream cascades over moss-covered rocks before continuing its journey toward the nearby Mississippi River. It is a place where the geology of the region and the history of St. Louis overlap in a single, quiet ravine.
Have you visited Cliff Cave Park?