Chuck Sutherland

I have photographed many of the waterfalls within an hour’s car drive of Cookeville. One, that I shot six years ago, Mill Creek Falls, has been on my list to re-do This is the story of my attempt to photograph it. Mill Creek Falls is accessed by walking downstream of Waterloo Falls along the Spring Creek Wild and Scenic River. This region of Spring Creek has more drops than your favorite dubstep song, which may explain both why this section of stream is so popular with kayakers, as well as kayaker’s obsession with dubstep. Unfortunately, my soundtrack for the day sounded more like Yakety Sax . Unable to recruit anyone to make the trek with me, I set out alone, grabbing a few extra plastic bags for the trash I was assured to find along the way. My standard gear set for a photo hike includes: Camera - I shoot a Canon T2i, and a Pentax Optio WG-1 (currently in the shop) Tripod Tiffen ND and polarizer filters Nalgene bottle of water Given that this was going to be a creek ...

Josh Meyer, Stephanie Smith and my girlfriend Alexis Lienhart went hiking on January 27th in the Big South Fork on Middle Creek Nature Loop Trail. The trail is around 3.5 miles long, and not terribly strenuous. As we drove into Jamestown via Highway 52, the world was perfectly frosted. Tree limbs hung low with the weight of snow, icicles several feet long hung from every ledge and large amorphous mounds of ice sat below. It brought the feel of the underworld to the surface; cold, lifeless. After briefly going the wrong way, we found the trailhead. The path was difficult to distinguish at first with the 1/2 - 1 inch of snow covering the ground. But it didn't take long to get the feel for where we were going. The sun came out and things started to warm up. Then, something amazing happened. It started raining without a cloud in the sky. For the next hour and a half a mixture of slush and water rained down on us. I tucked my camera safely under my waterproof jacket to ...

For sometime now I've lamented never having gotten a good shot of either of the Twin Arches at the Big South Fork. Determined to remedy that, I got together with my friend Quentin Jones , and we hit the trail. The Twin Arches Loop trail is a very short and easy trail. It leads to probably the most spectacular landform in the Big South Fork, two huge sandstone arches. The dimensions are listed on Tennessee Landforms as 92x70 feet, but I'm not sure which arch that is in reference to. There are numerous obstacles to getting a good photo of the arches. The first being that they are so huge it's hard to frame them without obscuring them with trees. The next problem is trying to not blow out or underexpose any part of the image. I really wish that I could get to shoot at dawn or dusk and it would help eliminate that problem. But for some reason my schedule always gets me to my location at about the worst time of day, when the sun is directly overhead. Furthermore...

I crossed Blackburn Fork Creek carefully, in boots, so as to not get them wet. From close to the rim of the waterfall, I looked into the canyon and was shocked by how different it was. What was once a valley covered in vegetation, was now stripped bare; bedrock exposed on all sides, huge boulders displaced, slabs of concrete from a destroyed bridge (about a quarter-mile upstream) now well below the falls, trees far up the sides of the valley were stripped of bark on their upstream side, NO HUMAN TRASH. Standing in the valley it was obvious how violent the event was that had just created this scar across the land. But it's a natural event, having occurred millions, perhaps billions of times throughout Earth's history. We just don't live long enough to appreciate geologic time scales. I seek these moments in which time or events reduce me to something small. It is, I feel, our proper place in the universe. Not that we're unimportant, but we're certainly ...

August 18th, 2010, Tennessee got a second round of flooding (the May floods that inundated Nashville being the first). I happened to be free that day and took full advantage of the opportunity to shoot some dramatic flood photos. Let me first say that floods are horrible, and many people's homes and property were destroyed. It's hard for me to balance my sadness for the disaster and loss while being equally awed at natures raw destructive forces. Please don't mistake my enthusiasm for a lack of sympathy for those whose property was lost or damaged. These photos were taken under the Waterloo road bridge over Spring Creek. These photos are of Waterloo Falls, normally a 35 foot waterfall. These photos were taken from Waterloo road bridge, looking downstream towards Upper Waterloo Falls. Look for people in the after photo for scale.

This was the end of the main trunk of Trash Compactor Cave and the room for which it is named (Trash Compactor scene: Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope). All the debris you see here is floating on water. Notice as we move, how the whole mass ripples. It is through this sump that we suspect a connection to Capshaw. Lee Pearson and Jason Collard later went to the closest spot in Capshaw to see if there was any match to debris types and he found plenty of styrofoam. It's a primitive, but possible effective dye-trace. This cave was accessed after the May 2010 floods when a swallet finally enlarged enough to allow for human visitation.

During our sinkhole tour the night of 5/01/10 Jason Collard and I stopped at Warehouse sink. I expected to see the sinkhole filled with pooled up water the same as the last two sinkholes shown. However, this is what I saw instead. The water is rushing directly into the swallet of the sinkhole, and (based on my prior knowledge of the this streams morphology) I could see that the stream had downcut considerably. Three days later, after the flood waters had subsided, Jason Collard, Lee Pearson and I accessed Trash Compactor cave via this entrance. This entrance is likely only accessible intermittently. Stream cross-sections of the creek, collected by Dr. Evan Hart of TTU, shows the sink collecting silt and backing up, alternating with times of deep down-cutting within the silt. A few hypothesis could explain the cycle. It could be that a cave collapse unplugs the cave to accept more water and downcuts the silt making it the cave accessible. An alternative explanation could be ...