Big Spring

Beautiful and the facilities are great! Enjoyed our stay.

Campsite was clean and the amenities were in good order. This was an incredible location. The springs are beautiful and the river is crystal clear. We will definitely be back!

We were on a cross-country driving trip recently, arrived at Big Spring to camp in the HUGE campground (100+ spaces), and every site was marked "reservation only" through recreation.gov. There were a grand total of 3 other campers there that night! And not an official park person to be found!! We had already encountered the system at Great Sand Dunes, where we pulled in and were also told all sites were by reservation ONLY--tho there were still some empty ones.

The website is difficult, if in remote area often don't have connectivity, and when on the road can't always reliably know where we will end up for the night. This reservation-only system does NOT work and we do NOT want it. It deprives the parks of income (could certainly have sold empty sites on first-come, first-serve basis). More important, it deprives visitors of the unique chance to camp under the stars in our amazing national parks. Ditch it and go back to hiring more NPS rangers!!

Rose Houk

Chiggers but so beautiful

We love the Ozark National Riverway area. Big Springs Campground is our favorite! So peaceful and has been maintained nicely even after this spring flooding. We stayed in early spring before flood and again this fall. Great stop over for us. Excited to see what they do when the cabins and dining hall opens up next year, we hope.

As with many national parks, there are no sites with water hook ups. It’s odd that a place built around a water feature and a river has no access to water for campers. So fill your tanks and adjust accordingly. And there was only one fairly small loop of about 20 spaces that had electricity. Mind knew there were six camping areas, but only one with electrical hook up. So if that’s important, no before you go. The listing for this site showed it to be shady. It wasn’t. It said it was a waterfront site. It wasn’t. It said it was a concrete site which was half right. Half was concrete and half was dirt that had washed in making it less than level. The general consensus after four years of travel is that state parks are run far better than national. The amenities are better. There needs to be more information about where you can swim at Big spring. And this is no fault of the park, but the gnats and flies around anytime you were near the water we’re almost unbearable. Might have been the time of year, but it made being near the water less than enjoyable.

Very nice. Peaceful.

We had an amazing time staying at Big spring. Very well maintained.

We were unable to get to the campground due to road paving. After 3 mi of hills and curvers we found the road blocked with no warning.
After calling the office, we were advised to turn around and recover the 3 rugged miles and find a church on the corner of the new road to take 3 more miles to the campground.
We never saw the church or road, we headed for home.
I believe that staff should have notified us by email as to the closure, nothing was sent or received by us.
Very bad experience.

Staff was very helpful.