Your Guide to the Ozarks
The Forest Service's northernmost Current River access: a one-lane gravel launch on the east bank below Gooseneck, with a vault toilet and parking for twelve rigs with trailers, on a quieter stretch the Forest Service rates for fishing. Its ramp is currently reported inaccessible due to flood damage.
Get directionsOpen in Google Maps
Bay Nothing is the Forest Service's first door onto the Current River from the south: a one-lane gravel launch on the east bank, smaller and less developed than the other ramps on this reach, and the northernmost access the Forest Service runs on the river. Gooseneck, the end of the National Park Service riverways, sits a short float above it, and Deer Leap waits about eight miles below.
What Bay Nothing sells is quiet. The Forest Service calls this stretch calmer than the water down toward Doniphan and better for quality fishing, and it is plain about how the fishing works here: mostly from a boat, for bass and panfish, because the bank stands about four feet above the water and makes bank fishing a challenge. Non-motorized use is infrequent, and tubers who start here face eight and a half miles to the Deer Leap take-out.
The road in runs from Grandin: State Highway O for two and a half miles, then Forest Road 3140 for three and a half miles to where the road dead-ends at the launch, with parking for a dozen vehicles with trailers and a vault toilet on site. Read this before you drive it: the Forest Service page for Bay Nothing, read on November 8, 2026, states in its current-conditions box that the boat ramp is inaccessible due to flood damage, even though the page header reads Site Open. Treat the ramp as unusable until the Forest Service lifts that note, and recheck the page before any trip.
The Park Service campground at River Mile 0, where the Lower Current and the Riverways end: a large flat camping field on the river at the end of Big Barren Creek Road, with standard sites, a picnic area, and an accessible restroom.
A Park Service landing at River Mile 7 on the Lower Current, at the end of a gravel road off Highway E, and the shore point for the Lower Current's Cave Spring.
A Park Service landing on the Lower Current a fifth of a mile below Hickory Landing: the take-out for the Big Spring to Cataract float and the last named landing above Gooseneck.
A National Register historic district of stone and timber buildings the Civilian Conservation Corps built at Big Spring in the 1920s and 1930s: a dining lodge, cabins, and a museum, closed for restoration but walkable today.