Big South Fork

I am an environmental planner who mostly works for the National Park Service. Sometimes I do odds and ends for the Navy and Army to, you know, actually earn my firm some profit, but mostly I make my living on the NPS. I love my job.

As part of my job description, I get to go to visit all the neat parks we get hired to work in. Its why I got to explore Everglades, see alligators in Big Cypress, and snorkel in Biscayne at the end of last month. Its why I get flown to D.C. once or twice a year and why I was sent to central Tennessee for the majority of last week. Its why I'm praying that my firm is awarded a new project at Arches National Park; I am in the proposal as project manager and it would include several trips to southern Utah. Although a lot of the parks are really great to visit, its also why I was sent to rural Missouri in December in the middle of an ice storm. You win some, you lose some.

But back to Tennessee. For this trip, we were facilitating a series of public meetings throughout Kentucky and Tennessee, which are held in the evening. Since our hotel's internet was inevitably not working, my co-worker and I were left with plenty of time to explore this huge and fairly new park. The park itself was created in the 1970s, but was run by the U.S. Corps of Engineers until the NPS took over management in the 1990s. The park has a pretty neat history. A lot of mining and, due to the ownership of the park, there are still a lot of oil and mineral rights held in private ownership within the park boundaries. The NPS only owns the surface of the land, above those private mineral rights. As part of the enabling legislation of the park, mining is an acceptable and historical use of the property.

The Blue Heron portion of the park was the site of an old mining community that housed and employed hundreds of people from 1937 through the mid 1960s. By the time the Corps of Engineers acquired the land, all of the structures had deteriorated but the the Corps rebuilt an outdoor museum of "ghost structures" of where the homes and buildings would have been. The bridge from the mine and the tipple, or sorting house, remain. Interestingly, a written account of Blue Heron during operation was never put together, so all of the information in the museum has been collected from people who were around then. Click here for the NPS history of the mining town. Here is a picture of the bridge and the original tipple.

"Look at me! I'm a Tipple! Not to be confused with Mr. Whipple"

Before visiting Blue Heron, my coworker and I had visited the northern-most Kentucky portion of the park that draws a big crowd: Yahoo Falls (thats pronounced Yay-hoo, for you non-locals out there). To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. Take a look for yourself:

That little stream of water in the lower righthand corner? That's it. Granted, this wasn't a peak flowage period, and we were forced to view it from above, not ground level, but still. I had to go onto the park's website even to see what made Yahoo Falls such a big deal. Apparently this little stream is the longest/tallest waterfall in Kentucky at 113 feet. I think you and I can agree that it pretty much blows Niagara Falls out of the water, so to speak.

I think my favorite part of the park was a portion we hadn't even planned on seeing. The Chief of Natural Resources was taking the newbie from the Southeast Region of NPS on a hike to see the Twin Arches on Wednesday morning so we happily tagged along. I also learned the valuable lesson to drink coffee before hiking in the morning. Although I really enjoyed the hike, I think my face had trouble showing it sans-caffeine. The Twin Arches were a geological marvel. Sandstone rocks that had been eroded away bit by bit until they became what they are today. A lot of native american tribes took shelter in the caves within the arches and, with a light and a solid grip on your arachnophobia, you can actually go in one portion of the North arch and out through the other side. They were so massive that it was difficult to get an accurate picture, but this was my best attempt.


And finally, on our way to "Gentleman's Swimming Hole" in the old Utopian town of Rugby, TN, we stopped and had lunch at a lovely little restaurant where I noticed this advertisement on a table:

Finally! I'm so glad Mr. Fuzzy Orange (you think he/his parents did drugs?) has found an inventive use for this invasive species. In only a billion or so baskets, our kudzu problems will be solved!