I can’t say the nascent shuffles toward the first installment of our Limestone Post series Revisiting the Deam Wilderness unfolded as planned.
I had decided that Panther Creek Hollow is the first objective for this nostalgic wilderness adventure and that Grandson Vale would be my inaugural hiking companion. In the wake of a foot of snow and a week of below freezing temps, we drove to the Crooked Creek Ramp on the Middle Fork of the Salt in Creek Brown County to take some deep-winter pictures.
We walked maybe 30 yards up the frozen channel that connects the ramp to the Middle Fork – until my boots got water in them.
Trouble was, I was so preoccupied with an adventurous 13 year old and me both on ice – grandpa on snow cover, grandson on glare – that I neglected some basic attention-to-camera details and overexposed the photos.
So, I had to go back solo to finish the job, after he went home.
The Hoosier National Forest’s Panther Creek Hollow is as deep and wild as any area in the Lower Midwest.
It’s covered by hardwood forest that’s as old growth as old growth gets in the region. It’s off the grid, some three hundred feet below the T.C. Steele State Historic Site, the home of an iconic force in the Brown County Art Colony in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
No cell phone, no Wi-Fi in the Panther Creek Hollow, like the Amazon.
Personally, the hollow was the scene of my first grouse flush back in the Kodachrome slide days of 1987, an experience an experienced friend compared to an IED: heart stopping. Somewhere in my archives I have a slide of the sky shot from inside a sycamore tree that had been burned and hollowed out by a lightning strike.
Politically, Panther Creek is long coveted but not part of the Deam Wilderness – yet.
Up the seasonal creek east from the boat ramp are, in forest planning speak, Panther Creek Units 1 and 2, which would be added to the 12,953-acre Deam in a bill that preservationists are pushing to pass Congress this session.
Despite the initial rookie photog faux pas, the first run at the Revisiting the Deam project was a leap forward.
Conditions-wise, I didn’t know quite what to expect. And I was, perceptively enough, concerned about being out of photo rhythm, though not so much as to ruin 90 percent of the images. So it goes.
I knew going in that we wouldn’t be hiking into the Panther Creek Hollow. But I did take a few, cautious, preliminary steps up the creek valley and photographed the ultimate destination, albeit from a distance.
I captured a small Photo Album of shots that are relatively rare in the Age of Climate Change – a foot of snow and six inches of ice. I had the experience I needed for a Limestone Post column. And I got to take not one, but two, weekend drives through the most beautiful country around.
I also had a device-free adventure with Vale – like the Amazon, again.
For the Revisiting the Deam Wilderness series, we’re planning walk and talks with folks who have particular knowledge of, or experience with, the wilderness expanded to 28,253 acres and a 29,382-acre buffer called the Benjamin Harrison National Recreation Area.
I chose Vale to be the first hiking partner to create a memory, of course, and to share one of my favorite places on the globe.
For a column on the expanded area’s flora and fauna, we are planning a wildflower hike with former Monroe County Naturalist and renowned expert on all things nature Cathy Meyer.
For one on old-growth, I will hike Panther Creek Hollow with Jeff Stant, who, as the first executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, oversaw creation of the Conservationists Alternative that became the Hoosier National’s management plan in 1992.
Today, Jeff is the Indiana Forest Alliance’s Hoosier National Forest Program Advisor, has been a driving force for wilderness protection in Indiana now for more than a half century, and is leading the wilderness expansion push in Congress.
Our ultimate destination for this and a related book project is a 300-year-old oak in Bad Hollow, four-and-a-half miles southeast of Panther Creek — even deeper in the Hoosier National wilderness.
