The Natural Bloomington Blog

The Natural Bloomington path tracked southwest last week into the Lost River Watershed, where life on the Hoosier National Forest floor displayed a kaleidoscope of annual regeneration: mayapple greens, anemone whites, spring beauty whites with violet-stripes, phlox and violet blues, wood poppy yellows, larkspur purples.

Friday's half-day excursion followed backcountry roads—i.e. Old Vincennes Road—to the light-drenched, scenic Big Creek and Sam’s Creek Valleys along the Orange and Martin County line. Big lies about a mile inside Martin. Sam’s crisscrosses the county line from north to south. Both feed the Lost on its way to the White River East Fork a few miles to the southwest.

Access to both creeks also lie at the end of twisty, asphalt-county turned national-forest-gravel roads, which pose considerable potential for driving disasters. Passing another vehicle on the two-and-a-half-mile ridge-top road above Big Creek seemed a daunting task. The Sam's Creek exit included hitting bottom on a small stream crossing. Waze navigation spent more than a little time "waiting for network.

One road trip is all that stands before the end of the prehistoric history phase of Rewilding Southern Indiana: The Hoosier National Forest. The Natural Bloomington version of life on Indiana’s largest chunk of public land from 350 million B.C. to 1650 A.D. has been written. A photo adventure to the most significant archaeology site on the 202,000-acre Hoosier, the last prehistory stop, is high on the itinerary.

The research / writing now shifts to the region’s recorded history, and road trips will highlight a series of national forest Special Places—such as Buzzard Roost, Hemlock Cliffs, and Wesley Chapel Gulf—which include several that are in fact historic sites. Also some lowercase special places—not officially designated—like the Beaver Creek Watershed down where Lawrence, Orange, and Martin Counties meet.

Superseding the archaeology hike, however, will be a time-sensitive return trip to Wesley Chapel. After days of rain, this eight-acre collapsed sinkhole will effectively be an upside-down waterfall, as an overflowing underground river system expels its liquid contents upward more than a hundred feet to the gulf’s rise pool.

Hemlock Cliffs

Hemlock Cliffs is arguably the most inspiring of the Hoosier National Forest’s self-declared Special Places. Encompassing a narrow, 150-foot-deep sandstone box canyon, this Crawford County natural sanctum supports towering hardwood trees and rare plants that thrive in its cool micro climes, including the namesake evergreen.

Wesley Chapel Gulf

A National Natural Landmark, Wesley Chapel Gulf offers a rare glimpse into the subterranean world of the Lost River Watershed in western Orange County. The 187-acre Special Place protects an exposed, peanut-shaped gulf created by the collapse of the limestone ceiling above an underground stream.

A half billion years ago, the chunk of earth crust that now underlies the 202,000-acre Hoosier National Forest basked in the equatorial sun. During the Paleozoic Era, geologists say, the tectonic plate on which Southern Indiana rests—called the North American Plate—lolled about five hundred miles south of the equator, roughly where the Amazonian city of Manaus, Brazil, lies today.

Like the planet’s other twelve plates, the North American has since merged, diverged, and drifted for five hundred million years through a geologic process known as plate tectonics, momentarily settling some thirty-five-hundred miles to the north.

During the Paleozoic Era, which geologists say lasted from 570 million to 266 million years ago, the Hoosier’s rugged hill country occupied the floor of a shallow tropical sea that incessantly ebbed and flowed and changed depths. As time passed, sedimentary materials—which included skeletons, shells, bones, and other plant and animal remains—settled to the ocean floor and compressed and cemented into the bedrock that underlies Southern Indiana today.