St. Francois Mountains

The St. Francois Mountains are located in southeast Missouri, about 70-80 miles south of St. Louis. Below I have listed several hikes and geologic features as well as some geologic history and information about these ancient peaks.
Geologic History of the St. Francois Mountains The St. Francois Mountains are some of the oldest mountains in North America at 1.485 billion years old. This makes them 3x older than the Appalachian Mountains and 10x older than the Rocky Mountains. They are so old that they are often referred to as the root of mountains. They formed long ago when four caldera volcanoes went through two large eruption periods, approximately 100 million years apart. The landscape you see today is the product of hundreds of millions of years of erosion, grinding the mountains down to their rounded over appearance you see today. At one point they rose thousands of feet over the surrounding landscape! These ancient knobs may have been the only area in the present day US to not have been submerged under ancient seas, an event that deposited the limestone we see in the Ozarks today.
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