Gateway Arch National Park

Gateway Arch National Park — The Myth and the Ledger

17 stops· 40 min· 1.6 mi

A self-guided walking tour of Gateway Arch National Park — the smallest national park in the country, and the only one built around a monument you already know on sight. A flat, paved, mile-and-a-third loop carries the whole story of America's westward dream and the price of it: the silver curve of Eero Saarinen's six-hundred-and-thirty-foot Arch; the Old Courthouse where Dred and Harriet Scott sued for their freedom; the 1764 founding block and its Old Cathedral, the one building spared when the riverfront was cleared; the vanished earthworks of Mound City; and the Mississippi levee that was the real gateway west. Ranger Quinn guides; Ranger Boone Merrick tells the deep stories — Dred and Harriet Scott, the setting of the keystone, the lost mounds, and the night the river burned. The grounds are free and open from five in the morning to eleven at night, the path is level and easy underfoot, and the tour works fully offline and walks the loop in either direction.