You'll tee off high where the Ozark winds sigh,
With limestone and cedar below the sky,
Each hole is a postcard, each green a small stage,
A page from the hills, turning page after page.

So, breathe in the pine, let your shoulders go slack,
The cliffs hold the drama, so you needn't hold back,
Swing easy, look out, and let the view have its say,
There's no cliffhanger here, just a perfect round's day.

Cliffhangers: A Long-Awaited Golf Course in the Ozarks 

Somewhere high above the valleys of southern Missouri, there is a tee box tucked inside a cave. Water falls in front of you. Limestone rises around you. Beyond the curtain of the waterfall, sunlight catches a small patch of impossibly green grass below. You have a golf club in your hand, but for a moment you almost forget why.

This is the third hole at Cliffhangers, the remarkable 18-hole par-3 course at Big Cedar Lodge. The hole is called Lion's Den, and the shot is only about 115 yards. On another golf course, that might mean a comfortable wedge. Here, nothing feels quite so ordinary. You stand inside the mountain, looking through falling water toward your target, and it occurs to you that perhaps this isn't really a story about golf at all.

Perhaps it is a story about the land. Because long before anyone thought about greens and bunkers here, before Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Tom Fazio, Bill Coore or Ben Crenshaw ever came to design golf in the Missouri Ozarks, there were the rocks. There were the forests. There were caves hidden beneath the hills and springs finding their way through limestone. There was the White River winding through the valleys below. And there were people who kept arriving, generation after generation, looking at this place and imagining something. Cliffhangers is simply the newest chapter.

To understand this golf course, you must look beyond the scorecard. The Ozarks are old. Really old. Their rounded mountains and deeply cut valleys tell a different story from the sharp, dramatic peaks of younger mountain ranges. Time and water have done much of the work here, slowly carving through ancient layers of limestone and dolomite.