A Guide to Natural Areas of Southern Indiana , livre ebook

A Guide to
NATURAL AREAS
of SOUTHERN INDIANA

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
www.iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Steven Higgs
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in China
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02090-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02098-7 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
This book is dedicated to Raina and Amara, who endured heat, hills, bugs, and miles to share this epic journey with me-and to Vale, whose time to share is drawing near.
I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
-JOHN MUIR
Southern Indiana Highways

* This section of Interstate 69 was under construction in 2016.
Natural Regions of Southern Indiana
Contents
Foreword by James Alexander Thom
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Natural Area Etiquette
Part 1 THE LAND STEWARDS
U.S. Forest Service ; U.S. Fish Wildlife Service ; Indiana Department of Natural Resources : Division of Nature Preserves , Division of State Parks Reservoirs , History of Indiana State Parks , Division of Fish Wildlife , Division of Forestry , Indiana Heritage Trust ; The Nature Conservancy : Indiana Chapter of TNC ; Sycamore Land Trust ; Central Indiana Land Trust ; Oak Heritage Conservancy ; Oxbow Inc .; National Audubon Society
Part 2 THE SOUTHERN INDIANA LANDSCAPE
Sculpted by Rock, Ice, and Water
Southern Indiana Physiography
The Natural Regions
Part 3 DESTINATIONS
Section 1
List of Sites
Southwestern Lowlands Natural Region
Glaciated Section
Driftless Section
Southern Bottomlands Natural Region
Section 2
List of Sites
Shawnee Hills Natural Region
Crawford Upland Section
Escarpment Section
Section 3
List of Sites
Highland Rim Natural Region
Mitchell Karst Plain Section
Brown County Hills Section
Knobstone Escarpment Section
Big Rivers Natural Region
Section 4
List of Sites
Bluegrass Natural Region
Scottsburg Lowland Section
Muscatatuck Flats and Canyon Section
Switzerland Hills Section
Part 4 SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
Species List
Glossary
Resources
Index
Foreword
Fourscore and two years ago, I decided that I wanted to be born in the most interesting part of Indiana, and so it happened, in a very small town called Gosport, which stood on a bluff above a bend of White River s West Fork.

Conveniently for me, the parents I d selected had their doctors office in that picturesque little town of seven hundred souls, and I was born in a bedroom upstairs from their office, which had a real human skeleton in it. Birth and death!
I take credit for my excellent choices of place and parents, but I must admit my timing wasn t that great. It was deep in the Great Depression, and even in the best of times, Owen County wasn t very prosperous. In their first year of practice, the Doctors Thom made $25.
But as a newborn Hoosier, I was even less interested in money than I am as an old man. What tickled me then and has ever since was that I was in the Indiana hill country instead of that vast, flat part of the Midwest that I think of as Ohiowa.
So I grew up with steep, wooded hills and stony creek bluffs to climb, limestone quarries to risk my neck in, and caves to crawl through. I was so much a ridge-runner that I never played Indiana s sacred sport, basketball, because I couldn t find anyplace level enough to dribble on. (That makes a better-sounding excuse than my inherent slowness and ineptitude.)
It was due to my childhood in these hills that, when I got to college, I elected for a science course titled Geomorphology, a course so boring to most college kids that everyone else had dropped out within weeks, and the professor had to keep teaching it the rest of the semester just for me. I was fascinated by the formation of uplands.
My college was Butler University in Indianapolis, a city so flat that I felt steep deprived. So I began shaping my career in ways that would take me into hills and mountains for research and eventually bring me back to Owen County, where I built myself a log house on a ridge overlooking the ranked ridges of what is called the Crawford Upland Section of the Shawnee Hills Natural Region. I live with, appropriately enough, a Shawnee wife from the Ohio hill country who can t stand flatlands any better than I can. Up here we intend to stay until we wake up and smell the coffin in this most interesting part of Indiana where I chose to be born.

But I didn t come here to talk about me. I came to talk about Steven Higgs and this book. This guidebook is the latest of many reasons why I would designate Steve an honorary gnome.
Gnomes, if you remember your folklore, have the sacred duty of protecting the Treasures in the Earth. Gnomes live close to the earth, far from the skyscrapers of financiers and profiteers.
Steve has spent much of his life working to protect our native Indiana from those who don t care what they do to it as long as there s money to be made from its resources. I m proud to be in his company. We ve come a long way as fellow gnomes, but he s been better at it than I.
He first inspired me with a book he wrote many years ago titled Eternal Vigilance: Nine Tales of Environmental Heroism in Indiana . It was about Hoosiers who had risked all in their efforts to stop enterprises that would destroy the natural assets or harm the environmental health of our state. It was, let s say, a book about Great Gnomes he had Gnown and their courage and ingenuity. It was one of the most heartening Indiana books I ever read.
Steve and I have trodden much of the same ground-literally, as the Indiana soil underfoot, and figuratively, in our careers. Both of us have written environmental news for the same Bloomington newspaper. We ve both taught in the Indiana University School of Journalism. We ve both written nonfiction books and magazine articles about the special nature of Southern Indiana and its earthiest inhabitants, man and beast. We ve canoed and hiked many of the same streams and sanctuaries.
We re both tall guys who don t go to the barbershop.
Steve had the courage and enterprise to publish a good, truthful, print and online newspaper for many years, the Bloomington Alternative . In it he published many of my articles and commentaries, some on politics and other forms of comedy, some on environmental matters. Usually I wrote under my own name, but I used for nature articles the name Gnome de Plume. A gnome de plume is, of course, like Steve and me, a gnome who writes.
In my mug shot for those columns, I wore one of those tall red dunce caps that the stereotypical garden gnome wears, and with these white whiskers, I looked like one of them. How many editors would allow a contributor to engage in that kind of fun?
But we gnomes don t joke around about the importance of the Creator s works and the proper use of the blessings we have received. All that is sacred, because the Creator made it, and it is real.
Money was created by man, so it is artificial. If God believed in making money, he would sell us this day our daily bread. Money isn t sacred, except to those who choose to worship it.
Those who worship it are dangerous to the natural world, because they will wrest from the earth every resource the Creator put there and won t stop until it s all gone, as long as it s profitable to them.
I ve spent about half my life writing about Indiana and the Wabash and Ohio watersheds as they were in historical and prehistorical times, when they were still occupied by the Natives, whom we call Indians. This area was given the name meaning Land of the Indians just when it was being taken away from them. Grim irony. The Indians didn t use money, didn t sell resources for profit, which may explain how they lived for ten or twenty thousand years on this continent without destroying it or using it up.
They wouldn t recognize it after a mere two centuries of Paleface domination: exhausted resources, deforested landscapes, exterminated species, disrupted climate, poisoned soil, air, and water.
For one little thing, imagine a Miami or Delaware or Shawnee of those old days looking up and seeing something that s so common to us we hardly notice it: a blue sky crisscrossed with white jet contrails. It would terrify him. And what would he make of a billboard, say, of a gigantic blonde with cleavage, brandishing a can of beer?
What little there is left that such an Indian would recognize is in this book. Here are the places that have been saved, or restored, and protected by those f