When people walk into the gift shop at Bridal Cave, an active cave in Camdenton, they are met with stacks of binders organized by date that are overflowing with photos. One binder holds a black-and- white photo of a couple from the 1950s, complete with the iconic women’s pin curl hairstyle, while another has a photo of a couple from the 1980s, who are both wearing oversized Coke bottle glasses. No matter the decade, each picture depicts a couple who got married inside the Bridal Chapel of Bridal Cave.
“We host several weddings a year. We’ve hosted over 4,500 of them to date, and they started about nine months after we opened up for tourism in 1949,” says Lindsey Webster-Dillon, public relations and events manager for the cave. “We get couples from around the world.”
The Bridal Chapel area of the cave, which is in front of a large drapery formation called the Pipe Organ, isn’t meant to fit more than about 40 people, but the first wedding brought about 117 people. “That first wedding was probably so far outside of the box that it really drew quite a crowd,” Lindsey says.
While Bridal Cave is known for being a unique wedding venue, it also offers electric-lit, lantern-lit, or black-light tours of the cave’s cascading stalactites and rising stalagmites. Visitors can take an almost hour-long tour along a half-mile, paved walkway that snakes through the cave. The walkway follows the natural curves and tight spaces of the cave, making many areas along the tour quite narrow. The path leads visitors about 200 feet underground, past mineral formations and clear pools.
“It’s always 60 degrees inside of the cave. So if it is winter and it is 10 degrees outside, it is still 60 degrees. If it is summer and it is 110 degrees, it is still 60,” Lindsey says. “It’s a nice even-temperature activity to do.”
Besides the cave, the area also features gemstone mining, a half-mile nature trail through Thunder Mountain Park, a gift shop, an observation deck with a view of the Lake of the Ozarks, and an outdoor classroom.
Missouri has more than 7,000 caves, which is why it is known as the cave state. Bridal Cave is one of the thousands of cave systems that make Missouri … well, Missouri!
To learn more about the Bridal Cave and Thunder Mountain Park, visit BridalCave.com.
This story appeared in the May 2025 issue of Missouri Life.
