Whittleton Arch and D. Boon Hut

 September 15, 2019. I was feeling better, so we did a full day of exploration. An awful lot of it was on the Sheltowee Trace, so I'll see some of this again!

(It looks like we walked to VanHook Falls on the 14th, but were disappointed because there was almost no water in the creek, so I'll just skip that day too.)

First walk was to Whittleton Arch. Actually, this is down a short branch trail, so perhaps I'll go to it or not on this next hike. It was OK, but not spectacular. The best thing about it was that you could scramble all over the rocks. There were families with kids there and the young'uns were having a blast.

I climbed up into the rocks, but Marie did not!

This hike was shorter than we thought it was going to be, so we tacked on another trail that took us to a cave that had D. Boon scratched into it. No one knows if THE Daniel Boone was here and just didn't finish his name, or if it's someone else. The cave is blocked off because there are endangered bats that roost there.

It was a hanging shelf cave, like all the others in the area, so I'll just show you this close view through the fence because this is more interesting. In this cave was mined potassium nitrate, Niter, which is used for making gunpowder. It was actively mined here through the Civil War. The troughs have something to do with that.

I just liked these roots.

Hiked a little over 5 miles that day. We were kind of in camper heaven. Even though it wasn't totally fixed up yet, the trailer was useable. We also had a screen house on our site. This is the only time we've used that when the wind didn't blow it over, but it worked great for that trip.

And I was in botany heaven with a lot of new plants. We'll see if I have time for some of those before I leave on this trip.

In other news: I worked hard on computer things today including editing. Made a small dent in my list, but the big projects are getting an alloted time slot each day, so they won't be DONE until probably early next week. I can't bear to work on any one of them for hours at at time.

See Rockcastle Narrows a nd Mill Springs