Best Hikes—Hercules Glade
The wildest of our finds, this is perhaps the most beautiful spot in the Ozarks—if you can find it.
By Trey George
Trey surveys the land as his civic fords a low-water bridge (don't try this at home).
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To get to Hercules Glade, start south on Highway 65, exit at Highway 160 East and follow that until you’re just west of Sudan. Follow the Sudanese border for about 15 minutes, and you should see a small brown dock with two wooden rowboats on the Nile River. Offer the boy half of what he asks for rental, and he’ll usually bring down the price about 25 percent. Row for roughly two miles until you see the next dock. There will be a Jeep parked facing the cave. Drive into the cave until you hit what feels like the fifth circle of Hell. No worries, it’s just the edge. You’re still in the fourth circle. Turn left and find a place to park.
Seriously though, I set my odometer, and this clocks in just more than 45 miles outside Springfield’s city limits, but it feels so much farther—especially when you miss two turns, and the last two miles are gravel roads rounding awkward declines next to rail-less drop-offs.
And the drive just keeps getting weirder, as you have to cross a bridge built just low enough to have an inch of water flowing over it, even despite beautiful weather (remember that weekend before the last snow? That’s when we went). If my tiny Civic’s alignment wasn’t an issue before, it probably is now. Point being, four-wheel drive is highly recommended, and if you want to come here in any kind of bad weather, don’t.
After the gauntlet of getting there, it’s hard to word how satisfying it was to park my car and start the trails. Plainly put, the forest (the Mark Twain National Forest, to be specific) is beautiful. Besides two parked trucks, an SUV and a bullet-holed sign warning about black bears, there was nothing but mildly groomed trails and forests for as far as our eyes could see
The biggest problem we noticed is that we didn’t allot enough time. Given the hour and a half it took to get there, including the missed turns, we only had an hour to wander the trails before it got dark. Hoping to reach the high point of the Coy Bald trail in the short amount of time, we hiked two and half miles before cowardly giving up and turning around.
Unlike Sac River or Busiek, we weren’t greeted with a creek right away. In fact, the only creek we see is a great distance from the trail. Lesson: Water is scarce here, so bring your own.
Local outdoors expert David Millsap says, if you give it a chance and enough time, you’ll find more diversity here than any of the others, ranging from creek bottoms to 600-foot hilltops. Millsap says Hercules Glades is his favorite in the area.
“You can go up to the top of the Balds and get a 360-degree view of the Ozarks,” Millsap says. “At night, you can even see as far as the Branson lights.”
With just more than 12,300 acres, Hercules Glades is the perfect multi-day camping trip; but even if it’s just an hour, it’s still worth the drive—weather permitting.
The Rundown
• Camping: Yes• Hunting: Yes, but not within 150 yards of the trails
• Mountain biking: Yes
• Road biking: No
• Horseback: Yes
• River-fording: Yes
