A local Tennessee story

A local Tennessee story

 

The location of the image is just upstream from the Roaring Falls area in Verble Hollow vicinity Monterey, Tennessee, USA.  It is on the same side of the Hollow (valley) as Roaring Falls in located. Roaring Falls is also called Verble Falls and Verble Cave Falls by others.

I think XXXX found the base of this slide during an exploration of this very rough area a while back.

XXXXX spotted parts of the slide from the Point (also called Sunset Rock) during a leaves off period a couple of years ago.

I found debris and dirt wash (silt) in the creek (downstream) myself, but never did find the slide. Like I reported earlier, it is a very rough area which intimidated me.  Usually the water itself flows underground, but when the caves fill, then it (the water) flows on top of the soil and in the creek bed.

The lines in the photo are artificial lines from the Google Earth method they use.

I think this slide was probably induced by the earlier timber work in this area, but don’t really know for sure. Another cause may be what I believe to be an underground and contouring creek that helps drain the Monterey Lakes, and may be the source of the water for Roaring Falls (around 84 feet or around 27 meters).  Now I know where this water disappears underground (right in front of me in Verble Hollow around a third of the way down), and my GIS (Geographical Information System, i.e. computer map) suggests this occurs at the same altitude as the source cave for the Roaring Falls, which is a further distance downstream.

This photo is from 2013, I also believe.

Last, three more short stories:

1)  The loggers found an arrowhead around 400 yards away from the Falls, and I twice had it independently dated as around 9,500 years old. So people have been down around there for a long time. Now it would have been very cold then (like around the end of the last ice age in North America) but we here we were a little south (by a couple hundred miles) of the edge of last ice cap, in my opinion.

2)  I have a reprint of a 1902 Nashville newspaper article that had local people then riding their horses and ponies down there to recreate.  I even carried (in a Polaris Ranger) an old gal and her husband down there a while back, and she had last been down there at age 15 or so. So even girls lied to their mother’s about where they had been during the day, and a long time ago. Her mother had told her not to go down there because of the danger, which is still real to me.

3) Tennessee Tech and other students and cavers still trespass down there. They usually post the evidence for me on Facebook, which is convenient to me.