2004/04 Boston and South Carolina trip - Big Bone Lick |
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Wednesday 28th April
There turned out to be even more commercial junk on the north side of the Smokies at Pigeon Forge, and it took us about an hour to get through the junk and the traffic. From there though it was fast traveling on a sunny warm day along I-75 across Tennessee and Kentucky, through pleasant scenery, mainly green rolling hills. In one town there was an enormous cross alongside the freeway, and an equally enormous warehouse labeled XXX Adult Books. We wondered which was there first and whether they were associates or enemies.
We were looking for a state park campground for the night, and picked
Big Bone Lick as it sounded interesting. It was. The main feature of the park is a hot springs, surrounded by a marsh. Over thousands of years, animals would come to lick the minerals from the springs, get stuck in the marsh, and leave their bones to fossilize. When first discovered the area was a mass of bones, but these have been carted off to museums and collections.
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The park has some recreations of the animals whose bones have been 
found: mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, and bison. They also have a herd of bison. I’d always thought of the bison as being on the prairies west of us, but apparently they ranged east into Kentucky. The park was also a mass of wildflowers, mainly phlox and delphiniums.