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. The Park Service says a glance at the rocky streambed undercuts the notion of solid rock, and that the rushing creek rounds off edges, tumbles boulders downstream, and wears them to stone, to gravel, to grains of sand and eventually to soil.
The stream falls from about 1,010 feet to about 750 feet over some four miles of channel, and its whole course lies in Wayne County. The official brochure allows the walk twenty minutes and promises seasonal wildflowers.
The panels and the chemistry make an odd pair. The trail's last panel credits the soil to limestone, alkaline like baking soda, which neutralises the acid in rain. The Park Service's own water sampling finds Sweetwater Branch poorly buffered, with low acid-neutralising capacity, as are Glenrock Branch and Cypress Creek. Sweetwater Branch drains south to the Tennessee River by Factory Creek and Shoal Creek, not north to the Duck, and the federal names database holds a second Sweetwater Branch seventeen miles north in Lewis County.
Getting there
35.2508, -87.6524
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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