Chuck Sutherland

I've lived in the Sparta area for a long time, and I've come to think of it as home. It's an amazingly beautiful place that really doesn't get the respect it deserves for being a haven for outdoor enthusiasts. Here are a few of my favorite photos I've taken of my home county.   1. Rocking Rock  From this overlook on the north side of Coal Bank road one can see all the way to Monterey. 2. The Oldham Theater This beautiful old theater on Sparta's town square is a reminder of earlier times. It's recent renovation has reclaimed the space for use as a place for meetings and parties, as well as beautified the downtown. 3. Sunset Rock Our most utilized and accessible overlook on the north side of the Crossville highway. This overlook is west facing, making it an ideal location for viewing sunsets, as the name suggests. 4. Upper Polly Branch Falls This is a lesser known waterfall that is on the Bridgestone Firestone Centennial Wilderness Wildlif...

Deanna Lack, Stephen Hewett, and myself got to hang out with the awesome cave diver, Jason Richards a few weeks ago. Here's a little about what he did, and some of the photos we each took. I set up the access for Jason's dive so that he may make the connection from the 'blue hole' (resurgence, at the upstream end) at The Canal in Cookeville to Capshaw Cave. But his dive may have raised more questions than it gave us answers. His dive went a length of 780 feet before he came up in walking borehole. By the description I had provided him of Capshaw Cave, he though he was in there, tied his line off, and returned. After mapping his dive out, it looked as if he was still several hundred feet short of reaching Capshaw Cave. The only way to prove he was there was to go to the downstream sump in the cave and look for Jason's dive line. I've been too busy between work and school to go check on this, but I finally recruited Stephen DeTroye to make the check. Jason di...

We returned to the swallets on Spring Creek to investigate further, hoping to find more, and perhaps better document the features we had seen there two weeks before (see this blog post: http://chuck-sutherland.blogspot.com/2015/07/unusual-karst-on-spring-creek-in.html ). Things had changed considerably for a few of the swallets, cementing in our minds just how dynamic the karst and streams are of the Spring Creek system.

I got to do a little bit of whitewater on Thursday in order to access and document a few unusual features located along Spring Creek in Jackson County, Tennessee. I was working with Ryan Gardner, a geology student at Tennessee Tech University, and a new caver in the Cookeville community. His senior thesis will be a study of The Boils in Jackson County. The Boils is a fairly unusual feature. It is a river that comes out of the ground under pressure. The water wells up in the center of a large pool and joins the Roaring River after travelling over the surface a few hundred feet. The video I will link to at the end of this message shows some footage of it. Ryan's goal in his project is to find possible inputs for the system, and to eventually dye trace them. My caver buddy, Steve Anderson will be assisting with the dye work, Dr. Evan Hart at TTU is advising, and I'm assisting in documentation. Video and stills:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/ch...