Treasure Hunting

by Aidan Strickland

ave you ever been on a treasure hunt? It's a game where players race to find the objects on a list, such as old birthday candles or harder-to-find things, like a pine cone bigger than a baseball or a cat with a specific color of fur. The person or team who finds the most objects on the list wins.

Like the list for a treasure hunt, Missouri has many interesting animals, plants and physical features. Some, like the dogwood tree or the Ozark Mountains, everyone knows about. Some of Missouri's other natural treasures are harder to find or more unusual. Here are some of Missouri's oldest, deepest, highest and neatest natural treasures.

Oldest Living Thing

The oldest living thing in Missouri is a tree. Perched on a rocky outcropping in the Current River watershed sits an eastern red cedar estimated to be 1,073 years old. Many eastern red cedars were chopped down a hundred years ago to make pencils and other wood products, but this ancient tree's out-of-the-way location has kept it from harm.

Scientists can tell how old a tree is by its shape and also by counting the number of growth rings in the wood. Growth rings are the light and dark circles you see on the top of a stump or the end of a log. Each year the tree adds another ring, so by counting the number of rings, scientists are counting the number of years the tree has been alive.

To count the rings without cutting down the tree, scientists remove a narrow cross-section of the wood using a tool called an increment borer. This process doesn't hurt the tree, and soon the tiny hole fills with sap and heals.

Deepest Pond

Believed to have formed when the New Madrid earthquake hit in 1811, Blue Pond is Missouri's deepest natural pond. Located at the Castor River Conservation Area in Bollinger County, Blue Pond is 66 feet deep or more and is unusually large at 230 feet long and 150 feet wide.

The pond's secluded location helps preserve rare and endangered plants that grow there, such as Loesel's twayblade orchid and the greenwood orchid, plants that normally are found much farther north in the United States.

Unlike most ponds people visit, Blue Pond is closed to fishing and boating in order to protect these fragile plants. Visitors come to watch wildlife and enjoy the quiet setting.

Largest Animal

Missouri's largest wild animal is the black bear. Weighing as much as 600 pounds, a black bear in your backyard would be pretty hard to miss--but it's highly unlikely you would see one. Bears are rare in Missouri.

Bears were plentiful in the early days of the state but by the 1850s--as logging and hunting increased and more people moved to Missouri --black bears began disappearing.

Lately, black bears have started to return and in the last five years, people in the Ozarks have spotted them more frequently. Bears originally migrated up from Arkansas, but Missouri now has its own black bear population.

Black bears live in heavily wooded areas. In the winter they make their homes under fallen trees, tree roots or in caves or slight hollows in the ground that they line with leaves, grass and sticks. In the summer they move from place to place, sleeping in trees or on the ground. Bears spend most of their time looking for something to eat and taking occasional naps. Berries, acorns and other nuts are some of bears' favorite foods.

Longest Cave

Crevice Cave in Perry County is the longest cave in the state with 28 miles of mapped passageways. Perry County has not only Crevice Cave, but 628 more, making it the county with the most caves.

Marvel Cave, located at Silver Dollar City in Branson, is the deepest cave. Entering the cave, visitors descend more than 383 feet below the surface.

Missouri has the most caves open to visitors in the United States. Only Tennessee has more caves than Missouri, although an average of 140 new caves have been discovered here each year for the past 35 years. That puts the total number of caves in the state over 5,000.

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