Natural Features in Tennessee
9 places
Nature·Wayne County
Cypress Creek
Cypress Creek is a small stream where the parkway meets it and a celebrated one where it ends. It rises in Wayne County, Tennessee, and runs roughly thirty-five miles south into Lauderdale County, Alabama, to reach the Tennessee River at Florence, draining 214 square miles on the way. The parkway crosses it twice, both times inside Tennessee, and at a federal stream gauge near Cypress Inn, close to the road, it drains under twelve square miles.
Nature·Lewis County
Fall Hollow
Fall Hollow is the parkway's other waterfall, and it is a lesson in what happens where hard rock lies on soft. Over the single mile between milepost 392.5 and milepost 391.5 the road loses about 320 feet and passes down out of the Fort Payne Formation, bedded chert and silicastone averaging about 250 feet thick, into far weaker Silurian limestones beneath it. Water coming off a cap like that has nowhere gentle to go.
Nature·Hickman County
Jackson Falls
Jackson Falls is one of only two waterfalls on the 444 miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway, and it exists because a river stole a creek. Jackson Branch is about 1.3 miles long and dry for part of the year, and for thousands of years it ran along a high valley cut off from the Duck River below. The Duck ate back into the bluffs until it captured the branch, and the water now abandons its old course and drops into the Duck valley over Ordovician limestone of the Nashville Group.
Nature·Lewis County
Little Swan Creek
The state of Tennessee uses Little Swan Creek as a yardstick. In refusing a permit to dam one of its tributaries in 2022, the state's water division listed the creek and its tributaries as Exceptional Tennessee Waters and named an ecoregion reference stream for the Western Highland Rim among the grounds, meaning its chemistry and its life are a standard a healthy stream of this kind is measured against.
Nature·Wayne County
Sweetwater Branch
Sweetwater Branch carries the one trail in Tennessee that the Park Service's list of parkway trails describes with interpretive stops, and its subject is erosion. A walk of 2,500 feet up and back follows the creek past panels titled Where Rock and Water Meet, Silent Stonemasons, and Rock Today, Soil Tomorrow: water, then roots and frost, then the soil they make.
Nature·Lewis County
The Buffalo River
The Buffalo is the Duck River's longest tributary and, by the state's reckoning, the longest un-impounded river in Middle Tennessee, with no dam anywhere on the main river. The name is not from bison. Tennessee's environment department takes it from the buffalo fish, which was abundant when settlers arrived. The parkway bridges it in Lewis County where it drains only 101 square miles of an eventual 763, high in the system. Its reputation is aquatic and it is measured.
Nature·Wayne County
The Cretaceous Gravel
Near its southern end the parkway climbs onto a cap of Cretaceous gravel, rounded chert one to eight inches across set in a tripolitic sandy clay, as much as a hundred feet thick where the Collinwood quadrangle maps it. The ecoregion changes with the rock, from Interior Plateau to Southeastern Plains, inside a quarter mile of road in Wayne County, and some nineteen miles of parkway lie on the far side of that line.
Nature·Hickman County
The Lower Duck River
The Duck is the longest river lying wholly inside Tennessee, about 284 miles from a spring in Coffee County to the Tennessee River in Humphreys County, and the parkway bridges it in Hickman County just below John Gordon's house, where it already drains 1,705 square miles. It carries 151 species of fish, more than 60 of freshwater mussel and 22 of snail. The mussel figure is the remarkable one: more than three times as many species as the whole of Europe.
Nature·Williamson County
The Rim And The Basin
In its first few miles south of Tennessee Highway 100 the Natchez Trace Parkway climbs a little over two hundred feet, out of the Outer Nashville Basin and onto the Western Highland Rim. That is about the height the Geological Survey gives for the Rim above the basin. The basin is a hole worn in a dome rather than a dent pressed into one.