Chuck Sutherland

In Marion County, Tennessee, there is a little known State Natural Area named Chimneys. The Chimneys are a series of natural arches and rock pillars formed from the middle unit of the Warren Point sandstone. A meander of Pocket Creek had weathered the ridge down to a knife's edge. The pillar stands approximately 80' above the surrounding landscape, as a detached island of cliff line. Within the wall of rock, which varies from approximately 25 - 10 feet in thickness, one can find two natural arches. A third arch was likely present until only recently in geological history, but it has since failed leaving only an overhanging pillar. The trailhead from the parking area isn't obvious. One must wander past the kiosk to the tree line and look for a steep unmarked goats trail down. At the bottom you'll see where generations of dumping left cars and other trash in this beautiful landscape. Plans are being discussed to clean this area. Beyond the car at the bottom of Overl...

On Good Friday I joined my friends at the Cumberland Trails Conference for a day of trail building. I wasn't alone, college students from two universities were there on their alternative spring break assisting with trail building. A group of about 40 people descended on a segment of trail on Renegade Mountain (more correctly, but less well known as Haley Mountain) in Cumberland County, Tennessee. I was shown how to use the tools, mattock and McLeod , and given some loppers and clippers to groom roots from the trail. Thus began hours of swinging a mattock to remove duff from the trail surface and bench it out. Side by side we stood (out of the swinging death zone of a deadly tool) breaking away and moving duff and soil to the trail specifications. The Cumberland Trail has very particular specifications to the quality of its trail, which is probably why in the segments I have seen, it is the very best trail in the state in terms of quality. Briefly, the specs are that the tra...

On Saturday (3/24/2018) I tagged along with the gang from Karst Springs Initiative (KSI) to provide assistance where needed, and to play paparazzi for their efforts to better understand the groundwater in Big Creek Gorge. In other words, I knew there would be some amazing photographic opportunities and I could geek out with like-minded people Our team consisted of  Ben Miller (USGS), Lee Anne Bledsoe (Crawford Labs), and Hali Steinman (WKU) - in other words, an all-star cast. Another group consisting of Joel Buckner, Bruce Robtoy, and Brian Ham injected dye into Schwoon Spring sink and Fall Creek sink while Kelly Smallwood and Jason Hardy (The Hardwoods) formed the final group and poured eosin in nearby Schoolhouse Creek. My group had a few objectives. First we set receptors at the Granddaddy Sink where Big Creek goes underground. Receptors were also placed at a number up springs about a mile upstream from Granddaddy Sink. And finally we were ...

In my short ten years of caving I've been witness to a tsunami of new cave data. Being the data hoarding geek that I am, I have tried to surf that wave. Data doesn't come easy though. We need folks like Gerald Moni, of the Tennessee Cave Survey (TCS), to solicit, collect, organize, manage, and distribute the data. Data collection, or as Gerald calls it, "Doing the hard part", is honestly the hard part. The joke seems lost on some people - caving is hard to do physically. We crawl, scrape, fight our way into and hopefully back out of these holes - and then that's the end of it. We often don't record our trip, which in a strange way makes it as if it never happened. So weekend after weekend Gerald organizes trips, and sits patiently at the cave entrance while we have fun. Upon our muddy exit he asks in his inimitable way, "How far did you go; how tall was the passage, how wide? Slow down..." Descriptive science is the most basic form of science...

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...