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. Uplift along the Nashville Dome brought Ordovician limestone at its crest within reach of erosion, that limestone wore down faster than the chert-rich Mississippian limestone ringing it, and what was left was a low centre inside a higher rim. Knobs capped with the Rim's own rock still stand inside the basin as remnants of the cover that once ran across it. Of the parkway's hundred miles in Tennessee, about 74 run on the Western Highland Rim and about eight on basin ground.
The road is down on basin rock in three places, not one: at its northern end, where Garrison Creek has cut back through the Rim, and along the Duck River.
The famous cedar glades, with their Tennessee coneflower, belong to the Inner Nashville Basin, east and southeast of Nashville, which the parkway never enters. The Rim's own open ground is barrens, with little bluestem on the dry ridgetops. The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency names the parkway among the public lands of its Western Highland Rim Forests conservation area, which takes in most of the Tennessee length.
Getting there
36.0211, -86.9785
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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