Some people visit baseball stadiums.
My buddy has a bucket list, and asked what’s on mine.
It started in grad school, crammed into a dark attic office, reading through papers. More than 2500 streams scattered throughout the United States, nominated for special protection due to their unique geological, biological, or cultural features. Some are small enough to step across, some are the among the longest and largest rivers on the planet.
All are unique, worth protecting, and over the past several years I’ve been chipping away at the list. I hope you enjoy them, I hope they spark your curiosity, and I hope as a society they’re a resource we’re willing to hold in trust for future generations.
#509.
It’s the bastard child of a bigger, more popular river. This one’s farther out, in rougher country with thinner soils, fewer trees, steeper hills, and little in the way of blacktop. Forty minutes from the nearest town of more than ten thousand. It’s a scenic stream, but not really marketable, most years the midsummer flow isn’t enough to sustain two or three hundred canoes, kayaks, and rafts a day. Its isolation means it’s developed an eclectic if dispersed population: old-time hardscrabble farmers, wannabe cattle barons, hillbillies, boilerplate white trash and tweakers, bikers, American Redoubt type apocalypse preppers, Holy Rollers and snake handlers, and yeah- hippies…read more.
#662.
This is still one of my favorite places on earth. Even after straightline winds knocked down every oak and sycamore a couple years back, opening up the canopy. Even after the stream started showing up in magazines, in calendars, on coffee mugs…read more.
#949
A hundred years ago the watershed was a moonscape. Between 1888 and 1903 timber companies cut 375,000 acres of white oak and shortleaf pine, rafting logs downstream where industrial sawmills turned 800 trees a day into the beams and boards building midwestern metropolises. By 1920 the roughest hollows and bottoms were the only timber left. After failed attempts to grow corn and wheat, locals who didn’t or couldn’t sell turned out hogs and cattle to forage what they could. Thousands of acres burned annually, or nearly so, to rejuvenate meager pasture…read more.
#1111.
I wonder what they did a century ago, when all except the steepest slopes and most inaccessible hollows were logged off at a massive scale, for railroad ties and whiskey staves, boxcar siding and studs to fuel the building of midwestern cities. Whippoorwills eked out a living in those few last timbered places, I guess. I can’t imagine what it would’ve looked like, the hills have grown back in oak and pine and hickory. I think about that, listening to a whippoorwill sing in the dark in a black walnut sixty feet above my head. Reforestation, recovery, bringing this landscape back to some semblance of its former self wasn’t accidental. It was an intentional decision involving thousands of public and private interests, working for decades in their mutually shared interest…read more.
#3112.
By the early 20th century roads and rails linked those communities, by the 30’s and 40’s massive dams were going up for flood control and power generation and those streams were lost. Forgotten. They’re still forgotten, in a lot of places…read more.
#3510.
Early explorers traveling by water can be forgiven for misappropriating the term “mountains”. Once you’re up out of the river valleys you see the region for what it is: a broad, flat plateau, lifted nearly in place a couple million years ago, judging by the nearly horizontal bands of sedimentary rock exposed along roadcuts. The slowness of the rise was important, it let ancient streams keep wearing serpentine courses through bedrock…read more.
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