Owens Creek Waterfall, at milepost 52.4 of the Natchez Trace Parkway in Claiborne County, is a waterfall that has mostly stopped falling. The Park Service says that only heavy rain now fills the stream, because over the years the water table has dropped several feet and the spring that feeds Owens Creek has all but disappeared. The same thing happened two and a half miles up the trail at Rocky Springs, the settlement named for its water: early travelers called the place the Rocky Spring, settlers came in the 1790s for its rich soil and many springs, and the Park Service records that the spring no longer flows.
The waterfall lies in the Bluff Hills, the most deeply dissected part of the loess country, where the federal soil description gives streams high gradients and narrow floodplains. Owens Creek is the southern end of the Rocky Springs section of the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, and the trail north to Rocky Springs crosses rocky outcrops and steep ridges, and the Park Service warns that the area can be unstable from erosion.
Under the loess around Owens Creek lies the Catahoula Formation, gray to purple silts, sands and clays laid down on land rather than in the sea, whose sands can be well cemented. Claiborne County's 1966 geology recorded Catahoula clay and sandstone exposed on the Natchez Trace about three miles north of the parkway's Bayou Pierre crossing, which is roughly where Owens Creek lies.
Getting there
32.0607, -90.8261
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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