That the Big Walnut Creek Valley is a natural wonder is evidenced by the fact that the U.S. Park Service designated 502 acres of it a National Natural Landmark (NNL) nearly a half century ago. By its 1968 designation, that means Big Walnut contains "outstanding biological and geological resources."
"The site contains one of the few stands in Indiana where beech, sugar maple, and tulip poplar grow on alluvial Genesee soil and includes relict species of a postglacial forest that occupied the area 5,000 to 6,000 years ago," the Park Service says.
And the recognition doesn't end there. Last Wednesday, I hiked through two Dedicated State Nature Preserves -- Big Walnut/Tall Timbers Trail Unit and Hall Woods -- and alongside a bean field to find a third -- the Hemlock Ridge Nature Preserve -- too overgrown to negotiate. The three are located along a six-mile stretch of the Big Walnut on either side of Bainbridge, a one-light town west of Danville with a population smaller than its zip code, 736 and 765.
In just four months,
Those familiar with this still-revolutionary phrase might be perplexed by the Porter reference to Henry David Thoreau's words that helped catalyze a fundamental change in Americans' relation with nature (not in Walden but in Walking, a.k.a., "The Wild," an Atlantic Monthly essay published in 1861 from a lecture Thoreau revised and delivered between 1851 and his death in 1862). "What I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. ... From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind."
