Big South Fork is a relatively new National Park area, covering 125,000 acres of the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee and Kentucky. Our target in the park was the Leatherwood Ford trail, which we have been to several times. This trail covers 6 miles round trip with the first two miles cover rolling terrain along the banks of the Big South Fork River before taking a dramatic upward turn for the last mile as the trail climbs the bluffs.

The summit of the bluffs is several hundred feet above the river. The views are incredible, as kayakers sometimes ply the river rapids, and birds of prey float in the valley below.

Today’s hike was near perfect. Weather was in the high 60 degree F range, with few clouds in the sky. For such a perfect day, there were very few cars at the trailhead, and we only ran into three or four people along the trail. I suppose the fact that it was 12 degrees just two days ago in Nashville made people less than excited to head out for the trails.

I spent some time on the bluff playing around with the digital camera. The pics from the hike have been posted to my flickr photostream.

I also experimented with capturing video using the camera, but the quality wasn’t very good. The video consists of several 60 second clips of Joey using his walking stick to break any large hanging ice sheets from the overhangs, usually accompanied with statements like “Man, I’m awesome”, or “Larry, that one almost came down on me in one piece”. In Joey’s world my name is Larry Monticello. Not sure why this is, exactly.

On the way back down from the Cumberland Plateau, we followed this guy for 5 miles or so:

Welcome to Tennessee

More pictures after the link: