A Day Trip to Ha Ha Tonka State Park

Before the weather got too cold here in Missouri, I took a day trip to a park in the Southwest part of the state. As you may know, there are no National Parks in Missouri. There are hardly any in the midwest at all. But Missouri has some great State Parks. I’ve been to several of them in my life, but there was one that I saw in pictures and wanted to visit so badly. It involves a castle:

Can you see why I wanted to go so badly? According to my parents, I’d actually been to this park before, when I was a kid. But I don’t have any memory of it, so I don’t really count that. Although, kudos to my parents for taking their kids to cool places.

I had a few days off work at the beginning of October, and when you work two jobs, like I do, that pretty much never happens. So my boyfriend, Joe, and I spontaneously decided to use one of those days to travel to Ha Ha Tonka State Park. The park closes at sunset anyway, so we didn’t think it would be too impractical to drive down in the morning and back home that night. It was only about two and a half hours from where I was living, and a bit longer for Joe, who lives in Kansas.

The park is in a small town called Camdenton, Mo., which I would have loved to explore more, had we had the time. But we were lost enough to use that as an excuse to stop at Ozarkland for directions, which is a huge gift shop/toy store that was utterly adorable and quirky. Joe loves talking to people, so he quickly made friends with the older woman behind the counter wearing a “Jesus is my Friend” lanyard, and he pretty much told her our story. Which is kind of a weird one. If I’m being totally transparent here, he wasn’t even my boyfriend at the time. This was our third date, and my dad actually called me while we were there to make sure I hadn’t been ax murdered yet. We left that shop with a new fanny pack, 12 name patches with other people’s names (including, but not limited to Merv, Ace and Babe), and directions to Ha Ha Tonka. We had just missed the turn.

When we got there, we stopped at the Visitor’s Center for a map. They seemed pretty surprised to see us there, so I’m guessing most people just head straight to the castle, which is where we went next. The parking lot is very close to the castle, so it’s not too much of a walk at all. The building itself was built in the early 1900s to use as a summer home for a wealthy man who later died in a fatal car crash before the building had even been finished. His children completed the construction in the 1920s, but it was destroyed in a fire just a couple decades later, which is why it is in ruins now. We walked around the castle (you can’t actually go in, I’m assuming to preserve it), and it was weird to think that at a point in time this castle-ruin was just somebody’s house. Granted, it was a second home and it was mansion, but it was still weird to picture while we were staring at dirt and grass growing from where a floor used to be.

After we took some photos there, we decided to hike up to the water tower. This was a beautiful walk. A lot of the path is on a boardwalk, and I would say the walk itself might be more beautiful than the tower. Some small wildflowers bloomed on the sides of the path, and you can see pretty far in some places.
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After that we went to the natural cave, which many before us had filled with balancing rock towers, which Joe contributed to while we were down there. The weather was pleasant for us the whole day, but if you travel here on a hotter day, this would be a good place to go to get some shade and cool for a bit.

We got back to the castle in time for sunset, and we sat on a bench on a wooden, porch-like structure that overlooked the river below, and let me tell you: that castle is beautiful at sunset. The pink and orange sky tinted the stone walls, and that color combined with the shadows casted by a low sun made the castle even more beautiful than it already was.
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We had to drive back in the dark, but seeing that castle at sunset was the show. Seeing it during the early afternoon was fine, but if you can stay, I highly recommend it.