Chuck Sutherland

Many years ago I made up a rule based on some casual observations. That if someone's name were to end in a vowel, they would tend to be a female. I had guessed this to be correct approximately 80% of the time. Recently, I happened upon a large table of names, and their frequency in the population this morning and wanted to more empirically test my hypothesis. Here's what I came up with. I began be isolating the last letter of each name in Excel and testing to see if it was A, E, I, O, U, or Y. Y is sometimes a vowel, but I lack a good rule to test for this in Excel, so I assumed they were all vowels. This seemed fair since the assumption was made on both male and female datasets. I totaled the frequency occurrence in population column for entries that met the conditions of my vowel test. The male and female datasets totaled to account for 90.05% and 89.94% of their population, respectively. The remainder was assumed to be uniform to the portion I had (assumption of homog...

Verble Hollow This cove in the area of Monterey is home to a spectacular 80 foot waterfall that emerges from a cave, and disappears into a cave. The caves are nerd-holes (caver jargon for a cave that only a geeky caver would want to visit), but the configuration of a waterfall isolated on a mountainside is pretty impressive. If you've seen Virgin Falls, or Lost Creek Falls, this should look familiar since it's the same geology that causes the others. The land is managed by Belle Ridge Retreat . They have cabins, campsites for RVs and other vehicles, and trails for hiking and UTVs. You can connect with them on Facebook also. Bee Rock An east facing cliff face just outside Monterey with an overlook, climbing routes, and a beautiful bed and breakfast called  The Garden Inn at Bee Rock is just some of what you will find there. The inn and the overlook are on separate properties, but access may require cooperation of the inn. The main rule for accessing the Bee Rock ov...

Originally appeared in STANDING STONE PRESS, Monterey, Tenn., October, 1980 Reproduced with permission. Dr. Richard C. Finch Associate Professor of Geology Tennessee Technological University Imagine that you are a fish ... a long, long time ago. You are a marine fish, swimming in the shallow sea that covered most of Tennessee during the Early Devonian period. Although life has barely crept out onto the stark land surfaces, the oceans teem with myriad life forms, and you are King: the largest, most sophisticated animal alive, with no enemies big enough to worry you. You are content, for the world is yours. Summertime and the livin’ is easy... Fish are jumpin’... Suddenly, as you are basking in the sun-warmed surface waters, a bright speck of light in a different portion oi the sky catches your eye. It is difficult to see at first, and you struggle to focus and see across the ocean – atmosphere interface, but faster than the sentence can be typed, and long before your fish brain ca...

When most folks hear about Jackson County, Tennessee, not much comes to mind. With the small city of Gainesboro, and the nearby Cumberland River, on the surface there seems to be little of interest there. Nothing is farther than the truth. Many people don't realize that Cummins Falls is in Jackson County. While Cummins is an amazing waterfall, this blog post is about the less well known locations. Not all of these are on public lands, and I do not encourage trespassing. Please be respectful of landowners. Flynn Creek Impact Structure That's right, there's a meter impact site in Jackson County. Maybe two. It doesn't look like the classic Barringer Crater impact though, and for good reason. The feature is quite old (around 360 million years before present), and it ended up getting buried under a lot of sediment, which was both good and bad for us. Good, because it preserved the structure, bad because it takes a trained eye to figure out what's going on. Mu...

Using quick and dirty analysis with a 10M Digital Elevation Model (DEM), I produced this dataset which shows the high and low points for each county. The highest point in Tennessee (as any native would know) is in Sevier County at Clingmans Dome, at 6644.33' The lowest point is in Davidson County at a Vulcan Materials quarry at just 90.18' above sea level. Of course, this doesn't include locations that are underground, so let's qualify that this is the lowest point that is not underground. Below is the table if you want to look at your home county. County High Point Map High Point Elevation Low Point Map Low Point Elevation Anderson 36.198101,-84.230138 3527.87 36.021527,-84.324953 757.79 Bedford 35.659490,-86.304398 1355.83 35.578287,-86.637268 630.75 Benton 35.852453,-88.206064 683.96 36.018287,-88.003935 338.01 Bledsoe 35.743564,-84.991342 2680.95 35.434861,-85.335046 707.66 Blount 35.568564,-83.70625 5526.05 35.874212,-84.009953 803.36 Bradley 3...

Grassy Cove Community Center with Brady Mountain visible behind it. Nestled in the southeastern part of Cumberland County, Tennessee lies a quiet community known as Grassy Cove. Its flat fertile land is home to agriculture and scenic farms which are still owned by the descendants of the first European inhabitants of the area. Without looking more closely at the landscape, it might escape the casual viewer that one was sitting inside a giant bowl. But with the aid of maps, it becomes readily apparent that Grassy Cove isn't like any old hollow. My first rule as a photographer/geographer is "Ask a local". Locals know a lot. For example, it's long been known that if it rains too much in Grassy Cove, then the fertile bottomland turns into a lake. It's also known from the days of yore that discarded corn shucks in the cove will appear in the Sequatchie River a few miles away, a few days later. What's going on here? Grassy Cove flooded. Structurally, ...

Photo credit: Brian Solomon / @waterfall_hillbilly Photo credit: Bryan Melton Sandstone boxwork is a unusual phenomenon that we see on the margins of the Cumberland Plateau. There are three things that must happen first to produce boxwork. Jointing Mineralization Weathering Jointing Produced in a parent rock of sandstone, this type of boxwork originates as small joints which run in a box shape. The origins of these joints could be from frost wedging - where water in the rock freezes and cracks the rock, or it could unloading pressure from the rock de-watering, or it could be from some other physical process. The origins of the boxwork joints are still a bit of a mystery. If the following steps occur without previous jointing then one gets Liesegang Rings. Mineralization The joints become a place of preferential mineralization. Groundwater loaded with iron minerals moves through the pores of the sandstone. Where it finds a void, like...