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. The reputation belongs downstream: a Geological Survey of Alabama study published in 2021 compiled 5,105 fish records for 109 species in the system and put the current fauna at 99 species.
Among them are animals with nowhere else to go. The crown darter is known only from the Cypress Creek system, in Tennessee and Alabama. Alabama's conservation department calls the creek both the type locality and a stronghold for the slackwater darter, which was listed as threatened in 1977. That fish mostly leaves the creek to spawn, moving in late winter into seeps and spring-fed rivulets beside it and returning afterwards. The last Alabama record of the popeye shiner was collected in Cypress Creek near Florence in 1889.
Two threads run back north from it. The slackwater darter also lives in the headwaters of the Buffalo River further up the parkway, and the yellow blossom pearlymussel, declared extinct and delisted in 2023, was recorded historically from Cypress Creek as well as from the Duck.
Getting there
35.0292, -87.8215
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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