Tennessee Explorations

[ExplorerExplorer]

Well, I just got back from a great 2-day trip, through two different state parks. I took a few pictures so, I thought I'd share them with ya'll... Once I get my pictures fixed I'll post the rest of the story...

First was Burgess Falls State Park, then we headed to Rock Island State Park (along with plenty of kayakers)...

This is the Little Falls at Burgess Falls (there are 3 falls)...

Then we got to the Middle Falls (I do not like this picture, I had to touch it up ALOT to make it decent)...

Then we have the Big Falls...

Which you could go down to the fall...

Here we are going under the falls (this is when I started paying attention and realized the WB on my camera was way caddywonk, fixed now...

This hanging ice was everywhere and just made the entire are 10x more beautiful...

This was as far as we went here (it was cold and a pretty good hike back up)...

Of course, Travis (being Trav), wanted to keep going (and ended up not being able to make it back up that hill, I had to pull him up)...

 

[wanderer-rrorc]

we plan on going back down this summer for a weekend trip...we REALLY enjoyed knoxville/gatlinburg...and that was just drivin around and doing some touristy stuff in gatlinburg..

this year we're gonna head to the smokies and clingmans dome..

 

[ExplorerExplorer]

we plan on going back down this summer for a weekend trip...we REALLY enjoyed knoxville/gatlinburg...and that was just drivin around and doing some touristy stuff in gatlinburg..

this year we're gonna head to the smokies and clingmans dome..

We have plans to visit most of the state parks in TN before the end of the year (we travel with one of our professors that absolutely loves this kind of thing)...

 

[ExplorerExplorer]

Ran outta picture room!

Now, on to Rock Island State Park!

Basically it's a dry riverbed formed by the placement of a dam, it's actually two rivers, one beside the other that are dammed together...

Dr. Goode took us in the back way so we could see this...

You can see in this picture (where the water seeps through the rocks), that's the level of the river on the opposite side of the ridge, and the water that is dammed up found a way through the rocks, and makes this beautiful waterfall (as you can see kayakers love this area as well)...

I almost fell in the water for this picture so I thought it needed including...

Here you can see the Rock Island Powerhouse, where they generate electricity, to the right of the picture around the bend is the falls... We're in the dry(ish) riverbed now...

I took about 3 billion pictures of the icicles...

I took this picture as good evidence at how powerful water can be, the river moved every single one of these rocks...

Now, this is really neat... We saw these everywhere, the hole is caused by rocks in suspension in the stream, and water filled them and froze around the edges first, so when the middle froze and had nowhere to expand it lifted up in the middle...

This "painted" looking ice was really pretty and seemed to consist of more than one layer of very thin clear ice with a small amount of snow between the layers...

I thought this looked neat so I pictured it, lol...

 

[KSJeep]

Winter make the ordinary extraordinary, Nice trip.

 

[KEENO]

Missing TN

Thanks for sharing pics of some of my favorite places in Tennessee!

I've recently relocated to Ohio for work and miss my home state during the work week.

KEENO

 

[Co-opski]

What a beautiful place! Keep posting up the trips. I need to get back down that way some time. :smiley_drive:

 

[ExplorerExplorer]

We were planning on going to Reelfoot or Jack Daniel's distillery this weekend, but the snow might have stopped us... We have a large Westward trip coming this May, thinking Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Cali, and back through Arizona, and to the Grand Canyon, Texas, and to New Orleans and back to TN...