Natural Features in Alabama
4 places
Nature·Colbert County
Freedom Hills
The Freedom Hills Overlook, at milepost 317 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Colbert County, stands on the highest ground the parkway reaches in Alabama. A steep paved trail about 1,100 feet long climbs from the parking area to a summit of roughly 830 feet by U.S. Geological Survey elevation data, a little higher than Woodall Mountain, the 806-foot high point of Mississippi, about 13 miles to the west-northwest. The motor road crests on the same ridge at about 775 feet.
Nature·Lauderdale County
Rock Spring
Rock Spring, at milepost 330.2 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Lauderdale County, is a small natural spring near Colbert Creek, a short way north of the Tennessee River. The Park Service describes the stream wandering through rich bottomland soil and limestone rock, with small fish in its deep pools. The state geologic map puts the ground on the Fort Payne Chert, a Mississippian limestone crowded with nodules and beds of chert, more than 330 million years old.
Nature·Colbert County
The Colbert Ferry Woods
The woods at Colbert Ferry, milepost 327.3 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, on the Colbert County side of the Tennessee River, are the Alabama site in the long-term vegetation monitoring the National Park Service runs along the parkway. When the Gulf Coast Inventory and Monitoring Network sampled its five sites in the 2021 growing season, Colbert Ferry had the fewest plant species: 99 across the six of its seven permanent plots that were sampled, with one plot holding only 31, the lowest of any…
Nature·Lauderdale County
The Ebonyshell
The ebonyshell is a thick-shelled freshwater mussel of large rivers, and a twenty-mile reach of Pickwick Lake on the Tennessee River, river miles 236 to 256, from about the Natchez Trace Parkway's bridge up to Florence, is where researchers have recorded it dying in numbers. A 2011 study in the Journal of Shellfish Research described die-offs there in successive years over about a decade.